Language, Society and Power
By: Linda Thomas and Shan Wareing
Summary
The broad idea that almost everyone has in mind about language is that it is just a means of conveying emotions, feelings, ideas and thoughts. The public believe that language is to be innocent and pure of all fallacies, discriminations, ideologies and latent meanings but a mere tool by which a group of people exchange the parts of the talk. However, throughout history and throughout all the studies that have been done, it is proven that language is the tool by which the elite practice an impose their power, the tool by which media spread the ideologies and certain rumors, and I would go far and say the means by which our social realities are constructed through giving meaning to things. Language is the most important invention that the humanity has made. Can we imagine a society without language where ideas and thoughts are expressed through a different means rather than language? Through drawings!! While even drawings can be considered as a language, then how this certain community would prosper and make a great progress toward civilization? Even, how the elites would rule and practice their power and the media how would it change people’s minds through those implicit and hidden messages? From here we can say that language would play a significant role in holding a society and making it progress toward the best and even through language the social classes can be hold and keep the status quo.
This paper will be devoted to provide a summary of Linda Thomas and Shân Wareing’s book which is entitled Language, Society and Power and published by Routledge. This book is an introduction to the study of language in relation to power and society with all its aspects including gender, ethnic groups, politics, media, class … and so on.
In the first chapter which is, an introductory part of the whole book’s issues that are related to language, entitled with a question “What is language and what does it do?” is mainly dealing with the notion of language and what signifies an also with its function. In this chapter the author believes that language is worth studying since it is part and partial of all the aspects of study, such as philosophy (the relationship between meaning, language and perception), anthropology (the role of language in different cultures), sociolinguistics (the different varieties of language people use, and why there are linguistic differences between different groups), artificial intelligence (how to make computers more sophisticated), and many other crucial aspects. But first, what language really is? The answer to this question would have many dimensions because it depend on the aspect we are seeing language from, however, the most simple way is that language is a system, as the chapter suggests, in which we combine several sounds of the language we speak to introduce words with respect to the grammatical features of that language. From the previous idea we can consider language as a rule governed system.
More than this, language is not just a combination of sounds but a tool to create the reality we live in (the social reality). In other words language is the means by which we create meanings to new things and new meanings to old things and in here the culture of that certain society we are living in can interfere to direct the creation of that meaning. In addition to this, language has many different functions including using it referentially, affectively, aesthetically, and phatically. The language is used referential when giving a referential instruction such as the given example: “put that bunch of flowers on the table”, it gives information about what you want placed (the flowers) and where you want them placed (on the table). Moreover, the choice made in the previous example is not the result of the information transmission; however, we can convey the same meaning or message using different utterances showing the social relationship that link us with the addressee. Another important aspect which is the variety of languages from one culture/country to another, I mean that we can find the same language spoken in another area of the country but convey different meanings which almost all the times cannot be understood by an outsider of that area. Taken the example of Morocco, people of the north (Shamal) also speak Arabic as well as the other areas but they include Arabic words in their accent that cannot be understood by someone who is not from the north.
What do we know about power in relation to our societies? Power is an abstract concept; Moore and Hendry (1982) describe it as: “…the force in society that gets things done, and by studying it, we can identify who controls what, and for whose benefit”. This quote indicates that power is something that can be studied and something that controls things in our society and also through which the regime is held. The author suggests a very simple example through which power is displayed, which is voting. Giving the vote to certain elected people to construct certain rules and laws on our behalf that if we break them, society has the full power, which we have given it, to punish us. Moreover, power is disseminated all over the social classes and each class has a certain degree of power of the classes below. The elite for example and those who own the means of production would maintain a greater power and influence than the lower classes would do.
Alongside with the above, the author jumped to tackle the issue of thought and representation through the Saussure’s theories of the sign, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and how language would create many worlds. As we illustrated in the passage before that cultures are different from one another and what is perceived as ordinary may not be perceived or understood in the same way within another culture. The author relied on Saussure’ theories of the sign to explain how language is correlated with the things it refers to. The author argues that the concept and abstract ideas within our minds can be affected by the language we speak and that the reality or the outside world is a representation of what we think of. Furthermore, he explained that the more mature we get the more language representation in our minds we have and know the limits of our language, for example we become able to know that “book” is a word that have a concrete representation in the real world and that specific combination of sounds is possible I that language we are speaking, while know that “jsg” doesn’t hold any representation and we cannot have a thought with “jsg” because it is impossible in that language. Moreover, Saussure believes that “Langue” is our innate knowledge of our native language, and that speakers belong to a “speech community” which includes all the people who speaks our language. Saussure also believe that (the common theory) language is made up of signs and each sign consists of two parts the “Signifier” and the “Signified”. The signifier would stand for the word itself, the graph while the signified stand for the meaning that word holds, and when the two are established it is impossible to separate the thought from the sound. Additionally, language is arbitrary because we cannot point out why we are, for example, calling the house “a house” and not “maison”. From here we can tell that there is an arbitrary division of reality because languages differ in the labels they give to objects and then reality would be different. For example: the Eskimo would have different names to different degrees and colors of “Ice” while a certain civilization would have only one word that describes all types of “Ice”.
The later idea and example would be an implementation and an explanation of the linguistic relativity that Sapir and his student invent, in other word it corresponds Saussure theory of the arbitrary division of reality. The second half of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis would be about linguistic determinism, which states that not only does our perception of the world influence our language, but that the language we use profoundly affects how we think. According to this theory, language creates a framework for our thoughts; it can be as limitations for our thoughts or even a box to think in and not out of it. For example, sometimes we experience feelings that we cannot express and illustrate by words, and this can be considered that framework the theory suggests. Furthermore, the utterances and terms that are used for a long time they become firmly entrenched and difficult to question, in other words they become the reality you or we live in without having a second thought about its origin or from where it comes and so it become a common sense.
In parallel with the above, we are going to investigate in the relations that language hold with all other aspects starting with politics. First what is politics? Politics is concerned with power: the power to make decisions, to control resources, to control other people’s behavior and often to control their values. More than that, we in our daily routine make political decisions in buying goods or in consuming services in accordance of their advertisements, and so we can say that politics can refer to a wide range of activities. However, politics and power are two sides that can by no means be separated, because to be a politician is to hold a certain degree of power according to the position you have in that political system. Political power can be displayed through coercion which is force (the military) that controls the society’s citizens not to break the laws that are already made by those in charge (politicians). Also there is another means of making others obeying the laws and rules that governs the society which is the persuasive method through manufacturing consent. “Ideology” nowadays is used to means any unaccepted idea or concept that would touch the safety of certain majority people in the society, or touch the other high classes status, ideology is related to any strange idea which during time and through the use of language by media it was turn to become a common sense (accepted). Orwell perceived the majority of politicians to be corrupt confidence swindlers and he particularly disliked the kind of language politicians adopted, describing it as follows: “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness…political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
The second aspect that the book investigates its relation with language is media, and as we all know that the core of the media relies on the use of language, media without language cannot exist. We use media for many different aims, to listen to news, to entertain, to get information and even some people would use it for some visual pleasure as it, nowadays, turned voyeuristic. The mixture between information and entertainment invent another name of this mixture which is “infotainment” which serves both functions. The most important and interesting aspects of the potential power of the media from a linguistic point of view is the way that people and events get reported. I mean that the same information is presented by different media channels would leave the viewer with different impressions, the point here is that the way the information if delivered matters the most and choice of words that are used in delivering that certain information would include some tended latent meanings, as an example saying that “Britain under the conservatives has changed” indicates that all the credits is given to the conservatives who did all the hard work to change Britain, but when saying “the conservatives has changed Britain” this would give the impression that not only the conservatives who did the hard work but the credit is divided among the state the party and the population.
The dominant discourse or the commonsense that language is creating among people would be explained by the author as followed: “The tendency to represent people, situations and events in regular and predictably similar ways results in the linguistic choices that are used in these representations becoming established in our culture as the most usual, prevailing ways of talking or writing about types of people and events. Once something has been represented in a particular way, it becomes more difficult to talk ‘around’, or ‘outside’, that representation, to find an alternative way of describing a social group X, or a political event Y.”
Furthermore, where is the place of gender in all this issues concerning language? Sexism in language represents one of the major issues in sociolinguistic studies. As a phenomenon of society, sexism is reflected through language that expresses inclination in favor of one sex and treats the other one in a discriminatory manner. Characteristically, the bias is in favor of men and against women. Thus, the language is presented as a powerful tool of patriarchy. Even though in English-speaking countries all the people are considered equal, discrimination against women exists and this fact is observed in language. When it comes to women, the message is a depressing one. The denigration of half of the population has embedded itself in the language in ways you may not even be aware of. Often this takes the form of “pejoration”: when the meaning of the word “gets worse” over time. The term “Mistress”, as an example, is the female equivalent of “master”, and thus, “a woman who has control or authority” – in particular one who employs servants or attendants. However, during time it turned to hold the meaning of “a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship”.
We think we already know that
women and men talk differently for many reasons. We know it from the thousands
of ‘pop’ psychology and communication books, from Men Are from
Mars, Women Are from Venus to He’s Just Not That into You. There are thousands of scientific articles that
report sex differences in behavior of all kinds. But how can we explain these
differences? The book suggests that the dominance theory would fit in to
explain the happening, which takes the difference in power between women and
men as the main cause of the discourse variations. The ways we speak to each
other may reflect the material differences between the sexes and reinforce them
making them and making them normalized.
The following aspect would be ethnicity, how language is related to ethnicities and how it affects it? And can ethnicity be represented through the use of language? The traditional definition of race and ethnicity is related to biological and sociological factors respectively. Race refers to a person's physical characteristics, such as bone structure and skin, hair, or eye color. Ethnicity, however, refers to cultural factors, including nationality, regional culture, ancestry, and language. An ethnic group or ethnicity is a population group whose members identify with each other on the basis of common nationality or shared cultural traditions. Some ethnic groups also share linguistic or religious traits, while others share a common group history but not a common language or religion. Moreover, there are two main divisions in ethnicity, “the ethnic majority” and “the ethnic minority”. The ethnic majority would be the people who hold the mainstream of their society, they can be the “elite” and those who maintain power to control and make laws. While the ethnic minority would be those people who are subordinated and treated as different and challenging the status quo of their society, and here power plays a significant role in deciding who are the majority and who are the other group.
The author focused on two practices that would reveal the role of language in ethnicity, that are the use of marked terminology and negative labeling. Markedness is visible through what the author called the invisible majority and marked minority. Those two groups are spotted by the use of “we” and “them”, in other words the minority are always pointed out as them, as an example, here in Morocco we use the term we against them when talking about a group of people that are not relate or belong to our ethnic group, such as Fesies people would call people from the country side as “them” because they are not affiliated to the Fesies culture and norms, even when just playing football the fans of a team would label the other team’s fans as “them” which signifies: the enemies, the strangers, the subordinates, and the others. As a result, we end to create negative labels about those minorities, such as call a person from the countryside “3robi” which signifies a negative meaning of a person who is not civilized and live in primitive conditions and also has no relation with fashion and modernity. And so language became a carrier of one’s own ethnic identity, taking an example of Amazigh people who speak Tamazight, from their language we can spot their identity, this can be implemented on various examples.
Furthermore, the author places value also on the age and how language can describe the status of children and elders. The fact that old people would use more wise words and even old ones while youngsters would use abbreviations, and short words and fashioned ones, such as those created among youth for example instead of saying “I don’t know” a young would say “Idk” as an abbreviation of the previous expression. From here we can point out that language would represent the status and also the age of the speaker (this doesn’t mean that an old person would say so, but almost all the time what we explained is what would happen).
In all societies, age can be used as a social category and as a means for determining duties, rights and privileges. Your age can determine whether you attend school, marry, drink alcohol, vote, draw a pension, or get into the movies at half price. However, when we say for example: “the intelligent old woman” In this case, the age description is placed closer to the ‘the person’ than the other description. There is a very strong tendency in English to place the adjective expressing the most ‘defining’ characteristic closest to the noun. What might seem to be a ‘natural’ word order for these phrases is really a reflection of which of the two characteristics we consider to be more important for classifying people. Although intelligence and other features are important to all of us, they would be secondary for other people. Moreover, even the way those two segments are talked to would be different, for instance when talking to a child we use some simple understandable language and even we call them by some adjectives that are related to cute animals, such as “kitty” from “cat”. While the elders are treated and spoken to in more mature manners as they are experienced of language and many other things.
The following point is one of the most controversial issues in society, which is “class”. Does language affect or be affected by class or both? What would be the relationship between the two? First let’s have a look on what is a social class? Basically it is a group of people who share a certain norms values and beliefs and feel a sense of belonging together. The author would give the following explanation of a social class: When we talk about being ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ on the social scale, or about ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ social classes, we are making the assumption that society can be stratified according to class. Stratification means dividing something into hierarchical layers so that one layer is above or higher up than another one. People on each layer have similarities with each other and are considered equals, but they are different from, and not equal to, the people on the other layers. We as Moroccans would confess that language play that significant role in establishing the class or in displaying a certain status, for example a person who speaks French would be considered in our society as one of the elites or those rich families due to the prestige and notions of being in the top of the traditional pyramid that language has in our community. In contrast a person who speaks Tamazight would be taken as a non-civilized and primitive one due to the connotations Tamazight has in our historical society. And so the social class of a certain person will definitely affect language, since they start using non standard words and vocabularies mixed with the French language revealing a prestigious status for the speaker. As a result language and social class would go hand in hand due to the mutual effect they maintain.
More importantly, language can be the holder of one’s cultural identity reveals that identity through his use of words and vocabularies (talking about people who speak the same language). When someone is speaking a certain language, for example Arabic he is indeed practicing his Arab Identity. Also through it we can shape the perspectives of people on who we are, an also make the society viewing us as bad or good. Identifying oneself as belonging to a particular group or community often means adopting the linguistic conventions of that group, and this is not just in relation to the words the one uses, but also in relation to the way that he or she says them. The way those conventions are defined and maintained is usually controlled by the group rather than the individual, and this would be called by the author as “linguistic identity” (belonging to a group who speak your language).
The author concludes his book with two important chapters that deals with the Standard English and the attitudes toward language. And we will try to summarize the two chapters giving the most important pieces of information that are provided in them. First of all, what is Standard English? Standard English is a controversial term for a form of the English language that is written and spoken by educated users. It is also known as Standard Written English (SWE). According to Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), the term Standard English "resists easy definition but is used as if most educated people nonetheless know precisely what it refers to." However, the author would define it as follows: “Standard English is the dialect of institutions such as government and the law; it is the dialect of literacy and education; it is the dialect taught as ‘English’ to foreign learners; and it is the dialect of the higher social classes. It is therefore the prestige form of English.”
Most people are aware that they use different styles of spoken language during a typical day depending on the situations they find themselves in, and this would be due to the changeability of the social context which directly affect the language style that is suitable to be used, it even dictates on the speaker the manner and the style to make a successful conversation. Social contexts are infinitely varied but can include: where you are; who you are talking to, for instance in terms of status, age, or intimacy, and what you are talking about. Many people have negative opinions towards the idea of teaching Standard English in education. This may be due to the uniqueness of an individual’s regional variety being reduced in speech. Through speaking Standard English, often people believe their individuality may become lost or reduced.
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