Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors' Preface
- Foreword
- 1 Overview: How politics permeates language (and vice versa)
- 2 Language and nation
- 3 The social politics of language choice and linguistic correctness
- 4 Politics embedded in language
- 5 Taboo language and its restriction
- 6 Rhetoric, propaganda and interpretation
- 7 Conclusion: Power, hegemony and choices
- References
- Index
1 - Overview: How politics permeates language (and vice versa)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors' Preface
- Foreword
- 1 Overview: How politics permeates language (and vice versa)
- 2 Language and nation
- 3 The social politics of language choice and linguistic correctness
- 4 Politics embedded in language
- 5 Taboo language and its restriction
- 6 Rhetoric, propaganda and interpretation
- 7 Conclusion: Power, hegemony and choices
- References
- Index
Summary
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY THAT LANGUAGE IS POLITICAL?
Over the last decade, some highly regarded and influential scholars of the origins of language have been putting forward the view that it began for fundamentally political reasons. Dunbar (1996) believes that language evolved as an ultra-efficient means of distinguishing allies from enemies and of grooming allies and potential allies. Dessalles (2000) locates its origins in the need to form ‘coalitions’ of a critical size, representing the initial form of social and political organisation:
We humans speak because a fortuitous change profoundly modified the social organisation of our ancestors. In order to survive and procreate they found themselves needing to form coalitions of a considerable size. Language then appeared as a means for individuals to display their value as members of a coalition.
(Dessalles 2000: 331-2, my transl.)While this is an area of scholarship in which nothing can ever be definitively proven or disproven, it is significant that a political take on language origins should coincide with the rise of a political approach within applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. Thirty years ago one would have had a much harder time finding anyone prepared to take seriously the idea that language might be political in its very essence. Yet it is an idea with a venerable heritage:
Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal … Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech.
(Aristotle, Politics I, 2, Jowett transl. [1885])- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language and Politics , pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009