Inclusive Language Guide

"Choices in language can empower us to reframe issues, rewrite tired stories, challenge problematic ideas and build a radically better future based on a survivor-centred, intersectional, anti-racist and feminist vision of equality."

Why should people working in "international development" care about the words they use? According to Oxfam, the answer is that language has power - both to oppress and to liberate. This guide is a resource to support people in the development sector in thinking about how the way they write can subvert or inadvertently reinforce the intersecting forms of inequality they are working to end.

The guide is based on a set of feminist principles for language use that centre the power and agency of people experiencing inequality - e.g., diversity, power sharing, safety, care and solidarity, inclusion and belonging, personal is political, "nothing about us without us". It gives examples of how to put these principles into practice in writing and day-to-day conversation. It also includes phrases and concepts that Oxfam contends are important to understand in order to recognise and challenge intersecting power issues.

The language recommended in the guide is drawn from specialist organisations that provide advice on language preferred by marginalised people, groups, and communities, and by Oxfam's own staff and networks, to support choices that respectfully reflect the way they wish to be referred to. The guide is structured in sections that span intersecting forms of inequality: disability; physical and mental health; gender justice; sexual diversity and women's rights; migration and the rights of refugees; and race, power and decolonisation.

Oxfam recognises that "there is a problem with the guide being all about English...[and] that the Anglo-supremacy of the sector is part of its coloniality. This guide is supporting people who have to work and communicate in the English language as part of this colonial legacy but...the dominance of English is itself one of the key issues that must be addressed in order to decolonise our ways of working and shift power." Oxfam is also conscious that this guide "needs to be understood as one piece of a much broader effort to rethink and re-imagine how international development works to decolonise and shift power..." It is a work in progress, and feedback is welcomed (through the Network Contact link above).