Drawing on ethnography as well as media and archival sources, this article approaches issues of language and relations of power in Barbados along ideological axes of civilization, modernity, and intelligence. Its particular focus is on the ideologies of social and language boundaries and the semiotic processes of their construction, navigation, and policing. I use the concept of commensurability to engage with questions of inclusion, alterity, and (post)colonial selfhood brought into sharp relief by my Barbadian fieldwork and conversations. [Barbados, coloniality, commensurability, semiotics of differentiation] I t was a warm autumn day in September 1987. I was waiting in the dark hallway of the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis for my appointment with the department chair when I noticed a poster-size map of Native North American Languages. Its plexiglass matted and yellowed with age, the faded mosaic of pinks and blues displayed its geolinguistic schemata (Gal and Irvine 2019, 232, 264; see also Shepherd 2020, 310). In the left corner of the map, a legend attributed each jigsaw piece to a language and, presumably, to people who spoke it. The solid coloring of the patches depicted an absence of variation. I imagined people falling silent when hitting sound walls conjured by thin black lines that delineated and contained each "language."Presenting language as uniform, territorial, and bounded, the map inspired questions that were to guide my own research on language and coloniality in Barbados (Fenigsen 1999;, 2007. Why were languages on the map separated by clear boundaries? Why was the variability in language and communicative practices erased and replaced by seemingly impermeable boundaries (see Irvine 1993Irvine , 2011? How did such representational transformations relate to coloniality and modernity? What can one make of the duplicity of inclusion, that shakespearesque invitation to a supper, where one may well end up being eaten? How is comparability linked to power (Gal and Irvine 2019, 241;Povinelli, 2001) and how are the terms of comparison staged? What place do language ideologies have in the semiotics of alterity and modern colonialism (