Politics of Language

Language and Politics

To the Greeks, language and politics are so closely related that the practice of democracy is impossible without a theory of language. “Nature makes nothing in vain … man is the only animal with the gift of speech” (Aristotle, Politics, I, 2). Politics is language, because language enables deliberation and debate and rules out violence, as Norbert Elias has shown in his Civilizing Process. Language is therefore central to any political activity.

Language is also central to social interaction, and social scientists have been indebted to pioneer linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, who claimed that language is the epistemological model of society. In other words, society is structured like a language. Structuralism indeed claims that there is a “social grammar,” and social sciences in general became fond of the idea that the implicit and explicit code ruling society resembles a constraining grammar of interaction. Social theory in the 1970s understood social action as either conforming to that grammar or violating its rules.

Three main movements characterize the past decades of research:

• 1.
  The first is the reception of nominalism in analytical philosophy and its durable influence on constructivism in general. Nominalism holds that there are no universal concepts, only empirical observations; referred to language, reality pertains to our ways of constructing/naming it; John Austin's illocutionary acts, for instance, are means of “doing things with words”: A minister saying, “I baptize this child,” ipso facto baptizes it.
• 2.
  The second involves studies on language and domination, with two subfields. One is concerned with routinized forms of domination, as in Pierre Bourdieu's Language and Symbolic Power (1982, 1991), for whom the linguistic market is similar to any other market, or Basil Bernstein's Class, Codes and Control (1971), where a sharp line is drawn between the “elaborated speech codes” of the middle classes seeking social mobility and the “restricted speech codes” of the working classes. Speech responds to strong cultural pressures: An elaborated code summarizes general social means and ends, whereas a restricted code is limited to local means and ends. The other subfield is concerned with the exacerbated form of domination: propaganda and totalitarian language. George Orwell depicts the deterioration of language in his novel 1984, and Viktor Klemperer's diary (Lingua Tertii Imperii) describes the sheer truth of how the Nazis systematically destroyed the German language, not only by evacuating the bald words but by substituting them with euphemized codes, such as “final solution” or “special treatment.”
• 3.
  The last movement is a legacy from philosophy and anthropology and relates to the profound skepticism concerning the written form of language and its potential link to illiberal policies (Plato, accusing the logographs, wrote that script [Page 2070]lies and that speech is sincere; script is compared to a pharmakôn—poison and medicine alike). Anthropology confirms that script is historically linked to despotism, as the original use of script was for accountability and domination of vast territories, not poetry. Classification might be a natural property of language; it enables governments to control society through rules enabled by script.

Language Policies

Language policy is an attempt to weigh collective language choices by institutional means, to prescribe the public use of one (or more) language(s), and to adopt language legislation. Historically, creating, rationalizing, or maintaining a language is the classical (European) sequence of language policy, mostly congruent with nation building in the 19th century. Official languages are not always national languages (an official language can coexist with a set of national languages), and substate national communities or groups with a strong regional identity may challenge the official language and make new language claims. Official- and national-language policies are only efficient alongside compulsory education, a wide interest in learning and using the official/national language, and some kind of reward for doing so (professional, symbolic)—the latter is particularly true for national-language policies: “What the eye is to the lover, language is to the patriot” (Benedict Anderson, 1983, p. 154).

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