Language and Power

10 Key excerpts on "Language and Power"

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  eBook - ePub

  Collected Works of Braj B. Kachru

  Volume 1

  • Braj Kachru, Jonathan J. Webster(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  In this study, however, I have a modest aim: to provide a blueprint for the discussion of selected issues related to the power and politics of the spread of English in a global context. While addressing the specific issues concerning English, an aside on the frameworks for the theoretical conceptualization of the relationship between Language and Power—and its politics—will be helpful. This aside will, I hope, contribute to our understanding of the complexity of describing the relationship between Language and Power.

  I will briefly explore several other interrelated issues connected with Language and Power. These include the concept of “power” and its application for language; the motivation for acquiring linguistic power; presuppositions for a power base; strategies used for power and politics; linguistic power and lingocide; and the politics of language in the Inner Circle of English, comprising the users of English in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand2 ; and, finally, will revisit the issue of a framework for the study of power.

  However, let me start with a warning: questions about Language and Power need not necessarily involve linguistic issues. The issues go beyond linguistics into the realms of history, sociology, attitude studies, politics, and into very mundane economic considerations. Thus this topic has many faces, and the power of English has yet to be studied from all of these perspectives. This chapter, then, reveals only a minute tip of the iceberg.

  The two crucial terms in this chapter, the “power” and “politics” of English, are linked in more than one way: the first implies an attainment of various types of “control,” and the second signifies the processes and strategies used for this control (see, e.g., Kramarae et al. 1984:9–22).

  Once a language attains power, it does not mean that political strategies are necessarily abandoned—far from it. Rather it is a vicious circle: in order for power and control to be maintained, political maneuvering must continue, which, then, develops into various situations of conflict (for discussions of case studies of language conflict, see Bourhis 1984; Brass 1974; Das Gupta 1970).

  How do power and politics relate to language? The power of language is intimately connected with societal power of various types. The dimensions of power and resultant politics include: (a) the spread of a language to numerically expand the speech community3

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  eBook - ePub

  Language and Power

  A Resource Book for Students

  • Paul Simpson, Andrea Mayr, Simon Statham(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Section A Introduction: Key Topics in the Study of Language and Power Passage contains an image

  A1 Language and Power

  This book is about the ways in which language intersects with the social and political reflexes of power . Over the last 40 years, scholars working in Linguistics, English Language and related fields of study have become ever more interested in how powerful groups can influence the way language is used and in how these groups can exercise control over access to language. Similarly, scholars have been interested in the obverse or reflex of this situation; that is, in how the exercise of power meets with resistance and how ‘ordinary’ people can and do contest discursive power through a variety of language strategies. This book sets out a comprehensive programme of study for this significant and expanding area of language and linguistics. Across its four sections, the book provides a history of the field and its associated methods of analysis. It covers the major approaches, the core technical terms and the main theoretical concepts. Additionally, it presents a series of seminal readings by some of the major academic figures in the field. Our aim is for students using the book to be able to identify the ways in which power is disseminated through language, whether that be through print, broadcast or social media, through legal or advertising discourse, or through political and other forms of institutional rhetoric.

  What is power?

  In short, power comes from the privileged access to social resources such as education, knowledge and wealth. Access to these resources provides authority, status and influence, which is an enabling mechanism for the domination, coercion and control of subordinate groups. However, power can also be something more than simply dominance from above; in many situations, for example, power is ‘jointly produced’ because people are led to believe that dominance is legitimate in some way or other. This second, more consensual, understanding of power suggests a two-way distinction: power through dominance and power by consent. As both concepts of power feature prominently across this book, it is worth saying a little more about their respective senses here.

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  Critical Applied Linguistics

  A Critical Introduction

  • Alastair Pennycook(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3The Politics of Language

  Sociolinguistics and Power

   Liberal Sociolinguistics

  Language Planning and Politics: The Global Spread of English

   Liberal Complementarity

   Language Ecology, Language Rights, and Linguistic Imperialism

  Postcolonialism and Resistance

   Colonialism and Postcolonialism

   Resistance, Appropriation, and Third Spaces

  Conclusion: Toward a Postcolonial Performative View of Language

  In the last chapter (←chap. 2 ), I focused primarily on the relations between knowledge and politics as they related to language. Left hanging, however, was the issue of developing a political understanding of language. Since applied linguistics always has to do with language in some form, the development of a political vision of language must indeed form a backbone to critical applied linguistics. I have already alluded to a possible distinction between looking at the politics of language in terms of how forms of power affect language use and in terms of how power may operate ideologically through language. Although this may be a slightly crude dichotomy, it can serve to organize different domains of the politics of language. While the next chapter (→chap. 4 ), therefore, is concerned with the analytical and pedagogical questions that emerge from a consideration of power and meaning within language—which I choose to call the politics of texts—this chapter deals primarily with issues to do with language use in different contexts—the politics of language. I focus on a number of principal concerns:

  • Language and Power within sociolinguistics;
  • Language and Power within different conceptions of language policy and planning, in particular, frameworks for understanding the global spread of English;
  • Issues of resistance and appropriation raised by postcolonialism.

  SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND POWER

  Of course, some versions of language may disavow any connection to power: Language is language, and power is power, and ne’er the twain shall meet. But whatever view of language supports such a position, it is evidently not one that is concerned with language use, for even conservative views on language tend to draw connections between Language and Power. Indeed, the main title of Honey’s (1997) conservative defense of standard English is Language Is Power. Such a title already points toward the arguments that underlie such a position: Particular forms of language (standard English) can convey social and economic power (language is power rather than Fairclough’s language and

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  Language Diversity and Education

  • David Corson(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Language, Power, and Social Justice in Education

  I don’t know what they’re saying. They could be saying anything, swearing at me, whatever. So it’s a loss of control, power, that kind of stuff. And that’s when their teacher’s back gets up.

  —Ryan (1999, p. 175)

  In its first half, this chapter looks at Language and Power; and then at language and social justice in its second half. The chapter ends by bringing these two discussions together, suggesting how the great imbalances in power that language diversity tends to create in educational settings can be leavened in ways that maximize the distribution of social justice.

  POWER AND LANGUAGE IN EDUCATION

  For most everyday human purposes, power is exerted through verbal channels: Language is the vehicle for identifying, manipulating, and changing power relations between people. In this section, I point to the ways that education and the discourse practices that it authorizes can routinely repress, dominate, and disempower diverse groups whose practices differ from the norms that it establishes. I begin with some of the links between discourse and power, focusing on education, which often gives power to its own favoured norms of discourse, and so risks creating discrimination and injustice for the many who favour other discourses.

  As mentioned already in chapter 1 , ‘discourse’ for me refers to the full range of meaning-filled events and practices that we encounter in life. Discourse covers all the sign systems, including those that are not usually regarded as part of natural language itself. Again, “to be able to think is to be a skilled user of these sign systems, that is, to be capable of managing them correctly” (Harré & Gillett, 1994, p. 49).

  Michel Foucault’s views on the links between power and discourse have become influential: Rather than a privilege that an individual person possesses, power is a network of relations constantly in tension and ever-present in discursive activity. It is exercised through the production, accumulation, and functioning of various discourses. Discourse here is the fickle, uncontrollable ‘object’ of human conflict, although no-one is outside it completely, or sufficiently independent of discourses to manage them effectively. The conflicts that take place, however, over and around discourse, can be one-sided if the balance of power consistently favours some groups over others. So the study of power is best located at the point where the dominating activities of the powerful are played out in real and effective practices. For Foucault (1972, 1977, 1980), the development of particular forms of language meets the needs of the powerful but, as often as not, it meets those needs without any direct exercise of discursive influence by the powerful. Relevant to other points made here (including discussion in chap. 3

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  Power Talk

  Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse

  • Joanna Thornborrow(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 PERSPECTIVES ON POWER: APPROACHES TO THE CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE AND INTERACTION

  S ince most work which addresses the question of power in discourse does so from its own particular analytical perspective, it is unusual to find an account of the various different approaches to analysing language, power and interaction which deals with the wide spectrum of theoretical positions that have emerged within the fields of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, broadly defined. In this chapter I attempt to go some way towards providing that account by outlining some of the major work which has contributed to the analysis of Language and Power, and by presenting a critical view of ways that power has been conceptualised, theorised and analysed in that work. I begin with an overview of the early studies in CDA, followed by a discussion of some key current theoretical perspectives, then move on to show how the issue of power has been dealt with in practice across a range of empirical research in discourse and conversation analysis.

  Over the past few decades there has been a growing interest in the analysis of language as a form of social, institutional and symbolic power, moving language study out of the domain of ‘langue’,1 where linguistic forms are decontextualised and treated as a cognitive, mental phenomenon, into to the domain of ‘parole’, where language is regarded as a socially situated, discursive and therefore often an ideological phenomenon. Many of the studies in the latter domain have drawn productively on the writings of social theorists, principally Foucault (1972, 1977, 1980), Bourdieu (1992) and Habermas (1982); the work of Althusser (1971), Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Pecheux (1982) has also had its part to play in the development of current thinking on the relationship between power and language. Ironically enough, although much of these theorists’ work was directly concerned with the social significance of language, their observations generally remained on the level of abstraction and there was very little in the way of empirical data upon which they based their conceptual claims. One of the aims of research in discourse analysis has been to examine real instances of naturally occurring texts and talk in the light of these theoretical concepts about the relationship between language, society and power.2

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  Cultural Anthropology

  Global Forces, Local Lives

  • Jack David Eller(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Language is both a medium of human communication and interaction and a shaping influence on that communication and interaction. Humans are not the only species that communicate, nor even communicate linguistically. However, humans have unique linguistic skills, which are also the same skills that make culture in general possible:

  • Symbolism
  • Productivity
  • Displacement.

  Language takes the form of a set of basic items and combinatory rules, from sound units to meaning units to utterances to socially appropriate speech-acts. Each of these dimensions is studied by a specific area of linguistics:

  • Phonology
  • Morphology or semantics
  • Syntax or grammar
  • Pragmatics or sociolinguistics.

  Language in its social production and use is much more than a list of names for things. It is a code for social information and social relationships. Any language includes a variety of specialized speech forms for different individuals and groups, different occasions, and different relationships. Language as a social phenomenon can express or determine functions such as:

  • Changes of social status and role
  • Politics and power relations
  • Performance of specific linguistic genres, such as ritual or storytelling
  • Blending, stratifying, or differentiating of social groups.

  Language, as a set of concepts or categories, may also influence the way that humans experience and interpret, and therefore respond to, their world – both physical and social. The linguistic relativity hypothesis suggests that language mediates human thought and experience such that members of different speech communities think and experience differently. This is an area of controversy and ongoing research.

  Key terms

  • anti-language
  • bound morpheme
  • competence
  • creole
  • diglossia
  • displacement
  • folklore
  • free morpheme
  • grammar
  • honorifics
  • kinesics
  • linguistic relativity hypothesis
  • morpheme
  • morphology
  • paralanguage
  • performatives
  • phoneme
  • phonology
  • pidgin
  • pragmatics
  • productivity
  • proxemics
  • semantic range
  • semantics
  • sociolinguistics
  • symbol
  • syntax
  • transient multilingual community
  • vocalizations

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  How to Speak Human

  A Practical Guide to Getting the Best from the Humans You Work With

  • Dougal Jackson, Jennifer Jackson(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Language The power of language to shift perception Whether you believe humans came from ape, idyllic garden or spaceship, it’s generally accepted that language evolved (or existed) to facilitate cooperation.

  The common scientific theory is that early man-beasts expanded their primate communication systems to work together better. But for those who believe in more spiritual origins, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel describes how God scattered people with different languages to prevent them working together. Same same.

  Language allows us to share knowledge, ideas and stories within our group. Just as importantly, though, it plays a role in protecting that knowledge from outsiders. Oh yes, no matter how cosmopolitan our outlook, our tribal instincts still run deep.

  In this way, language has always identified us as belonging to a particular culture, to the exclusion of everyone else. Even when we speak the same language, our accents and dialects reveal our affiliation to various subcultures: nationality, religion, social class, club, gang, team, pastime, political persuasion, trade, profession, employer. It’s not uncommon for us to change dialects depending on the cultural setting.

  Let’s pause a moment here, and look at the word ‘culture’. It’s a term that’s banged on about plenty in the business world, a vague-ish word used to describe a fuzzy set of shared attitudes, beliefs, rituals, conventions, norms, assumptions and values. These all influence our behaviour, how we interpret other people’s behaviour and, as a result, the way we interact.

  Language is essential in expressing these elements. It encodes the schemas, categories and metaphors that help us make sense of the world. And for this reason, language and culture are woven together, inseparable, each influencing the other.

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  The Exercise of Power in Communication

  Devices, Reception and Reaction

  • R. Schulze, H. Pishwa, R. Schulze, H. Pishwa(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  These considerations, however, can only be seen as a provisional diagnosis of what is going on in real-life encounters. Concerning the exercise of power, for example, Greene claims that

  […] it is too dangerous to seem to be too power hungry, to be overt with your power moves. We have to seem fair and decent. So we need to be subtle – congenial yet cunning, democratic yet devious. This game of constant duplicity most resembles the power dynamic that existed in the scheming world of the old aristocratic court. (1998: xvii)

  Although there does not appear to be a common set of research questions, linguists from different research strands have struggled to raise a number of these that are intended to uncover the mechanisms of the ‘diverse games of constant duplicity’, for example:

  • How do interactants in (a-)symmetrical relationships impact on linguistic choices and behaviours and vice versa?

  • How do powerful speakers or writers verbally exert power over less powerful speakers or writers?

  • How are concepts such as ‘dominance’, ‘inequality’, ‘power’ or ‘solidarity’ ‘translated’ and encoded in language?

  • What are the possibilities opened up by Cognitive Linguistics (including Construction Grammar), Frame Semantics or Neo-Firthian Linguistics to explore and cope with ‘the social’ in everyday life from a theoretical and methodological point of view?

  In this chapter, we will explore the idea that language and grammar are inherently social, basing ourselves on the theoretical principles and analytical tools offered by the theory of Cognitive Grammar, as laid out by Langacker (1987/1991), Frame Semantics, as advocated by Fillmore (1982), and Neo-Firthian Linguistics, as championed by Sinclair (1996), Hunston and Francis (2000), Hoey (2005), Stubbs (2001), Hanks (2013), etc.

  Focusing on social relations or the two dimensions of interpersonality, i.e. power and solidarity, the following chapters will outline the theoretical foundations for the different strands’ view on the social aspects of meaning and also provide reasons for their analytical potential. In keeping with the scholars mentioned above, the chapter will argue that due to the central role of meaning and function in all these approaches and by virtue of their usage-based nature, these models may lend themselves well as a basis for the exploration of the status of a reader or speaker vis-à-vis the hearer, or their level of intimacy. In doing this, we will ignore other types of social meaning, for example those types indicating the geographical provenance or dialect of a speaker or writer, or those expressing the age of the speaker (writer)/hearer or the archaism of a text.

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  Power

  A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences

  • Olivier Dupont(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-ISTE

    (Publisher)

  PART 2 Mobilizing the Concept of Power in ICS

  Introduction to Part 2

  Our journey through the epistemic foundations of the concept of power cannot claim to be exhaustive. It is marked by a particular approach; including an exploration initiated by its presence and use in contemporary work that researchers in the humanities who adopt the perspective of the information and communication sciences are likely to consult. Consecutively addressing political power, economic power, intersubjective or relational power, and discursive power is at once a segmentation based on existing work (Russ, 1994; Billier, 2000) and on historical changes, and also a deliberate decision to emphasize theories that illuminate the kinds of questions addressed by researchers in ICS. This is why, in the first section, we took the opportunity to begin mentioning several authors from the discipline by situating their approaches in relation to the philosophers and theoreticians we have mentioned. We will therefore, in this second part, present work conducted in information and communication sciences by organizing it around the three questions presented in the general introduction, namely linguistic power in ICS, reconfigurations of power associated with developments in ICT, and media power. This will also give us the opportunity to return at times to some of the authors introduced in the first part, by explaining, on one hand, the inheritance they deserve when they belong to past eras, and by identifying, on the other hand, the implicit or explicit dialog with researchers in ICS, if they are contemporary.

  Passage contains an image

  4 Linguistic Power in ICS

  Generally, when considering the question of the power inherent in language, researchers in information and communication sciences rarely mention the power of creation, innovation, or liberation connected to this language and, hardly more frequently, didactic or therapeutic power. Most of the time, they are more likely to clarify the discursive mechanisms that carry the power of dominance, influence, manipulation, or dissimulation.

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  Voice in Political Discourse

  Castro, Chavez, Bush and their Strategic Use of Language

  • Antonio Reyes(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  The Language of Politics (1987): “This is by no means the first book on the language of politics, but it is, I think, the first such book written by a linguist and the first to provide extensive analysis of actually occurring political language” (Geis 1987: vii). That quote reveals that the majority of the literature in this field has been published in the last twenty years. Geis (1987) shows how political language can evoke patterns of political belief and the kind of linguistic expressions that can efficiently evoke those beliefs. For him, those beliefs are “Mythic themes” such as “America the Peaceful,” which is evoked by linguistic structures such as, “Reagan may be forced to take action in Central America unless Nicaragua…” (Geis 1987: 175) as if the American president opts for hostile actions only when he is forced to do so. The use of the word “incursion” instead of “invasion” by Nixon or the phrase “rescue mission” instead of “invasion” by Reagan are examples of perpetuating the myth of “America the Peaceful” by avoiding the denotation of aggressiveness of the word “invasion.” According to Geis, political myths are axioms, that is, they are considered truths and it is taken for granted that they do not need further justification or argumentation. America being peaceful and generous and trying to help other countries with problems are some of these myths that language can evoke. Geis’s work (1987) opened up a new path to the understanding of the relationship between language and political thought.

  The studies of language within the critical linguistics framework are mainly motivated by an understanding of the importance of language as a vehicle that can shape, transform or misrepresent the reality (i.e. Austin 1962, Bolinger 1980, Edelman 1974, 1977, Gal 1989, Milroy and Milroy 1985, Richardson 2004, Silberstein 2002, Sornig 1989, Tannen 2001, van Dijk 1991). Hodge and Kress (1993) state: “Language is an instrument of control as well as of communication. Linguistic forms allow significance to be conveyed and to be distorted” (1993: 6). Schilling-Estes (2004) argues that “not only are speakers not bound to elements of the external situation as they shape their speech, but they use their speech to help shape and re-shape the external situation” (2004: 378). One of the aims of this book is to decode the linguistic ways in which power is exerted by politicians to shape the external situation, that is, our reality.

  Extensive linguistic analyzes of political discourse have been mainly guided by CDA (i.e. Billig, Chilton, Fairclough, Kress, van Dijk, van Leeuwen, Wetherel, Wodak) in the last twenty years. Another guiding source for political text analyzes has been provided by Functional Grammarians (for example Halliday 1985, Thompson 2004) as seen in the work of Butt, Lukin and Matthiessen’s (2004)2 .

  However, most of the literature focuses on political speech in English, and a major part of them is based on North American politics because of its pre-eminent military and economic position in the world. Examples of analyses in the field of political discourse in Spanish are sparse (Diaz Barrado 1989, Giraldo 1991, Martín and van Dijk 1997, Reyes-Rodríguez 2006, van Dijk and Mendizábal 1999, van Dijk 2005).

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