Allow me to open with a deliberate provocation. I have borrowed from Shakespeare’s Macbeth — one of the most canonical texts of the English literary tradition, a tradition that colonialism carried into classrooms across the globe — and rewritten its most famous soliloquy to be about language itself. I chose Shakespeare specifically because of what he represents: the inherited canon that many of us were handed as the standard of educated expression, whether we asked for it or not. The subversion is intentional.
“Is this a language which I use before me,The grammar, spellings and sentences toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty Training room from programme to programme To the last syllable of recorded training time…
Out, out, brief language… It is a language Used by a Trainer, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing…”
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
That is the risk every L&D practitioner runs when they fail to interrogate the language they work in.
Wikipedia estimates there are over 7,000 human languages in the world, each one a different lens through which reality is interpreted and understood. In Learning & Development, we tend to collapse all of that into one: whichever colonially dominant language powers the organisation. For many practitioners across Africa and beyond, this means designing and delivering in a borrowed tongue — one that arrived not by choice, but by conquest. We are using a borrowed delivery platform.
This is not merely a political observation. It is a practical one. Ngugi wa Thiong’o described how colonialism accomplished its deepest work not through physical force but through “the vast naming system of language”, shaping how people identified themselves and their world. If the language of your training doesn’t connect to the naming and norming structures of your learners, then language becomes a filter for learning, not a gateway to it.
The terminology we use inside L&D deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives. We use “trainee,” “participant,” “learner,” and “delegate” interchangeably, but each signals a different relationship between the person holding the knowledge and the person meant to receive it. Are learners active agents in their own development? Or recipients? The word you choose has already answered that question before you’ve opened your mouth.
If we are not deliberate about language, we may be reinforcing the very dynamics we claim to be disrupting.
Genuine Communities of Practice are built on shared and understood language. When trainers and learners do not share a conceptual vocabulary, when the training speaks past rather than to the people in the room, no volume of good content will close that gap.
This is the practical weight behind Dr Chipo Ndudzo’s guiding principle at Providence Human Capital: “We are mindful of the language we use.” Mindfulness here is not a soft skill. It is a core design competency that shapes every session before a single slide is opened.
The question worth carrying into your next programme design: What language does your learner think in and is your training designed to meet them there?