by Anita Likmeta

I was eleven years old when I mispronounced the Italian word for “traffic light.”

I spoke it just as I saw it written: flat, without an accent, unaware of the musicality of Italian. Semàforo. My classmates laughed. Not out of cruelty, but because mistakes exist only for those who know the norm. On that day, I understood that language is not merely a tool for communication—it is the first form of citizenship. Those who do not master it do not exist. Those who learn it reconstruct themselves. Denied access to that original technology, I began to glean its sound as one tunes in to a faint signal across a noisy field.

Language was not a school subject: it was a map, a ticket, a key, a weapon. From that moment on I have never ceased to observe it, to interrogate it, to fear it. Language is a battleground, and today more than ever. The illusion that social media democratized speech is the most convenient fairy tale of our time: they did not restore voice, they multiplied noise. Speaking is no longer saying; it is producing. Communication has become automatic, repeated, compulsive, irrelevant. Words no longer represent reality. They never truly aspired to it, and now they don’t even pretend. We inhabit an augmented reality of language, where words have lost weight and gained volume. In this algorithmic Babel, depth is a system error. Doubt is interpreted as weakness; reflection as delay; slowness as fault. Thus language empties itself and spreads, like a sterile contagion. And those who still honor it—those who know its craftsmanship and its toil—become anomalies. But it is from these anomalies that renewal must begin.

Language is humanity’s first technology. It predates the wheel, fire, writing. It was born to name the unknown, to endow the uncontrollable with sound. An ancestral device, created for unity, evolved for division. It is instrument of precision, but also of exclusion. Filter, code, structure: nothing in history has held more power than the architecture of language. Yet today, in the age of instantaneous communication, words themselves are under siege. We have mistaken quantity for access, visibility for participation, connection for thought. We dwell in a present that produces meanings as by-products: fragile, indistinct, interchangeable. Social media are not public spaces; they are speculative simulations of discourse. Environments designed to valorize gesture, not content. Speaking is no longer a creative act; it is a reflex. Every thought is converted into a rapid, digestible, attack-ready expression. Every word becomes a fragment, primed to be wielded against its speaker.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has begun generating texts, images, music, conversations. It has not created a new language—it has accelerated the existing one into indistinction. Algorithmic content merges with human, gradually re-educating the ear. We acclimate to frictionless sentences, sleek syntax, packaged thought. Language without effort. And it is precisely in that absence of exertion that human intelligence disintegrates. Every authentic creative act is an act of resistance. A text that offers no friction, that demands no pause, no return, no stumble—does not exist. The algorithm produces, but does not question. The true writer exposes themselves.

Today we witness the transformation of language into flow. And in that flow, every word loses gravity. Relationships reduce to messages, opinions collapse into slogans, criticism masquerades as attack. Those who seek dialogue are overwhelmed. Those who defend complexity are accused of ambiguity. Those who ask for time are excluded. Speed has displaced thought. The word, once a tool of emancipation, has become choreography of consent. But the illusion will not last. Reality—real reality—demands attention. And it will resume its insistence that we know how to name things. That we understand the weight of a term. That we can listen without replying. Today, the political act is precisely this: to withdraw from reactivity. To reclaim the slowness of human speech. To defend the word—not as content, but as construction. As architecture. As ethics.

Writing, for me, is not about expressing—it is about measuring. But above all, it is about defending doubt. Doubt is the first form of freedom. It is the foundation of philosophy, and of democracy. One is not truly democratic unless one accepts the possibility of being wrong. One cannot pursue truth without the humility to interrogate it. Even now, as I write, I know I may be mistaken. Perhaps I have already erred. Perhaps more rigor was needed; perhaps silence was wiser than speech; perhaps I spoke before I understood. Yet it is doubt that anchors me. It is my only ethical guarantee.

All that I understand—or believed I understood—I learned by observing. Not by reading. Not by studying. Observing. Raised in the countryside, among the mountains, I spent my childhood watching animals. Especially ants. Their world knew no rhetoric, no polemic, no quest for visibility. Ants do not compete; they do not assert themselves. They simply exist, following an order that needs no proclamations. It is not morality—it is ritual. It is concentuality. A rhythm that makes sense only in its repetition. As a child, that rhythm struck me as the only credible language: measured gesture, function, necessity.

Today, when I look at social media, I see the opposite: a bulimia of speaking, a frenzy of appearing, a syndrome of permanent witnessing. Every thought is a declaration. Every word a plea for approval or a summons of condemnation. But life—real life—does not update with a scroll. It is made of waiting, of silences, of minimal rituals. And of doubt. Above all, doubt.

Democracy, if it still makes sense, is not a form—it is a method: a way of inhabiting language. Of accepting interruption. Of enduring dissonance. Of not having the last word. We live in an age that seduces us into believing we can respond to everything. But responding is not the same as understanding. And knowing everything is merely another form of ignorance. In a world teetering under the weight of its own certainties, defending doubt is a radical act. It is from doubt that I will restart. From a deliberate, measured space built with the same concentuality I recognized in the animal world of my childhood. I will write not to assert, but to see more clearly. To understand anew. To endure. In silence, if needed.

In doubt, always.