Who owns A Language?

A widely circulated interview between Elena Reyes, a Filipino professor of English, and a veteran British broadcaster James Whitmore did something quietly radical. In a few unadorned exchanges, it unsettled a belief so deeply normalised that it often goes unquestioned: that there exists a proper way to speak English, and that this propriety is best adjudicated by those who once ruled through it. What Reyes articulated—without rancour but with unmistakable conviction—was that language, especially in its global forms, has long been used not merely to communicate, but to command.
The colonial project did not simply transport English across oceans. It transported a hierarchy within the language itself. Accent became a marker of authority; deviation, a sign of deficiency. The coloniser’s manner of speech was elevated into a standard, while all other ways of speaking were classified as local, native, or—most tellingly—incorrect. This was not linguistics. It was power arranging itself into sound. 
What makes this hierarchy especially revealing is how unevenly it is enforced. British English does not question American English, despite its dramatic departures in spelling, pronunciation, and idiom. Nor does it withhold legitimacy from Australian or Canadian English. Yet Indian English, Filipino English, Singaporean English—each with millions of fluent speakers, internal coherence, and long literary traditions—has often been treated as an accent to be overcome rather than a voice to be recognised.
This asymmetry exposes the illusion at the heart of linguistic authority. The distinction is not between correct and incorrect English, but between English spoken by former rulers and English spoken by the formerly ruled. Accent becomes a residual badge of empire.
Frantz Fanon recognised this long ago when he wrote that to speak a language is to “assume a world.”Accent, then, is not a matter of phonetics alone; it is a matter of legitimacy. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o went further, warning that linguistic hierarchies reproduce cultural subordination even after political independence. When speakers internalise the belief that their English is lesser, they internalise a wider lesson about where authority resides.
And yet, history refuses to cooperate with such hierarchies.
Languages do not remain the property of those who first wield power through them. Once lived in, inhabited, argued with, and loved, a language changes allegiance. English today is no longer anchored to Britain, if it ever truly was. It has become an Indian language, a Filipino language, a Nigerian language—shaped by local rhythms, memories, metaphors, and needs. Linguists such as Braj B. Kachru described this decades ago through the idea of World Englishes: plural, legitimate, and fully formed.
India offers a particularly striking example—not because it is unique, but because it is illustrative. English in India functions as a language of the Constitution, the courts, science, higher education, diplomacy, and literature. Indians do not merely speak English fluently; they produce some of its most agile contemporary prose and thought. Yet the Indian accent has often been heard as marked—intelligible but not authoritative. The same holds true for Filipino, African, and Southeast Asian Englishes. The prejudice persists not because these accents fail the language, but because they unsettle the idea that linguistic authority flows from a single centre.
What is at stake here is not mutual intelligibility or grammatical precision. It is the lingering belief that ownership of a language implies cultural superiority. That belief is misplaced. Languages are not heirlooms; they are habitats. They belong to those who live in them.
The quiet force of Elena Reyes’s intervention lay in its refusal to seek validation. She did not ask whether Filipino English should be accepted. She assumed its legitimacy and exposed the bias that questioned it. In doing so, she reminded us that the age of linguistic gatekeeping is an anachronism.
The future of English—or French, or Spanish—will not be decided by how closely it resembles its original form. It will be decided by how fully it serves those who speak it. Once a language leaves home, it does not owe fidelity to its birthplace. It owes fidelity only to meaning, clarity, and life. It ceases to owe allegiance to its birthplace. It belongs to those who inhabit it fully, shape it daily, and make it answer to their realities.
To insist otherwise is not to protect a language; it is to preserve an old order of listening. And when certain accents still provoke discomfort, it is not because the language falters—but because, in those sounds, one can hear something else entirely: authority shifting, ownership dissolving, and the long echo of empire finally losing its claim to the voice.
And perhaps that is the unease we hear when certain accents speak—not a flaw in the language, but the sound of empire finally losing its voice.

(Uday Kumar Varma is an IAS officer. Retired as Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting).