Language, Society, and the State

From Colonization to Globalization in Taiwan

Gareth Price

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501500442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

1 Language, society, and the state: Defining the terrain

1.1 Introduction

This chapter outlines some working definitions of language, society, and the state. The aim is to orient readers from different disciplinary paradigms – specifically, sociolinguistics and political sociology – and provide the basis for building a theoretical framework of a political sociology of language in chapter two. Since chapter two is thus a synthesis of these concepts, the definitions in the present chapter are kept relatively separate, and are presented consecutively. However, their precise articulations are inescapably influenced by each other. Language, therefore, is presented in terms of its social and political dimensions, and not in terms of its abstract structures. The concern of political sociology is the relationships between society and the state, and thus these are described in terms of their mutual dependencies.

The structure of the chapter is as follows. It begins with language, briefly considering its communicative functions and evolutionary basis. From there, the conceptual difficulties of seeing specific languages as discrete entities are discussed; the postmodern call to abandon the notion of singular languages is sketched but ultimately rejected, since languages are indeed perceived as real and distinct for social and political purposes. The current state of language diversity is considered in the next section; following that, the argument is made that linguistic diversity represents human cultural diversity, and that this is worth conserving.

The analytical scope of political sociology is then examined as a prelude to defining society and the state. As Poulantzas (1980: 600) notes, “according to whether we choose the state or society as the focal point of our research, our approach to the other term will necessarily be different”. For the purposes of this book, the focal point is the state, and so society is defined subsequently in those terms. The state is addressed from a neo-Weberian perspective, examining its nature as an institution of institutions and a political organization with specific means available to it – chief among them the monopoly of legitimate force – and having identifiable and relatively durable characteristics of operation. The characteristics of coercion and legitimacy, organization and bureaucracy, territoriality and sovereignty, and nationalism and citizenship are emphasized. The concluding section considers the concept of society, beginning by outlining the problems of methodological nationalism, and partly resolving them by viewing society as a set of overlapping systems. The notion of civil society is then defined, before turning to the pluralist “civil society argument” and some criticisms of this approach. The public sphere is then briefly described, in terms of its relation to civil society and its potential as a forum for democratic deliberation, but also the problems of stratified access based on class, gender, race, and language.

1.2 Language

Definitions of “language” vary depending on the unit and level of analysis, and on the disciplinary approach in question. For syntacticians, for example, human language is a set of underlying if abstract structures operating primarily at the level of the sentence (Chomsky 1965), while discourse analysts see sentences as one element of “texts” that also have broader social and political dimensions (Gee 2011; Halliday and Webster 2014). Variationist sociolinguists seek to understand the social correlations of language use – such as class, age, and gender – from a linguistic perspective (Labov 1972; Trudgill 2000), while more critically-inclined applied linguists have inveighed against variationists’ traditional under-theorization of society and politics, and the reliance on static social categories (Cameron 1995; Pennycook 2001). At a much more micro-level, phoneticians and phonologists ignore these concerns; they study language as a set of sounds and “wonder what all the noise is about” (Lippi-Green 1997: 7), apparently both literally and metaphorically. At the heart of these perennially roiling debates lie the questions of whether language should be analyzed on its own terms as an abstract system or set of systems, or in the social and political contexts in which it is embedded; and, if the latter, which social and political contexts matter and to what extent. From the title of this book, it should be clear that I take the critical sociolinguistic position that language is best understood in terms of its relationships with other aspects of our sociological, political, and economic realities. Specifically, I take a (political) sociology of language approach (Fishman 1972) that is less concerned with language itself, and instead with how language and languages affect social and political structures. In other words, here language is used as a prism to understand society and politics, and not the other way around.

1.2.1 Language, communication, and evolution

Language is the most fundamental means of communication among humans, and thus the basis for any form of human society (Noble 2000). As Bickerton puts it, language is also a “system of representation, a means for manipulating the plethora of information that deluges us throughout our waking life” (1990: 5). Many animals – from birds, to bees, to baboons – can communicate, and base complex societies upon this communication. But, to the best of our knowledge, animals cannot use language to represent abstract concepts or concrete phenomena that are not temporally or spatially present, among other features which make human language uniquely human (Adornetti 2015). It is far from settled whether human language is a branching-off from animal systems of communication or, as Chomsky (2000) holds, it is so different that it must have emerged in humans spontaneously and discontinuously (Knight et al. 2000), but it clearly has some evolutionary basis. Despite obvious evolutionary disadvantages to individuals in terms of expending time signalling or freely exchanging information, clearly language and thus cooperation has evolutionary benefits for social animals (Smit 2014: 159). One proposal is that human language emerged around the same time as tool-making; language makes it easier to assign social roles and tasks to members of a group (Stout 2010; Steele and Uomini 2009).

A more complex assessment of why, evolutionarily, humans became languaging beings can be found in Tetel Andresen (2014), but it is a demonstrable fact that children acquire language for the most part effortlessly, given normal cognitive development and opportunities for linguistic input from other humans. In Chomsky’s (1965) early theorization, this was due to the innateness of language, which presumed that human brains were hardwired with some sort of language acquisition “device” that would adapt to the specific parameters of the target languages around them. Even at the time, scholars in the then-emergent field of sociolinguistics balked at this emphasis on language as a biological function. As Dell Hymes wrote, along with acquiring competence from innate rules of a universal grammar underlying all language(s), children must also acquire communicative competence in the social context of language use, since “a child from whom any and all the grammatical sentences of a language might come with equal likelihood would be of course a social monster. Within the social matrix in which it acquires a system of grammar, a child acquires also a system of its use” (Hymes 1974: 75; emphasis added). Social contexts of language use are determined by the child’s immediate home environment and by his or her wider society. Traditionally, these were defined as the “speech community”, though this notion is by now highly contested even in sociolinguistics (Rampton 2000; Patrick 2004). Chomsky was explicitly concerned with a stable speech community, writing that the object of linguistic study should assume an “ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community” (1965: 3). Whatever a speech community is, however, its homogeneity is sociologically impossible; Chomsky has thus been reasonably criticized as developing “a theory of language without human beings” (Coulmas 2003: 576). A crucial dimension is that children will not only acquire languages in their speech communities, but they will acquire knowledge of the value of those languages within the social, economic, and political systems of their communities.

1.2.2 Naming and un-naming languages

For the purposes of this book, the unit of analysis is not “language” as an abstract system (or set of systems) in the singular, but named and distinct languages such as Dutch, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Hoklo, Hakka, Basay, or English. However, the very idea of named and distinct languages has come under attack in recent years from postmodernist scholars such as Makoni and Pennycook (2007). Languages might need to be “disinvented” insofar as they “were, in the most literal sense, invented, particularly as part of the Christian/colonial and nationalistic projects in different parts of the globe” (Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 1). As Errington (2008) shows, the European colonial project deliberately invented linguistic and ethnic distinctions where they did not exist, and erased them where they did. Nationalist impulses towards constructing and mythicizing traditions, cultures, and identities (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) have long been recognized as codifying, homogenizing, and standardizing languages at the expense of a vast diversity of accents, dialects, and repertoires (Anderson [1983] 1991; Wright 2016). Borders between national languages have been historically drawn by modernist “grand narratives” for political purposes, resulting in diminishing hybridity and diversity at the liminal edges of speech communities, and the socio-political marginalization of these mixed forms. Re-thinking language in contemporary sociolinguistics, for Garcia and Wei, is to conceive of it as an “open-ended, complex, [and] adaptive system” (2014: 31), and the project at hand is “to make visible the complexity of language exchanges … that [have] been buried within fixed language identities constrained by nation-states” (2014: 21).

These perspectives, and others, give very good reasons to think that linguistic difference and individual named languages are to a large degree socially constructed. But, be that as it may, people understand themselves in national, sub-national, and ethnic terms on the basis of the distinct languages they speak, and not all the sociolinguistic borders that groups have drawn between “them” and “others” can be traced historically to the emergence of European colonialism or nationalisms. This is evident in the fact that many non-state societies have long distinguished themselves linguistically, even if they have not named their own languages; though, of course, linguistic distinctions were not always as abruptly delineated as they are now by national borders. Furthermore, distinct languages are specific manifestations of the underlying human capacity for language. They have their own discrete structures and systems, and can be empirically demonstrated quite easily. A monolingual Malay speaker and a monolingual Swahili speaker, marooned on a desert island together, will find ways to communicate with sufficient inclination, but only with great difficulty; they obviously do not speak the “same” language.

Such diversity seems to be an odd outcome in evolutionary terms: humans are endowed with the same universal material for language acquisition, and humans appear to be essentially the same in neurobiological and cognitive respects. As such, one might wonder why humans have ended up with multiple languages rather than a common one, which, according to the dominant monogenesis paradigm, we presumably started with (Atkinson 2011). Wright (2016: 6, after Laycock 2001), suggests that groups of people may “simply prefer [linguistic diversity] that way … a distinct and singular language contributes to their sense of self”. In other words, having a common language may be part of a baser “human instinct to establish and maintain social identity … and a profound need for people to show they belong somewhere” (Chambers 1995: 250). The corollary of this is that there is potentially a desire to actively construct differences and barriers to understanding, since a common language can mark both inclusion within and exclusion from a particular social group: linguistic difference is used to exclude, marginalize, and dehumanize certain individuals and groups within societies.

1.2.3 Measuring linguistic diversity

Most sources put the total languages in the world at around 7,000. Even with this rough estimate, it seems that societal multilingualism is the norm among the 193 UN-recognized nati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Acronyms
• 1 Language, society, and the state: Defining the terrain
• 2 Towards a political sociology of language
• 3 The coming of the state: Taiwan encounters China and Europe
• 4 State against society: The Japanese and KMT regimes
• 5 Democratization, pluralism, and multilingualism
• 6 Globalization, neoliberalism, and immigration
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Languages in Taiwan
• Bibliography
• Index