Creating the language you need also means creating room for others to live. Audre Lorde urged transforming silence into "language and action" (1977), linking voice to survival. Pronoun practices, disability-first or person-first choices, and trauma-informed phrasing are not mere etiquette; they redistribute recognition. Beyond style, decolonial work insists on speaking in one’s own tongue—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind (1986) argues that language can be a site of emancipation. Revitalization efforts, from Māori immersion schools to Indigenous language nests, exemplify how speech restores worlds. [...]
