Beginnings: The Politics of Linguistic Correctness and Persuasion

The study of language and politics is aimed at understanding the role of linguistic
communication in the functioning of social units, and how this role shapes language itself.

The fact that the word “politics” derives from Greek polis ‘city’ is significant. The city as an
organized social unit depends on linguistic communication for its functioning, and urban life
places functional demands on language that are substantially different from those in a
sparsely populated rural setting.

Politics is the art, and language the medium, whereby they position themselves to get what
they need, and beyond that, what they want.

The example of Transactional conversation between Crispin and John. John said “Bring to
me” à Crispin replay “Bring it to me”.

The use of “standard” forms of language in politic will make the audience more persuasive ,
when it comes to convincing and this persuasiveness may well carry on throughout the life.

The “correction” in question is of a usage over which native speakers disagree, both across
and within dialects.

“Bring me it” is acceptable to many but not all speakers;

“Bring it me” is likewise semi-acceptable, but only in parts of England. “Bring them them” is
fine for me in spoken usage, though not in writing, and most native speakers seem to reject it
in either mode.

Issues of linguistic correctness go far deeper than the particular grammatical or lexical
quibble at hand. They are interpreted as reflecting the speaker’s intelligence, industry, social
worthiness, level of exposure to the elders of the tribe.

Interpreting language use in this way is a political act. It determines who stands where in the
social hierarchy, who is entrusted with power and responsibility. There is a further linguistic-
political dimension in how those in power, or desiring power, deploy language in order to
achieve their aims. This is traditionally the domain of rhetoric, defined by Aristotle as the art
of persuasion.

In modern times, particularly in the climate of twentieth-century ideas about the unconscious
mind and the possibility of thought control, it has come to be classified under the still more
loaded rubric of “propaganda.” Applied linguistics, as the study of language in use, can be
thought of as the approach to language that takes its political dimension directly into
consideration, whereas theoretical linguistics attempts to abstract it away.

In the twentieth century, the understanding of language and politics was shaped by an
ongoing conflict and tension between structuralism (and later “poststructuralism”), which
treats language as a system of signs given inadvance and structuring the unconscious
minds of the members of a speech community, and a range of Marxist (and “post-Marxist”)
approaches focused on the social production and reproduction of signs and their political
consequences.

The Structuralist vs. Marxist Divide

Saussure declared that langue, a language, is a social fact and that social force holds the
system together so powerfully that no individual can change the language. Changes occur
in parole ‘speech,’ and if eventually the social community accepts the change, the system
moves to a new state, a new langue.

Voloshinov said that Saussure’s course contains “abstract objectivism”

No speech act is individual; they are always social, even if the addressee exists only in the
speaker’s imagination.

According to Bakhtin (1981), “heteroglossia” is the discrete systems that linguists normally
study co-exist with a multiplicity of different ways of speaking that are constantly
intermingling with each other.

A unitary language is not something given but is always in essence posited – and at every
moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same
time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing
specific limits to it . . . (Bahktin, 1981, p. 270)

Saussure Voloshinov

An understanding of the social as what What one can say about the relationship
binds people together between them that would be meaningful.

Utterances come first, and that languages

A recognition that our very way of
as abstract systems are artifacts of the
talking about “a language” implies a
analysis of politically contextualized
powerful social cohesion
utterances.

An admission that the arbitrariness of

the link between signifier and signified,
A keen awareness of language as a field
and the existential break between the
of political struggle.
signified (a concept) and things in the
world.

Politics in Discourse: Approaches in the Marxist Line

Propaganda can only be combated by rational analysis and argument. This entails rephrasing
propagandistic statements in a different form.

Crowley (1989, 1996) and Holborow (1999) have analyzed the phenomenon of Standard
English in these terms, and the following passage encapsulates some of the key issues:

In the nineteenth century, the ideology of Standard English was part of a wider ruling-class
project to extend its hegemony over a growing working class and to meet the demands of
mass education on its own terms. However, this rulingclass ideology ran up against the
narrowness of its social base, which, in the case of language, could be seen in the reality of
the continued existence of nonstandard forms used by the vast majority of society.
(Holborow, 1999, p. 185)

There is good reason to think that general education did not serve the interests of the
important segment of the ruling class that depended upon the availability of a plentiful and
pliable labor force. There is equally good reason to believe that many in the ruling class
would have been horrified if the children of workers had begun en masse to speak just like
their own children. If the “ideology of Standard English” was aimed at ensuring that such
linguistic homogeneity did not happen, it succeeded. Language standards function precisely
by running contrary to what most native speakers’ intuitions would predict.

Politics in Grammar and Discourse: Approaches in the Structuralist Line

What essentially distinguishes Foucault from his Marxist counterparts is his belief that the
objects of knowledge, including language as well as the concepts that constitute its signifieds,
are not produced by subjects thinking, speaking, and acting intersubjectively. Rather, they are
produced by “power” itself, with which they have a mutually constitutive relationship.

George examined metaphors and how they pervade language and thought, often injecting a
political dimension into discourse that is not political in a literal sense. For example: “love is
war. He is known for his many rapid conquests. He overpowered her. She is besieged by
suitors” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 49). Political discourse itself is conditioned by certain
master metaphors such as that of the “race” for a political position, inter-party rivalry as a
sort of “match” between “teams” who sometimes drop the “political football.”

Robin Lakoff (1973, 1975) argues that languages, in both their structure and their use, mark
out an inferior social role for women and bind them to it. As with deferential address and
interpersonal relationships, gender politics is incorportated directly into the pronoun systems
of English and many other languages, through the use of the masculine as the “unmarked”
gender (as in “Everyone take his seat”).

O’Barr (1982) would argue that in fact the features Lakoff identified should not be
considered part of “women’s language,” but of “powerless language,” since their occurrence
is in fact greater among men or women who occupy low-prestige jobs and are less well-
educated, than among persons of the same sex with a higher level of education and more
prestigious employment.

The Politics of Language Choice

In an article entitled “Diglossia”, Charles Ferguson originally proposed a “narrow” definition
of diglossia as

a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the
language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent,
highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a
large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech
community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and
formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary
conversation. (Ferguson, 1959 [1972], pp. 244–5)
Within a few years, however, Ferguson’s narrow definition had been abandoned – because
those who used it found that the differences of linguistic structure were of trivial importance
compared to the cultural-political factors implicit in the functional differentiation of L and H.

In reconsidering the relationship of linguistic to national identity, it is worth going back, as

Anderson did, to Ernest Renan (1823–92), who said:

A national is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things that are actually one make up this soul,
this spiritual principle. One on the past, the other in the present. One is the common
ownership of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the present day agreement, the desire to
live together, the will to continue validiting the heritage that has been inherited jointly.
(Renan, 1882, p. 26, my translation)

It is in this sense that powerful “ideologies of language” may be said to condition language
choice, from the level selecting a national language down to what one will speak, and how,
in a given conversational situation.

Phillipson (1992) has very influentially promulgated the idea that the spread of English is
being brought about through “ English Linguistic Inperalism” as set of practicies through
which the dominance of English is asserted and maintained by the establishment and
continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other
languages”.

One of the most powerful tools of linguicism according to phillipson is laguage teaching and
multilingual education. “linguicism occurs………..if there is a policy of supporting several
languages, but if priority is given in teacher training, curriculum development, and school
timetables to one language” (1992, p.47)

The other most important applied linguist working in the area of “linguistic human rights” , it
regularly asserts that “languages are today being killed and linguistic diversity is disappearing
at a much faster pace than before in human history” (Skutnabb-Kangas,2000).

The most significant development in opposition has been the concept of “linguistic
hybridity”(Pennycooj,1998). Hybridity denies that spread of English wipes out other
language and culture, providing evidence instead of how resilient adaptive language and
cultures are to intermingling.