Why Mangling American English Is a Civilizational Threat
A nation is held together by many things — shared memory, common law, a founding creed. But without a shared language, all of it collapses into noise.
Today, the American language — not just English, but American English, forged through grit, clarity, and the rhythms of liberty — is under siege. Its enemies are not foreign powers with bayonets, but bureaucrats with pronouns, ideologues with dictionaries, and academics with scissors.
This isn’t new. Totalitarians have always known that if you want to rule a people, you don’t start with guns. You start with grammar. You redefine the words that define reality — man, woman, truth, citizen — until people can no longer speak plainly. Once speech is confused, thought is disabled. And once thought is crippled, tyranny becomes easy.
We are now well into that process.
Attack by a Thousand Edits
From coast to coast, institutions have declared war on linguistic clarity:
- The Associated Press Stylebook now cautions against using “the French,” “the disabled,” or even “the poor.” These are deemed dehumanizing. The real dehumanization? Being told you may no longer name yourself or your people in plain terms.
- Medical associations, such as the American Psychological Association, promote “person-first language” to the point of absurdity: not “diabetic,” but “person with diabetes”; not “addict,” but “person experiencing substance use disorder.” The result isn’t dignity — it’s paralysis. Language becomes so bloated with disclaimers that it can no longer move.
- University DEI departments regularly publish “inclusive language guides” that ban words like “grandfathered,” “brown bag lunch,” or even “master/slave” in tech coding — all under the banner of microaggression prevention. Stanford’s guide, now infamous, even flagged “American” as potentially offensive, because it might imply other nations in the Americas don’t matter as much.
This is not progress. It is linguistic lobotomy.
The Price of Silencing the Tongue
Academic research has long confirmed what any honest person knows: when you rob people of their language, you rob them of their thinking.
Linguist and cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky has shown that “language shapes how we think,” particularly through how we encode time, space, and causality. In her widely cited work (“How Language Shapes Thought,” Scientific American, 2011), she notes that speakers of different languages actually perceive the world differently based on linguistic structure. Mangle the structure — and you mangle perception.
Even more chilling is what happens when language is forcibly stripped away. Consider the tragic case of Native American languages. The late scholar Michael Krauss, a foremost authority on endangered languages, warned that linguicide leads directly to cultural extinction. “When a language dies,” he wrote in The World’s Languages in Crisis (Language, 1992), “a culture dies with it — intellectual wealth, cultural traditions, and unique worldviews are lost forever.”
We did this once already — to Native Americans. Now we’re doing it again. To ourselves.
The late Daniel Everett, in his work Language: The Cultural Tool (Pantheon, 2012), explained how language doesn’t just express thought — it builds culture. When a people abandon their mother tongue or allow it to be diluted into meaninglessness, the culture that depends on that tongue begins to fray. Tradition cannot be passed on. Memory is severed. Identity dissolves.
The same is true in reverse. In Losing Our Language (Free Press, 1999), linguist Sandra Stotsky explored how politicized curriculum changes in American education erode not just vocabulary, but historical comprehension, civic cohesion, and moral clarity. When students are denied the linguistic tools of previous generations — from classical texts to plain speech — they lose the very capacity to reason like Americans.
Why American English Matters
American English is not just a dialect. It’s a vessel. It carried the Declaration of Independence across the world. It gave Lincoln the cadence to heal a nation. It gave King the moral clarity to call us to justice. It gives the working man his voice and the Constitution its teeth.
It is ours. And it is worth defending.
When a nation loses its language — or allows it to be twisted by activists into unrecognizability — it loses its soul. We must not let that happen. That means rejecting the absurdities of “inclusive language” where it clouds understanding. It means protecting the words that carry our history. And it means speaking, plainly and proudly, as Americans.
Language is not a playground for the self-absorbed. It is the backbone of civilization. And if we won’t defend it, we won’t keep anything else.
Sources Cited:
- Boroditsky, L. (2011). How Language Shapes Thought. Scientific American.
- Krauss, M. (1992). The World’s Languages in Crisis. Language, Vol. 68, No. 1.
- Everett, D. (2012). Language: The Cultural Tool. Pantheon Books.
- Stotsky, S. (1999). Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason. Free Press.
- APA Inclusive Language Guidelines. American Psychological Association. [2021]
- Stanford University IT Language Guide (Retracted, 2022).
- Associated Press Inclusive Language Advisory, 2023.
Would a Founder recognize this as worth fighting for?
Yes. He would sharpen his quill and say: “Call things by their right names — and you’ll set men free.”
