Our international treaties crystallize an unindividualized view of underprivileged groups

What is it about?

Language is the vehicle through which we communicate our experience and shape our collective ideas and cooperation. At the same time, the ideas shared by our community crystallize in the shared language and serve to create new cognitive representations that reproduce the ideas crystallized by language and language usage. This paper analyzes these dynamics by reference to expressions that list groups. It takes the treaties forming the the International Bill of Human Rights and scrutinizes whether the divisions by which the international community organizes the world behave like a homogeneous group or whether linguistic usage allows them to keep their individuality. Results show that “the human family” is divided into an unnamed group of privileged individuals and an expression that has been lexicalized and is used like one term covering a blurry set of humans which requires protection.

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Photo by Ben Neale on Unsplash

Photo by Ben Neale on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It helps us reflect on how language shapes our treatment of groups' individual traits and needs.