Language is Politics

Exploring an Ecological Approach to Language

Frank van Splunder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000754391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language is Politics discusses power relations between languages in the world, with a particular focus on English. Even though English is the most widely spoken and the most powerful language worldwide, it is not the lingua franca it is often supposed to be. The basic tenet of this book is that languages do not exist in the natural world; they are artefacts made by humans.

The book debunks some common myths about language and it suggests that we should be more modest in our assumptions, for instance concerning the linguistic uniqueness of our own species. The author argues in favour of an ecological or balanced approach to language. This approach sees humans and other animals as part of the larger ecosystems that life depends on. As in nature, diversity is crucial to the survival of languages. The current linguistic ecosystem is out of balance, and this book shows that education can help to restore the balance and cope with the challenges of a multilingual and multicultural world.

With an ecological approach to language and a focus on narratives and personal language histories, this will be key reading for researchers and academics, as well as students of English language and linguistics.

PART 1

Language is politics

1

The language myth

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my dog.

(attributed to Charles V)

The invention of a myth

A couple of years ago, a Danish friend of mine asked whether I knew what the most typical Danish dish was. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, but I thought smørrebrød was a safe bet.¹ So that’s what I said. ‘Wrong’, she replied, ‘it’s pizza’. I was baffled, but then I realized the street where she lived was lined with pizzerias. And this was Copenhagen, not Rome. There wasn’t a single place selling smørrebrød. Of course, this may have been due to globalization: pizza is available all over the world while smørrebrød is not, not even in Denmark. More importantly, the example shows that people think in clichés which may be dead but won’t lie down. Language belongs to the same realm of myths. That is, not language as such, but many of the beliefs people have developed about language. For instance, the belief that one’s language determines the way one thinks, that Eskimos have more than 100 words for snow, or that Danish is the ugliest language in the world (or is it Dutch?). These beliefs – or ideologies, as I will call them – don’t make sense, and yet they are taken for granted.

The basic tenet of this book is that languages do not exist. Why then write a book on something that does not exist? At first sight, the whole idea appears to be absurd. My underlying assumption is that languages are in fact constructions. That is, they do not exist in the natural world, though we do speak of ‘natural’ languages – languages that have developed spontaneously in contrast to artificial languages or computer codes. In fact, however, a natural language is to a large extent artificial too, in that man has played a decisive role in its construction and in the way it is used. The word man is to be taken quite literally as most of these people were and are men indeed.

Languages are constructions in a number of ways. First of all, language can be used to construct a particular reality or view of the world. This is the case in, for instance, religion or politics. In his famous essay Politics and the English Language (1946), George Orwell focused on the way language can be used to make lies sound true.² For example, a government might use the term ‘pacification’ to justify its actions when bombarding a defenceless village. A more modern example is the term ‘collateral damage’, which is used in US military terminology for the killing of unintended victims during an attack. ‘Collateral damage’ sounds almost trivial when compared to ‘killing by accident’, yet the consequences are the same. Orwell’s essay anticipates his development of Newspeak – a simplified language constructed to limit the range of thought – in Nineteen Eighty-Four.³ Even though Orwell’s belief in a dialectical relationship between language and thought might be called rather naïve, it is a compelling idea, and ‘newspeak’ has since become a common name for the ambiguous euphemistic language used chiefly in political propaganda.

Second, languages are used to construct identities, in particular the identities of nations, groups of people, and individuals. When defining their identity, people try to answer the question not only of ‘Who are we?’, but also of ‘Who are we not?’. Thus, one’s identity is dependent on the way the other is defined. Self- and other-identification can be observed in the names ascribed to people, their countries and their languages, and in the characteristics ascribed to them. Whereas the self is usually described in a positive way, the other is often portrayed in a negative way. For example, a people may refer to itself simply as ‘the people’ (e.g. Cymry, the Welsh word for themselves), while other people are referred to as foreigners or sometimes even as non-people. A good example is the Greek word barbaros, which was used to refer to all foreigners not belonging to the great Greek civilization. The word emphasizes the otherness of outsiders and their gibberish languages, which sounded like ‘bar bar bar’. These origins are reflected in today’s usage of the word barbarian, meaning uncivilized or primitive – the original meaning of ‘foreigner’ has been lost.

Last but not least, languages are themselves constructions. They are complex systems consisting of grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and so on. Again, these systems do not arise naturally. And languages are not only described, but also codified in books and other works of reference that prescribe their ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ usage. An extreme example is Orwell’s Newspeak, though it is perhaps not as extreme as it seems. After all, languages are indeed manipulated to serve certain needs and ideologies. At a more fundamental level, languages are constructed to differentiate them from other languages and dialects. Language academies have been set up in various countries to regulate and control how a language is used. The role of these language regulators is highly political and driven by certain assumptions and beliefs concerning language. The Académie française, the French language council, is a good example of an authority that decrees what constitutes correct language, and which rules language users have to abide by. It goes without saying that the Academy’s decisions are made by people (mostly elderly white men) and they do not reflect anything that could be observed in nature.

Many of the beliefs that will be discussed in this book originated in Europe, the continent which played a dominant role in the world for almost 500 years (roughly from the fifteenth to the twentieth century). European assumptions concerning race, religion, social class, gender, and so on were exported to all other continents and legitimized as universal values.⁴ The Eurocentric worldview was challenged after the Second World War, when the postcolonial world took shape. Moreover, the United States had entered the international arena, shifting power from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ world. European languages, however, continued to play a major role in the world, and one language in particular became the world’s most dominant language: English.

Figure 1.1 Pitt and Napoleon Carving Up the World (James Gillray, 1805)

Source: British Museum

The focus of this book is on the use of language as a constructor of identity and on the construction of languages themselves. Of course, language is not the only way to construct an identity – there are many other ‘markers’, such as gender, age, social class, and so on, which combine to shape the way a person speaks, dresses, and behaves. The identity of a larger entity such as a nation is constructed and visualized by means of borders and border controls, flags, uniforms, monuments, manifestations, and even the colour of street signs.⁵ For instance, the colours used on the poles that support traffic lights in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, were changed to mark the territorial difference between linguistic regions: the ‘Belgian’ colours red and white were replaced by the ‘Flemish’ colours black and yellow. As I will discuss later, language can play a crucial role in the construction of a nation. It is one of the most powerful means of distinguishing one nation from another, and the belief in distinct identities is ingrained through language use in state institutions, schools, churches, the mass media, and so on. This is not to say that nations are constructed out of the blue, but they are definitely less natural than is commonly assumed.

Tensions over language appear to be increasing, which may be because the belief that each nation has a single, unifying language is in decline. This belief was mainly propagated by advocates of the nation-state, a concept that is itself under pressure as it is endangered by fragmentation, a tendency which may be observed all over the world. Even in ‘stable’ regions such as the European Union, the nation-state is being threatened from within. In today’s Spain, for instance, Catalonia is defiantly asserting its distinct culture and language as part of its long push for independence. Similar tendencies are evident in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Belgium. Language is a potent marker of identity, and one which is more tangible than race or religion. Often we cannot see where people come from or which religion they adhere to (unless they wear conspicuous signs to stress their identity, such as a headscarf or a turban), but their language (or dialect, or accent) will give them away immediately. Of course, people also switch between different languages (or accents) to highlight particular identities in particular situations.

The assumption that languages are essentially made by people ties in with the conceptualization of reality as a construction, which holds that social reality does not exist as such – it only exists in our interpretation and representation of it. The title of this chapter describes language as a myth, a widely held but false belief. The myth is created to serve a particular purpose, namely the construction of an identity. Several of the ideas in this book are inspired by Benedict Anderson, the title of whose seminal book Imagined Communities I have used as the title of my third chapter.⁶ Anderson is not the only scholar to have established a link between language and imagined communities. Alastair Pennycook went a step further when he referred to ‘the pernicious myth that language exists’.⁷ Stephen May has claimed that languages are created out of the politics of state-making.⁸ Thus, languages are made different from other languages for political purposes. Linguistic ‘borders’ and other identity markers are set up by means of the politics of vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and especially pronunciation.

The quotation given at the beginning of this chapter may also belong to the realm of myth. It has been attributed to Charles V (1500–1558), emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a vast and multilingual empire with territories in Europe as well as in Latin America. Interestingly, the quotation exists in different versions, with different roles assigned to the languages. In other versions, the emperor speaks Italian to kings, French to women, and German or Dutch to his horse (or soldiers). In the sixteenth century, however, the divisions between languages were not as clear-cut as they are today, and it may have been difficult to tell Spanish from Portuguese, French from Italian, or German from Dutch.⁹ These distinctions are more recent, as I will discuss in Chapter 3. The quotation probably dates from the seventeenth century, long after the death of the emperor. It reflects the view of Romance languages (which all derive from Latin) as the languages of high culture or nobility and Germanic languages as the languages of low culture or the common people. Another quotation often attributed to Charles V (or Carlos I, as he is known in Spanish) is ‘One is worth as many people as the languages one knows’.¹⁰ Again, it is highly questionable whether the emperor ever actually uttered these words, but the sentiment reminds us of the distinct identities afforded to individual languages.

Throughout history, writers, philosophers, and others have pondered the nature of language and attributed different characteristics to it. In her novel Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia Woolf describes language as ‘wine upon the lips’.¹¹ One of the protagonists, a university lecturer, intones Latin phrases as though his words were wine (while sipping port). Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century English lexicographer, takes a slightly less sensual approach, describing language as ‘the dress of thought’, an idea which was also expressed by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Many writers regard their language as the virtual home or country in which they live. Think, for instance, of French writer Albert Camus and his Portuguese counterpart Fernando Pessoa. In popular culture, too, language is often seen as the home or soul of a nation. These strong metaphors testify to the emotional content of language, as will be discussed later.

According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, language should be viewed not only as a means of communication, but also as a mechanism of power.¹² A language may be perceived as a threat to another language, which may in turn be perceived to need some kind of protection. As a result, metaphors of war are prevalent when it comes to language (for instance, the very concept of language war). In a global context, English is often considered a threat to other languages (hence the ‘tsunami of English’ metaphor), although it is sometimes seen as a solution to long-lasting language conflicts as well (e.g. in multilingual countries such as Belgium or Switzerland). In international, national, and subnational contexts, languages may vie for power, prestige, or dominance in a particular area, such as education. The terms language war, struggle or strife are mainly used in relation to conflicts ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Language is politics
• Part 2: Personal language histories
• References
• Index