Politics & Power Quote by Edward Sapir

“International” languages tend to arrive carrying flags and incense. Sapir’s point is less about vocabulary than about baggage: French and Latin didn’t just circulate as convenient tools, they functioned as prestige systems tied to particular empires, churches, and class formations. They could coordinate diplomacy and scholarship “up to a certain point,” but never in spirit because their authority depended on unequal history. A language can be widely shared and still feel like someone else’s house.

The phrasing does quiet work. “Involved with” is almost clinical, as if nationalism and religion are contaminants you can’t fully scrub away. “Could not be entirely shaken off” admits a stubborn residue: even if speakers try to treat French or Latin as neutral, the social meanings cling. Sapir is signaling an anthropologist’s reflex that communication is never just a code; it’s a social contract, enforced by institutions. Latin’s internationalism is inseparable from the medieval Church and its gatekeeping of literacy. French’s cosmopolitan sheen is inseparable from the political and cultural dominance of France in Europe, a dominance that made “standard” French look like reason itself.

Context matters: Sapir is writing in an era obsessed with world order, standardization, and planned solutions (think Esperanto, auxiliary languages, and post-WWI internationalism). His skepticism is a warning to technocrats: you can’t engineer neutrality by selecting a prestigious language, because prestige is the problem. The “international language problem” isn’t solved by reach alone; it’s solved only when the medium doesn’t silently reproduce the hierarchy it claims to transcend.