In her bilingual text Language Duel/Duelo de Lenguaje (2002), the Puerto Rican writer, Rosario Ferré (1938–2016), dramatizes the contest between English and Spanish in the Americas. This war is so fierce and loud, with cannonballs roaring above, that the advantages of taking a double perspective seem inaudible for these ‘two male crabs’ interlocked in an ever-lasting power struggle for linguistic dominance. We can observe this linguistic power struggle not only in the Americas, but globally, and with shifting and more complicated power dynamics when the struggle becomes one between minority and majority languages, as in Europe. Cronin (2003, 139) shows how the postcolonial critique of Europe's role in history as colonizer often tends to ‘reduce Europe to two languages, English and French, and to two countries, England and France’. He cites Niranjana's references to ‘European descriptions’ and ‘European languages’, which aptly expose the double pall of invisibility that minority cultures and languages experience (Cronin, 2003, 140). In telling Europe's story as one single story, postcolonial critics risk homogenizing languages, cultures and experiences, thus reducing them to ‘invisible minorities’ (139). The single story, the one that does not study specificity, as Chimamanda Adichie (2009) warns, risks creating and perpetuating stereotypes (see also Tanoukhi, 2013). What is being perpetuated here is an essentialist narrative of Europe as a colonialist’s narrative, which renders invisible the story of a post-colony within Europe. It also renders invisible Europe's multicultural experiences, not only beyond borders (e.g. the diaspora) but also within them, as exemplified by Malta, a small Mediterranean island-state that is generally absent from such debates.

The absence of smaller literatures from scholarly debates or in translation can render that literature invisible. Joseph Brincat (2011, 34) illustrates this well in his history of Maltese linguistics, in which he identifies contemporary translations of an ancient Arabic text, Kitābar-Rawḍ al-Mitar (The Book of Fragrant Gardens) that exclude the sections about Malta. For Brincat, these exclusions make it more difficult to trace the origins of the Maltese language, the only European language that is part-Semitic, part-Romance.