Democratic participation tends to erode colonial elite languages in favor of indigenous ones.

Evidence

Following independence, however, the elites of these societies needed to distinguish themselves from the common people of their societies. Fluency in English, French, or another Western language did this. As a result, elites of non-Western societies are often better able to communicate with Westerners and each other than with the people of their own society (a situation like that in the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when aristocrats from different countries could easily communicate in French with each other but could not speak the vernacular of their own country). … To the extent that non-Western societies establish democratic institutions and the people in those societies participate more extensively in government, the use of Western languages declines and indigenous languages become more prevalent. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 170

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of colonial legacies and elite self-distinction from my chapter on India (English-speaking minority vs. the voting masses mirrors the divide noted in earlier material on political participation).
• DEEPTHINKING: The structural irony — colonial language chosen to distinguish elites from the colonizers then reused to distinguish elites from their own people — is a dense two-stage mechanism that resists a one-line summary.