Language and Power

Power is both cause and effect of language. This bidirectional relationship can be summed up in terms of two concepts: the power behind language and the power of language. Power behind language refers to a language's symbolic roles in signifying or reflecting the power relationships that already exist. In these passive roles language serves as a conduit of power, but otherwise has no power of its own. The power of language, on the other hand, refers to the generative roles of language in creating power for influence and control. In these active roles language is power.

Power behind language can be illustrated by the well-known saying that a dialect with an army behind it becomes a language. For example, after conquering all other major Chinese states in 221 BCE, Emperor Qin standardized the script of his own state and made it the official writing system for the whole of China, displacing all other regional scripts. The military prowess behind the Qin script was responsible for the script's elevation in status and popularity. Much the same can be said of the ascent of English in modern times, although religious, colonial, and industrial factors are also at play. Such ethnolinguistic vitality provides a conceptual framework for analyzing the power that lies behind language, and understanding this power allows us to systematically classify the factors that can account for the vitality of different languages.

Once empowered, a language enables its users to bask in the reflected glory of the power behind it. The resulting “feel-good effect” contributes psychologically to ethnolinguistic pride and social identity, and can serve as a motivational driver for ethnolinguistic nationalism (which can be seen in the Bahasa Melayu, now known as the Bahasa Malaysia movement). As well, the empowered language affords users tangible advantages such as better educational, political, and job opportunities relative to nonusers, giving rise to a range of language-based discriminatory practices that favor users. In other words, the power that is behind a language becomes transmitted to users of the language.

The power of language has many sources. It can be based on the very power that lies behind language and is later transmitted to users of the [Page 372]language, as shown above. Alternatively, it can be derived from the language itself, because of the ability of language to influence thinking and behavior. The simplest case is the power of single words. For example, “How fast were the cars traveling when they smashed into one another?” would mislead eyewitnesses of the car accident to overestimate the car speed and the seriousness of the accident, compared to “How fast were the cars traveling when they hit one another?” The power of loaded words such as smash is due to their connotative meanings that bias the reconstructive memory of the observed event.

Single words without loaded connotations can also influence behavior through other psychological processes. According to the linguistic category model, action verbs induce readers to assign greater responsibility or causality of the action to the sentence subject than to the sentence object. For example, a newspaper headline “Unions always quarrel with employers” would induce its readers to hold unions (sentence subject) rather than employers (sentence object) responsible for quarreling, whereas the alternative headline “Employers always quarrel with unions” would produce the opposite effect. The reason for sentence subject bias is due to action verbs' association with the agent-patient cognitive schema, which interprets causal events as flowing from the agent (represented as sentence subject) to the patient (represented as sentence object). Another category of verbs, called state verbs (such as trust), leads to sentence object bias by activating the experiencer-stimulus schema, which interprets state verbs as flowing from the stimulus (represented as sentence object) to the experiencer (represented as sentence subject). Thus readers of the state verb trust in the headline “Unions trust employers” would infer that the trust is due to trustworthy employers more than to trusting unions.

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