The concept of hegemony, as explored in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, is linked to the idea of expansion. In this respect, Gramsci was influenced by his professor of linguistics, Matteo Giulio Bartoli, most notably by his idea of the “prestige” of a language or linguistic construct. A linguistic phenomenon tends towards hegemonic power as it gains authority over other phenomena on account of its comparatively greater degree of “prestige”. Gramsci speaks of the “irradiation” of “prestige” and of the concomitant creation of “conformism”: expansion normalizes the power of the hegemon. [5]