PsyberSpace: Understand Your World

Episode Script: “Words They Don’t Want You to Say: The Psychology of Linguistic Oppression”
Intro
Welcome to PsyberSpace, I’m your host, Leslie Poston. Today, we’re tackling a big topic: the psychology of the language of oppression. I want you to think about this—for decades in parts of South America, people haven’t said someone was kidnapped by the government. They say they were forcibly disappeared. That phrase carries the weight of the crime in a way ‘kidnapped’ never could. And right now, in the U.S., we’re seeing something similar, but flipped: a slow erasure of words like ‘diversity,’ ‘gender,’ and even ‘woman’ from official use, from corporate memos, and from public discourse. So today, we’re asking: what does it do to us psychologically, socially, and politically when words are controlled, censored, or erased? Let’s dig in.
1. Language as a Tool of Control
Language isn't neutral, it's a tool. Political philosophers and linguists like George Orwell and Michel Foucault have long pointed out that controlling language is about more than semantics, it's about controlling reality itself. Orwell's concept of Newspeak in 1984 wasn't just fiction; it was a warning. When you shrink the vocabulary of a population, you shrink the range of ideas they're allowed to think. If there's no word for resistance, can you even conceive of resisting?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis takes it further, suggesting that the language we speak fundamentally shapes our thought patterns. This isn't just academic theory, researchers like Lera Boroditsky at UCSD have demonstrated experimentally how language affects everything from our perception of time to our assignment of blame in accidents. When political forces remove words like "gender" from official use, they're not just avoiding a conversation, they're making it harder for people to even imagine that conversation. This narrowing of language literally narrows thought, and over time, shapes the cultural and psychological baseline of what's considered normal or possible.
Psychologically, this control creates what researchers call linguistic deprivation. We see this in studies of deaf children denied sign language, but the concept applies broadly. When language is policed or stripped away, people may experience a kind of cognitive dissonance or fragmentation, unable to fully articulate or even internally process their experiences. That's powerful. And dangerous.
Think about how many revolutions began with naming something that wasn't supposed to be named. The concept of "sexual harassment" didn't exist as a legal term until the 1970s. Before that, workplace harassment was just "life" or "the way things are." Once named, it could be fought. Once articulated, change became possible. That's the power authoritarian systems understand all too well, and why they work so hard to control what can and cannot be said.
2. Naming Oppression: "Forcibly Disappeared" and Beyond
In Argentina, Chile, and other Latin American countries during military dictatorships, the state didn't just abduct dissidents, they forcibly disappeared them. That phrase wasn't just poetic; it was political. It placed blame squarely on the state, embedded violence into the act, and refused to soften the reality. Compare that to how U.S. military and intelligence communities use phrases like "enhanced interrogation" instead of "torture." One phrase tells the truth; the other obscures it.
The term "desaparecidos" or "the disappeared" emerged from mothers and grandmothers in Argentina's Plaza de Mayo, who gathered weekly demanding answers about their missing loved ones. These women created a new linguistic framework when existing language failed to capture the systematic nature of the state's crimes. By insisting on "forcibly disappeared," they rejected the government's preferred narrative of random kidnappings or willing departures.
Language like "forcibly disappeared" functions as a collective acknowledgment of injustice. It becomes a form of resistance in itself, a refusal to let euphemisms wash away accountability. Psychologists studying collective trauma have noted that naming an injustice accurately is key to healing and to mobilizing communities toward action. Without the right words, there's no shared understanding, and without that, organizing for change becomes exponentially harder.
The stakes are high. Naming oppression clearly creates international pressure, fuels movements, and keeps atrocities visible. Euphemisms, on the other hand, pave the way for normalization, denial, and apathy. The battle over words is never just semantics, it's a fight over truth.
Let me give you another example: Rwanda, post-genocide. The government actively prohibits the terms "Hutu" and "Tutsi" in public discourse, promoting instead the unified identity of "Rwandan." While motivated by reconciliation, this policy has also made it difficult to discuss ongoing ethnic tensions or discrimination. What can't be named can't be addressed. This shows the double-edged nature of language control, even well-intentioned erasure can silence necessary conversations about justice and healing.
3. The Psychological Impact on Citizens Living Under Linguistic Oppression
When a government or dominant power controls language, it doesn't just alter public discourse, it rewires private minds. Citizens living under linguistic oppression often experience what psychologists call learned helplessness: the sense that speaking out, or even thinking critically, won't change anything. Over time, this erodes agency, dulls moral outrage, and fosters quiet compliance.
In environments where words are censored or warped, people may also develop cognitive avoidance, a psychological defense mechanism where uncomfortable realities are pushed out of awareness because they're too dangerous, or too futile, to confront. The brain adapts by creating psychological blind spots, and those blind spots become cultural ones.
And it's not just about fear of punishment. Research on authoritarian regimes shows that when oppressive language becomes the norm, people start to believe it. Social psychologists call this internalized propaganda, when lies or omissions repeated enough times are absorbed as truths, even by those who once knew better. The result? A population gaslit at scale.
Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of totalitarianism, noted that the real danger isn't just the lies, but the destruction of the standards by which we judge true and false. When "alternative facts" become legitimate, when "truth isn't truth," the psychological foundation of shared reality crumbles. We see this in studies of cult dynamics too, linguistic isolation creates epistemological dependence. If your community's language doesn't allow for certain thoughts, where would you even go to think them?
There's also the phenomenon of what psychologists call "pluralistic ignorance", when everyone privately rejects a norm but publicly conforms because they think everyone else accepts it. In societies with linguistic oppression, people often believe they're the only ones questioning the approved narrative. This creates a silent majority effect: everyone thinks they're alone in their doubt, so no one speaks up. The tragedy is that collective resistance becomes impossible not because people agree with the regime, but because they can't recognize their potential allies.
4. The Psychological Impact on Immigrants and Refugees
For immigrants and refugees fleeing countries where oppressive language shaped their reality, there's a psychological double-bind. On one hand, leaving can feel like escaping linguistic control. On the other, arriving in a new country often means encountering a sanitized or dismissive narrative of their homeland's oppression. Imagine hearing the U.S. press describe your family members as "detainees" instead of "political prisoners", the erasure continues.
This disconnect can create profound identity conflict. Psychologists studying diaspora communities have found that linguistic erasure contributes to cultural bereavement, a form of grief not just for lost homes, but for lost words, stories, and frameworks for understanding one's experience. Without language that honors their truth, immigrants can feel doubly silenced, first by the state they fled, and then by the culture they enter.
The research of Khatharya Um on Cambodian refugees shows how this plays out. Survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime arrived in the U.S. to find their experiences reduced to footnotes in American textbooks, their traumas described with clinical detachment, if mentioned at all. This linguistic disconnect created what Um calls "exile within exile", a profound alienation from both home and host countries.
And for younger generations growing up in immigrant families, there's an added layer: inheriting histories that were never fully named, or were deliberately mistranslated. This can lead to intergenerational trauma, where silence or euphemism around past oppression leaves emotional wounds that words never had the chance to heal. We see this in studies of Holocaust survivors' families, Japanese American internment descendants, and children of political refugees worldwide, the unnamed past casts shadows across generations.
There's also the daily reality of linguistic code-switching, navigating between private truth-telling within the community and public conformity to acceptable narratives. This constant translation isn't just exhausting; it fractures the self. Psychologist Roberto Gonzalez observes that for many immigrants, this creates a form of "decentered identity," where no single linguistic home feels fully authentic or safe.
5. Corporate and Institutional Complicity
We tend to think of governments as the main language censors, but corporations wield this power too. We're seeing it right now with Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) banning "DEI" language from internal policies, or Trump's administration banning terms like "diversity," "fetus," and "transgender" from official documents and grant applications. This is another form of linguistic oppression: soft censorship embedded in policy.
For employees working under these constraints, the psychological effects can be profound. Studies in organizational psychology show that when people are forced to avoid words central to their identities or values, it creates identity strain. Imagine being a diversity officer who's not allowed to say "diversity." Or a gender studies scholar who can't write "gender" in a grant proposal. It's not just a job barrier, it's an existential one.
And companies engaging in this language policing aren't neutral players; they're complicit in extending structural oppression. By removing words, they remove the issues those words describe from institutional memory, policy, and action. The erasure happens at every level: individual, organizational, societal.
Research from the field of organizational silence reveals something important: when institutions systematically discourage certain topics or terms, employees internalize these boundaries. They stop raising concerns, stop identifying problems, even stop seeing them. This creates what scholar Edgar Schein calls "shared tacit assumptions", unspoken rules that become embedded in organizational culture. Over time, these assumptions shape not just what people say, but what they notice and value.
We should also consider how corporate euphemism serves market interests. When Facebook rebrands privacy invasions as "connecting people" or Amazon describes grueling warehouse conditions as "being customer-obsessed," they're using linguistic manipulation to mask exploitation. This isn't just PR, it's a form of cognitive capture. When we adopt corporate language uncritically, we start thinking in corporate frameworks, prioritizing profit and efficiency over humanity and justice.
6. The Politics of Denying Words
When politicians make certain words taboo or illegal, it's a chilling sign. It signals not only what they want to suppress, but who. Banning the word "gender" isn't just semantic nitpicking; it's a denial of gendered experiences, identities, and injustices. And banning "diversity" doesn't just attack a policy, it attacks an entire worldview that acknowledges inequality.
This tactic isn't new. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, apartheid South Africa, many regimes policed language to rewrite cultural narratives and erase inconvenient truths. What's insidious is that it works quietly: you don't need to arrest dissidents if you can make the words they'd use disappear first.
Politically, this undermines democratic discourse by preemptively excluding certain topics from the conversation. It's a psychological play, creating a culture where self-censorship feels safer than defiance. Over time, this shrinks what's politically imaginable, making injustice harder to name, and therefore harder to fight.
Political theorist Steven Lukes calls this the "third dimension of power", controlling not just what happens or what's discussed, but what's thinkable. By controlling language, power structures shape what appears as common sense versus radical, reasonable versus extreme. The genius of this approach is that it makes resistance seem not just dangerous, but nonsensical.
Take the phrase "pro-life" versus "anti-abortion." Or "job creators" versus "the wealthy." Or "enhanced interrogation" versus "torture." Each framing activates different moral intuitions and political possibilities. Research in political psychology shows that these linguistic frames aren't just describing reality, they're creating it, activating different neural pathways and emotional responses in listeners. That's why language is never neutral in politics; it's always doing work, always shaping what actions seem necessary, justified, or imaginable.
And as political scientist Murray Edelman noted, much of this language control happens through classification systems that seem technical and objective. When poverty measurements change, poverty itself appears to change. When crime statistics are recategorized, perceptions of public safety shift. The politics of naming isn't just about dramatic censorship, it's also about the quiet power of bureaucratic categorization to make problems appear or disappear.
7. The Media's Role in Amplifying or Resisting Oppressive Language
The media sits at a crossroads in this battle over language. When reporters use government-approved euphemisms, they perpetuate oppressive narratives. After 9/11, many U.S. outlets adopted "enemy combatant" instead of "prisoner of war", a shift that wasn't neutral, but political. Research shows that media language primes public opinion, subtly shaping what audiences see as legitimate, necessary, or normal.
But the media also has power to resist. Journalists who insist on calling torture "torture," or refer to "forcibly disappeared" instead of "missing persons," are actively disrupting oppressive linguistic frameworks. This isn't just word choice, it's narrative intervention.
And for audiences, media literacy is key. Psychologists studying propaganda note that people trained to spot euphemisms and rhetorical manipulation are less susceptible to narrative control. Critical media consumption is a psychological defense against oppressive language.
The Associated Press Stylebook wields enormous influence over news language. When AP decided in 2013 to recommend against using "illegal immigrant" to describe people, preferring "person entering the country illegally" instead, it shifted how millions of Americans encountered the immigration debate. This wasn't just a style change; it was a humanizing intervention that reminded audiences that actions, not people, can be illegal.
Media framing doesn't just affect how we perceive issues, it affects whether we perceive them at all. Communications scholars call this "agenda-setting theory": the media may not tell us what to think, but it powerfully influences what we think about. When certain words or frameworks dominate coverage, they become the default lens through which audiences understand events. That's why media resistance to oppressive language isn't just about accuracy, it's about keeping alternative perspectives visible and viable.
There's also an international dimension here. Foreign media often uses language banned or discouraged by authoritarian regimes, creating what scholars call "information bridges" for citizens under linguistic control. During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe used forbidden terminology that communist regimes had erased. Today, outlets like Radio Free Asia do similar work. When domestic language is constrained, international media can preserve linguistic alternatives, keeping counter-narratives alive.
8. Psychological and Social Costs for Politicians and Bureaucrats
It's easy to focus on victims of linguistic oppression, but what about the people inside the system enforcing it? Bureaucrats tasked with censoring reports or rewriting policies can experience moral injury, a form of psychological distress that comes from acting against one's ethical beliefs. Over time, this can lead to burnout, disengagement, and psychological withdrawal.
Politicians navigating forbidden words face their own dilemmas. Some lean into dog-whistles and coded language to signal support without violating formal bans. Others struggle to reconcile public silence with private beliefs. Political psychologists call this identity dissonance: when public roles force individuals to betray personal convictions.
The result is a culture of duplicity, where language becomes a performance rather than a tool for truth. And that culture doesn't stay at the top, it filters down through every level of policy and practice, shaping what whole institutions can acknowledge, discuss, or change.
Research by psychologist Robert Jay Lifton on medical professionals in Nazi Germany reveals how this works. He found that doctors involved in unethical programs developed what he called "doubling", creating a professional self that could participate in atrocities while maintaining a private self that still identified as moral. This psychological splitting allowed them to use sanitized language professionally while privately recognizing the horror of their actions.
We see similar patterns in contemporary whistleblower accounts from institutions engaged in language control. Former government officials describe developing compartmentalized vocabularies, one for internal use, one for public consumption, and perhaps a third for their private understanding. This linguistic fragmentation exacts a psychological toll, creating what some researchers call "moral stress", the chronic strain of navigating conflicting ethical demands.
There's also the phenomenon of what organizational psychologists call "moral disengagement," where bureaucrats gradually deactivate their ethical self-monitoring through language distancing. Terms like "collateral damage" instead of "civilian casualties," or "processing facility" instead of "detention center" help officials psychologically separate themselves from the human consequences of their work. The tragedy is that this linguistic cushioning doesn't just protect them from discomfort, it enables further harm.
9. Oppression by Omission: What Happens When a Word is Erased
When a word disappears, the people and realities it names disappear too. This is oppression by omission. Erasing "woman" from healthcare policy doesn't make women's health needs vanish, it makes them harder to see, measure, and meet. And removing "diversity" from grant criteria doesn't erase inequality; it erases the mechanisms for addressing it.
Memory researchers warn that omission changes collective memory. If you erase the vocabulary for an injustice, future generations may not even know it happened, or won't have the language to describe it. This is a psychological form of erasure that goes beyond forgetting: it's preemptive silencing.
The danger is cumulative. Each word removed narrows what's speakable. And when enough words are erased, the range of possible futures shrinks too. Oppression by omission doesn't just target individuals, it targets entire imagined worlds.
The concept of "structural silences" in linguistics helps explain this. These aren't just gaps in discourse; they're systematic patterns of omission that shape entire fields of knowledge. Think about medical textbooks that historically omitted female anatomy, or economics textbooks that exclude non-Western economic systems. These aren't random oversights, they're structured absences that maintain existing power relations.
Psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró, who studied the effects of state violence in El Salvador before being assassinated by government forces, wrote about the "psychology of liberation." He argued that psychological healing requires not just addressing individual trauma, but reclaiming erased histories and naming structural violence. When words for oppression disappear, so does the psychological framework for understanding one's suffering as political rather than personal.
We can see this pattern across contexts: when "hunger" becomes "food insecurity," when "poverty" becomes "economic challenge," when "racism" becomes "unconscious bias." Each linguistic shift moves us from structural analysis toward individual psychology, from systemic critique toward personal adjustment. The words we lose shape the solutions we can imagine.
10. Reclaiming Language: Activism and Resistance
The good news? Language can be reclaimed. Social movements around the world have fought to restore, reframe, and repurpose words weaponized against them. "Queer" was once an epithet; now it's an empowered identity. "Black" was politicized into a statement of pride. "Abolish" is being reasserted as a demand for transformative change, not chaos.
This reclamation is deeply psychological. Research shows that reclaiming stigmatized words boosts collective self-esteem and identity solidarity. It also disrupts the oppressor's narrative control, forcing dominant powers to respond to new vocabularies that weren't in the script.
And language activism isn't just about single words, it's about building counter-narratives. Through hashtags, memes, zines, and spoken word, communities craft new linguistic landscapes that make oppression visible and resistance possible. It's not just semantics; it's survival.
Consider how #MeToo transformed the conversation around sexual violence, or how Black Twitter creates linguistic innovations that both express community solidarity and challenge mainstream narratives. Digital platforms can amplify suppressed vocabularies, creating what linguist James Scott calls "hidden transcripts", discourses that develop outside official channels and eventually reshape public language.
There's also the power of what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls "countering the silence." When communities document and name what official records omit, through oral histories, community archives, or alternative media, they preserve linguistic pathways to truth. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo didn't just demand answers; they created vocabularies of resistance that outlasted the dictatorship. Their language of "forced disappearance" eventually entered international human rights law.
We're seeing this kind of reclamation work now with terms like "climate justice" instead of just "climate change," or "prison abolition" instead of "criminal justice reform." These linguistic shifts don't just rename problems, they reframe the conversation around who's responsible and what solutions are possible. They expand imaginative horizons.
11. Healing and Moving Forward: Building Inclusive, Honest Language
So where do we go from here? Psychologists studying collective healing point to truth-telling as a foundational step. Using accurate, inclusive language isn't just "political correctness", it's psychological repair. It restores trust, names harm, and creates space for accountability.
And each of us plays a role. Choosing truthful language in our conversations, supporting media literacy, refusing euphemisms that hide harm, these aren't small acts. They're daily practices of resistance and repair.
Because language isn't just words. It's the air we think in. And if we want a freer, fairer world, we need to protect, and expand, the vocabulary that makes that world imaginable.
Research on post-conflict reconciliation shows that linguistic repair must happen alongside political and economic change. In South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the ability to publicly name crimes in precise, unvarnished language was vital to healing. When survivors could say "torture" instead of "interrogation," or name perpetrators directly instead of using passive voice, they reclaimed narrative authority over their experiences.
There's also emerging work on "narrative medicine" that shows how finding words for trauma can literally rewire neural pathways, moving traumatic memories from implicit, fragmented storage toward explicit, integrated understanding. This isn't just psychological theory, it's neuroscience. Honest language physically reshapes wounded brains.
And for communities building toward justice, inclusive language creates what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls "hermeneutical justice", the ability to make sense of one's experiences using shared conceptual resources. When we expand our collective vocabulary, we expand who can be understood, whose suffering counts, whose solutions matter.
This isn't about policing speech or creating new taboos, it's about expanding our linguistic horizon to make room for more truths, more perspectives, more possibilities. It's about recognizing that language shapes reality, and that by speaking differently, we can create differently.
The work starts with noticing. Notice when words disappear from public discourse. Notice when euphemisms replace direct naming. Notice when certain people's experiences lack language entirely. And then resist, through speaking, writing, teaching, questioning. Through insisting that what matters can and must be named.
Outro
"Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Until next time, stay curious."