To Vernaculate A Verb for the Living Self and the One Body of Humanity
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article argues that English needs, and now has, a verb for an act it previously had no word for: the affirmation by a person or people of its own living self, beginning with its language. The form "vernaculate" is attested in late nineteenth-century American English only in a thin sense (to call something by its popular name; to use vernacular language). Vernacularism (Arabic al-Maḥallaniyyah, المحلانية) gives the verb a new theoretical sense: self-affirmation, starting from language understood as the human operating system (ManOS), and resistance to hegemony and symbolic violence. The article distinguishes vernaculation from decolonization, vernacularization and localization; relates it to Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence and to the protection of human thought in the age of artificial intelligence; and develops the image of humanity as a single body in which no member is shamed by another, drawing on Islamic, Christian and Persian sources while noting the hierarchical misuse of the same image. It names the internal danger of closure and calls on the scholars of every language to find a native term for the concept, as Arabic has done with maḥlana / maḥlanah (محلن / محلنة), rather than borrowing the English word. This record documents the use of the English verb "vernaculate" in the sense defined by the author within the paradigm of Vernacularism (المحلانية).
Authors: Hajjaj, Nasser, Hajjaj, Nasser
Language: English
Topic: Language and Culture
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222889271
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