relationship between language and power essay

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Language and power.

Sik Hung Ng Sik Hung Ng Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China
and Fei Deng Fei Deng School of Foreign Studies, South China Agricultural University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.436
Published online: 22 August 2017

Five dynamic language–power relationships in communication have emerged from critical language studies, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and the social psychology of language and communication. Two of them stem from preexisting powers behind language that it reveals and reflects, thereby transferring the extralinguistic powers to the communication context. Such powers exist at both the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, the power behind language is a speaker’s possession of a weapon, money, high social status, or other attractive personal qualities—by revealing them in convincing language, the speaker influences the hearer. At the macro level, the power behind language is the collective power (ethnolinguistic vitality) of the communities that speak the language. The dominance of English as a global language and international lingua franca, for example, has less to do with its linguistic quality and more to do with the ethnolinguistic vitality of English-speakers worldwide that it reflects. The other three language–power relationships refer to the powers of language that are based on a language’s communicative versatility and its broad range of cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions in meaning-making, social interaction, and language policies. Such language powers include, first, the power of language to maintain existing dominance in legal, sexist, racist, and ageist discourses that favor particular groups of language users over others. Another language power is its immense impact on national unity and discord. The third language power is its ability to create influence through single words (e.g., metaphors), oratories, conversations and narratives in political campaigns, emergence of leaders, terrorist narratives, and so forth.

power behind language
power of language
intergroup communication
World Englishes
oratorical power
conversational power
leader emergence
al-Qaeda narrative
social identity approach

Introduction

Language is for communication and power.

Language is a natural human system of conventionalized symbols that have understood meanings. Through it humans express and communicate their private thoughts and feelings as well as enact various social functions. The social functions include co-constructing social reality between and among individuals, performing and coordinating social actions such as conversing, arguing, cheating, and telling people what they should or should not do. Language is also a public marker of ethnolinguistic, national, or religious identity, so strong that people are willing to go to war for its defense, just as they would defend other markers of social identity, such as their national flag. These cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions make language a fundamental medium of human communication. Language is also a versatile communication medium, often and widely used in tandem with music, pictures, and actions to amplify its power. Silence, too, adds to the force of speech when it is used strategically to speak louder than words. The wide range of language functions and its versatility combine to make language powerful. Even so, this is only one part of what is in fact a dynamic relationship between language and power. The other part is that there is preexisting power behind language which it reveals and reflects, thereby transferring extralinguistic power to the communication context. It is thus important to delineate the language–power relationships and their implications for human communication.

This chapter provides a systematic account of the dynamic interrelationships between language and power, not comprehensively for lack of space, but sufficiently focused so as to align with the intergroup communication theme of the present volume. The term “intergroup communication” will be used herein to refer to an intergroup perspective on communication, which stresses intergroup processes underlying communication and is not restricted to any particular form of intergroup communication such as interethnic or intergender communication, important though they are. It echoes the pioneering attempts to develop an intergroup perspective on the social psychology of language and communication behavior made by pioneers drawn from communication, social psychology, and cognate fields (see Harwood et al., 2005 ). This intergroup perspective has fostered the development of intergroup communication as a discipline distinct from and complementing the discipline of interpersonal communication. One of its insights is that apparently interpersonal communication is in fact dynamically intergroup (Dragojevic & Giles, 2014 ). For this and other reasons, an intergroup perspective on language and communication behavior has proved surprisingly useful in revealing intergroup processes in health communication (Jones & Watson, 2012 ), media communication (Harwood & Roy, 2005 ), and communication in a variety of organizational contexts (Giles, 2012 ).

The major theoretical foundation that has underpinned the intergroup perspective is social identity theory (Tajfel, 1982 ), which continues to service the field as a metatheory (Abrams & Hogg, 2004 ) alongside relatively more specialized theories such as ethnolinguistic identity theory (Harwood et al., 1994 ), communication accommodation theory (Palomares et al., 2016 ), and self-categorization theory applied to intergroup communication (Reid et al., 2005 ). Against this backdrop, this chapter will be less concerned with any particular social category of intergroup communication or variant of social identity theory, and more with developing a conceptual framework of looking at the language–power relationships and their implications for understanding intergroup communication. Readers interested in an intra- or interpersonal perspective may refer to the volume edited by Holtgraves ( 2014a ).

Conceptual Approaches to Power

Bertrand Russell, logician cum philosopher and social activist, published a relatively little-known book on power when World War II was looming large in Europe (Russell, 2004 ). In it he asserted the fundamental importance of the concept of power in the social sciences and likened its importance to the concept of energy in the physical sciences. But unlike physical energy, which can be defined in a formula (e.g., E=MC 2 ), social power has defied any such definition. This state of affairs is not unexpected because the very nature of (social) power is elusive. Foucault ( 1979 , p. 92) has put it this way: “Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” This view is not beyond criticism but it does highlight the elusiveness of power. Power is also a value-laden concept meaning different things to different people. To functional theorists and power-wielders, power is “power to,” a responsibility to unite people and do good for all. To conflict theorists and those who are dominated, power is “power over,” which corrupts and is a source of social conflict rather than integration (Lenski, 1966 ; Sassenberg et al., 2014 ). These entrenched views surface in management–labor negotiations and political debates between government and opposition. Management and government would try to frame the negotiation in terms of “power to,” whereas labor and opposition would try to frame the same in “power over” in a clash of power discourses. The two discourses also interchange when the same speakers reverse their power relations: While in opposition, politicians adhere to “power over” rhetorics, once in government, they talk “power to.” And vice versa.

The elusive and value-laden nature of power has led to a plurality of theoretical and conceptual approaches. Five approaches that are particularly pertinent to the language–power relationships will be discussed, and briefly so because of space limitation. One approach views power in terms of structural dominance in society by groups who own and/or control the economy, the government, and other social institutions. Another approach views power as the production of intended effects by overcoming resistance that arises from objective conflict of interests or from psychological reactance to being coerced, manipulated, or unfairly treated. A complementary approach, represented by Kurt Lewin’s field theory, takes the view that power is not the actual production of effects but the potential for doing this. It looks behind power to find out the sources or bases of this potential, which may stem from the power-wielders’ access to the means of punishment, reward, and information, as well as from their perceived expertise and legitimacy (Raven, 2008 ). A fourth approach views power in terms of the balance of control/dependence in the ongoing social exchange between two actors that takes place either in the absence or presence of third parties. It provides a structural account of power-balancing mechanisms in social networking (Emerson, 1962 ), and forms the basis for combining with symbolic interaction theory, which brings in subjective factors such as shared social cognition and affects for the analysis of power in interpersonal and intergroup negotiation (Stolte, 1987 ). The fifth, social identity approach digs behind the social exchange account, which has started from control/dependence as a given but has left it unexplained, to propose a three-process model of power emergence (Turner, 2005 ). According to this model, it is psychological group formation and associated group-based social identity that produce influence; influence then cumulates to form the basis of power, which in turn leads to the control of resources.

Common to the five approaches above is the recognition that power is dynamic in its usage and can transform from one form of power to another. Lukes ( 2005 ) has attempted to articulate three different forms or faces of power called “dimensions.” The first, behavioral dimension of power refers to decision-making power that is manifest in the open contest for dominance in situations of objective conflict of interests. Non-decision-making power, the second dimension, is power behind the scene. It involves the mobilization of organizational bias (e.g., agenda fixing) to keep conflict of interests from surfacing to become public issues and to deprive oppositions of a communication platform to raise their voices, thereby limiting the scope of decision-making to only “safe” issues that would not challenge the interests of the power-wielder. The third dimension is ideological and works by socializing people’s needs and values so that they want the wants and do the things wanted by the power-wielders, willingly as their own. Conflict of interests, opposition, and resistance would be absent from this form of power, not because they have been maneuvered out of the contest as in the case of non-decision-making power, but because the people who are subject to power are no longer aware of any conflict of interest in the power relationship, which may otherwise ferment opposition and resistance. Power in this form can be exercised without the application of coercion or reward, and without arousing perceived manipulation or conflict of interests.

Language–Power Relationships

As indicated in the chapter title, discussion will focus on the language–power relationships, and not on language alone or power alone, in intergroup communication. It draws from all the five approaches to power and can be grouped for discussion under the power behind language and the power of language. In the former, language is viewed as having no power of its own and yet can produce influence and control by revealing the power behind the speaker. Language also reflects the collective/historical power of the language community that uses it. In the case of modern English, its preeminent status as a global language and international lingua franca has shaped the communication between native and nonnative English speakers because of the power of the English-speaking world that it reflects, rather than because of its linguistic superiority. In both cases, language provides a widely used conventional means to transfer extralinguistic power to the communication context. Research on the power of language takes the view that language has power of its own. This power allows a language to maintain the power behind it, unite or divide a nation, and create influence.

In Figure 1 we have grouped the five language–power relationships into five boxes. Note that the boundary between any two boxes is not meant to be rigid but permeable. For example, by revealing the power behind a message (box 1), a message can create influence (box 5). As another example, language does not passively reflect the power of the language community that uses it (box 2), but also, through its spread to other language communities, generates power to maintain its preeminence among languages (box 3). This expansive process of language power can be seen in the rise of English to global language status. A similar expansive process also applies to a particular language style that first reflects the power of the language subcommunity who uses the style, and then, through its common acceptance and usage by other subcommunities in the country, maintains the power of the subcommunity concerned. A prime example of this type of expansive process is linguistic sexism, which reflects preexisting male dominance in society and then, through its common usage by both sexes, contributes to the maintenance of male dominance. Other examples are linguistic racism and the language style of the legal profession, each of which, like linguistic sexism and the preeminence of the English language worldwide, has considerable impact on individuals and society at large.

Space precludes a full discussion of all five language–power relationships. Instead, some of them will warrant only a brief mention, whereas others will be presented in greater detail. The complexity of the language–power relations and their cross-disciplinary ramifications will be evident in the multiple sets of interrelated literatures that we cite from. These include the social psychology of language and communication, critical language studies (Fairclough, 1989 ), sociolinguistics (Kachru, 1992 ), and conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974 ).

Figure 1. Power behind language and power of language.

Power Behind Language

Language reveals power.

When negotiating with police, a gang may issue the threatening message, “Meet our demands, or we will shoot the hostages!” The threatening message may succeed in coercing the police to submit; its power, however, is more apparent than real because it is based on the guns gangsters posses. The message merely reveals the power of a weapon in their possession. Apart from revealing power, the gangsters may also cheat. As long as the message comes across as credible and convincing enough to arouse overwhelming fear, it would allow them to get away with their demands without actually possessing any weapon. In this case, language is used to produce an intended effect despite resistance by deceptively revealing a nonexisting power base and planting it in the mind of the message recipient. The literature on linguistic deception illustrates the widespread deceptive use of language-reveals-power to produce intended effects despite resistance (Robinson, 1996 ).

Language Reflects Power

Ethnolinguistic vitality.

The language that a person uses reflects the language community’s power. A useful way to think about a language community’s linguistic power is through the ethnolinguistic vitality model (Bourhis et al., 1981 ; Harwood et al., 1994 ). Language communities in a country vary in absolute size overall and, just as important, a relative numeric concentration in particular regions. Francophone Canadians, though fewer than Anglophone Canadians overall, are concentrated in Quebec to give them the power of numbers there. Similarly, ethnic minorities in mainland China have considerable power of numbers in those autonomous regions where they are concentrated, such as Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Collectively, these factors form the demographic base of the language community’s ethnolinguistic vitality, an index of the community’s relative linguistic dominance. Another base of ethnolinguistic vitality is institutional representations of the language community in government, legislatures, education, religion, the media, and so forth, which afford its members institutional leadership, influence, and control. Such institutional representation is often reinforced by a language policy that installs the language as the nation’s sole official language. The third base of ethnolinguistic vitality comprises sociohistorical and cultural status of the language community inside the nation and internationally. In short, the dominant language of a nation is one that comes from and reflects the high ethnolinguistic vitality of its language community.

An important finding of ethnolinguistic vitality research is that it is perceived vitality, and not so much its objective demographic-institutional-cultural strengths, that influences language behavior in interpersonal and intergroup contexts. Interestingly, the visibility and salience of languages shown on public and commercial signs, referred to as the “linguistic landscape,” serve important informational and symbolic functions as a marker of their relative vitality, which in turn affects the use of in-group language in institutional settings (Cenoz & Gorter, 2006 ; Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ).

World Englishes and Lingua Franca English

Another field of research on the power behind and reflected in language is “World Englishes.” At the height of the British Empire English spread on the back of the Industrial Revolution and through large-scale migrations of Britons to the “New World,” which has since become the core of an “inner circle” of traditional native English-speaking nations now led by the United States (Kachru, 1992 ). The emergent wealth and power of these nations has maintained English despite the decline of the British Empire after World War II. In the post-War era, English has become internationalized with the support of an “outer circle” nations and, later, through its spread to “expanding circle” nations. Outer circle nations are made up mostly of former British colonies such as India, Pakistan, and Nigeria. In compliance with colonial language policies that institutionalized English as the new colonial national language, a sizeable proportion of the colonial populations has learned and continued using English over generations, thereby vastly increasing the number of English speakers over and above those in the inner circle nations. The expanding circle encompasses nations where English has played no historical government roles, but which are keen to appropriate English as the preeminent foreign language for local purposes such as national development, internationalization of higher education, and participation in globalization (e.g., China, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Egypt, Israel, and continental Europe).

English is becoming a global language with official or special status in at least 75 countries (British Council, n.d. ). It is also the language choice in international organizations and companies, as well as academia, and is commonly used in trade, international mass media, and entertainment, and over the Internet as the main source of information. English native speakers can now follow the worldwide English language track to find jobs overseas without having to learn the local language and may instead enjoy a competitive language advantage where the job requires English proficiency. This situation is a far cry from the colonial era when similar advantages had to come under political patronage. Alongside English native speakers who work overseas benefitting from the preeminence of English over other languages, a new phenomenon of outsourcing international call centers away from the United Kingdom and the United States has emerged (Friginal, 2007 ). Callers can find the information or help they need from people stationed in remote places such as India or the Philippines where English has penetrated.

As English spreads worldwide, it has also become the major international lingua franca, serving some 800 million multilinguals in Asia alone, and numerous others elsewhere (Bolton, 2008 ). The practical importance of this phenomenon and its impact on English vocabulary, grammar, and accent have led to the emergence of a new field of research called “English as a lingua franca” (Brosch, 2015 ). The twin developments of World Englishes and lingua franca English raise interesting and important research questions. A vast area of research lies in waiting.

Several lines of research suggest themselves from an intergroup communication perspective. How communicatively effective are English native speakers who are international civil servants in organizations such as the UN and WTO, where they habitually speak as if they were addressing their fellow natives without accommodating to the international audience? Another line of research is lingua franca English communication between two English nonnative speakers. Their common use of English signals a joint willingness of linguistic accommodation, motivated more by communication efficiency of getting messages across and less by concerns of their respective ethnolinguistic identities. An intergroup communication perspective, however, would sensitize researchers to social identity processes and nonaccommodation behaviors underneath lingua franca communication. For example, two nationals from two different countries, X and Y, communicating with each other in English are accommodating on the language level; at the same time they may, according to communication accommodation theory, use their respective X English and Y English for asserting their ethnolinguistic distinctiveness whilst maintaining a surface appearance of accommodation. There are other possibilities. According to a survey of attitudes toward English accents, attachment to “standard” native speaker models remains strong among nonnative English speakers in many countries (Jenkins, 2009 ). This suggests that our hypothetical X and Y may, in addition to asserting their respective Englishes, try to outperform one another in speaking with overcorrect standard English accents, not so much because they want to assert their respective ethnolinguistic identities, but because they want to project a common in-group identity for positive social comparison—“We are all English-speakers but I am a better one than you!”

Many countries in the expanding circle nations are keen to appropriate English for local purposes, encouraging their students and especially their educational elites to learn English as a foreign language. A prime example is the Learn-English Movement in China. It has affected generations of students and teachers over the past 30 years and consumed a vast amount of resources. The results are mixed. Even more disturbing, discontents and backlashes have emerged from anti-English Chinese motivated to protect the vitality and cultural values of the Chinese language (Sun et al., 2016 ). The power behind and reflected in modern English has widespread and far-reaching consequences in need of more systematic research.

Power of Language

Language maintains existing dominance.

Language maintains and reproduces existing dominance in three different ways represented respectively by the ascent of English, linguistic sexism, and legal language style. For reasons already noted, English has become a global language, an international lingua franca, and an indispensable medium for nonnative English speaking countries to participate in the globalized world. Phillipson ( 2009 ) referred to this phenomenon as “linguistic imperialism.” It is ironic that as the spread of English has increased the extent of multilingualism of non-English-speaking nations, English native speakers in the inner circle of nations have largely remained English-only. This puts pressure on the rest of the world to accommodate them in English, the widespread use of which maintains its preeminence among languages.

A language evolves and changes to adapt to socially accepted word meanings, grammatical rules, accents, and other manners of speaking. What is acceptable or unacceptable reflects common usage and hence the numerical influence of users, but also the elites’ particular language preferences and communication styles. Research on linguistic sexism has shown, for example, a man-made language such as English (there are many others) is imbued with sexist words and grammatical rules that reflect historical male dominance in society. Its uncritical usage routinely by both sexes in daily life has in turn naturalized male dominance and associated sexist inequalities (Spender, 1998 ). Similar other examples are racist (Reisigl & Wodak, 2005 ) and ageist (Ryan et al., 1995 ) language styles.

Professional languages are made by and for particular professions such as the legal profession (Danet, 1980 ; Mertz et al., 2016 ; O’Barr, 1982 ). The legal language is used not only among members of the profession, but also with the general public, who may know each and every word in a legal document but are still unable to decipher its meaning. Through its language, the legal profession maintains its professional dominance with the complicity of the general public, who submits to the use of the language and accedes to the profession’s authority in interpreting its meanings in matters relating to their legal rights and obligations. Communication between lawyers and their “clients” is not only problematic, but the public’s continual dependence on the legal language contributes to the maintenance of the dominance of the profession.

Language Unites and Divides a Nation

A nation of many peoples who, despite their diverse cultural and ethnic background, all speak in the same tongue and write in the same script would reap the benefit of the unifying power of a common language. The power of the language to unite peoples would be stronger if it has become part of their common national identity and contributed to its vitality and psychological distinctiveness. Such power has often been seized upon by national leaders and intellectuals to unify their countries and serve other nationalistic purposes (Patten, 2006 ). In China, for example, Emperor Qin Shi Huang standardized the Chinese script ( hanzi ) as an important part of the reforms to unify the country after he had defeated the other states and brought the Warring States Period ( 475–221 bc ) to an end. A similar reform of language standardization was set in motion soon after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty ( ad 1644–1911 ), by simplifying some of the hanzi and promoting Putonghua as the national standard oral language. In the postcolonial part of the world, language is often used to service nationalism by restoring the official status of their indigenous language as the national language whilst retaining the colonial language or, in more radical cases of decolonization, relegating the latter to nonofficial status. Yet language is a two-edged sword: It can also divide a nation. The tension can be seen in competing claims to official-language status made by minority language communities, protest over maintenance of minority languages, language rights at schools and in courts of law, bilingual education, and outright language wars (Calvet, 1998 ; DeVotta, 2004 ).

Language Creates Influence

In this section we discuss the power of language to create influence through single words and more complex linguistic structures ranging from oratories and conversations to narratives/stories.

Power of Single Words

Learning a language empowers humans to master an elaborate system of conventions and the associations between words and their sounds on the one hand, and on the other hand, categories of objects and relations to which they refer. After mastering the referential meanings of words, a person can mentally access the objects and relations simply by hearing or reading the words. Apart from their referential meanings, words also have connotative meanings with their own social-cognitive consequences. Together, these social-cognitive functions underpin the power of single words that has been extensively studied in metaphors, which is a huge research area that crosses disciplinary boundaries and probes into the inner workings of the brain (Benedek et al., 2014 ; Landau et al., 2014 ; Marshal et al., 2007 ). The power of single words extends beyond metaphors. It can be seen in misleading words in leading questions (Loftus, 1975 ), concessive connectives that reverse expectations from real-world knowledge (Xiang & Kuperberg, 2014 ), verbs that attribute implicit causality to either verb subject or object (Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013 ), “uncertainty terms” that hedge potentially face-threatening messages (Holtgraves, 2014b ), and abstract words that signal power (Wakslak et al., 2014 ).

The literature on the power of single words has rarely been applied to intergroup communication, with the exception of research arising from the linguistic category model (e.g., Semin & Fiedler, 1991 ). The model distinguishes among descriptive action verbs (e.g., “hits”), interpretative action verbs (e.g., “hurts”) and state verbs (e.g., “hates”), which increase in abstraction in that order. Sentences made up of abstract verbs convey more information about the protagonist, imply greater temporal and cross-situational stability, and are more difficult to disconfirm. The use of abstract language to represent a particular behavior will attribute the behavior to the protagonist rather than the situation and the resulting image of the protagonist will persist despite disconfirming information, whereas the use of concrete language will attribute the same behavior more to the situation and the resulting image of the protagonist will be easier to change. According to the linguistic intergroup bias model (Maass, 1999 ), abstract language will be used to represent positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors, whereas concrete language will be used to represent negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. The combined effects of the differential use of abstract and concrete language would, first, lead to biased attribution (explanation) of behavior privileging the in-group over the out-group, and second, perpetuate the prejudiced intergroup stereotypes. More recent research has shown that linguistic intergroup bias varies with the power differential between groups—it is stronger in high and low power groups than in equal power groups (Rubini et al., 2007 ).

Oratorical Power

A charismatic speaker may, by the sheer force of oratory, buoy up people’s hopes, convert their hearts from hatred to forgiveness, or embolden them to take up arms for a cause. One may recall moving speeches (in English) such as Susan B. Anthony’s “On Women’s Right to Vote,” Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India,” or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” The speech may be delivered face-to-face to an audience, or broadcast over the media. The discussion below focuses on face-to-face oratories in political meetings.

Oratorical power may be measured in terms of money donated or pledged to the speaker’s cause, or, in a religious sermon, the number of converts made. Not much research has been reported on these topics. Another measurement approach is to count the frequency of online audience responses that a speech has generated, usually but not exclusively in the form of applause. Audience applause can be measured fairly objectively in terms of frequency, length, or loudness, and collected nonobtrusively from a public recording of the meeting. Audience applause affords researchers the opportunity to explore communicative and social psychological processes that underpin some aspects of the power of rhetorical formats. Note, however, that not all incidences of audience applause are valid measures of the power of rhetoric. A valid incidence should be one that is invited by the speaker and synchronized with the flow of the speech, occurring at the appropriate time and place as indicated by the rhetorical format. Thus, an uninvited incidence of applause would not count, nor is one that is invited but has occurred “out of place” (too soon or too late). Furthermore, not all valid incidences are theoretically informative to the same degree. An isolated applause from just a handful of the audience, though valid and in the right place, has relatively little theoretical import for understanding the power of rhetoric compared to one that is made by many acting in unison as a group. When the latter occurs, it would be a clear indication of the power of rhetorically formulated speech. Such positive audience response constitutes the most direct and immediate means by which an audience can display its collective support for the speaker, something which they would not otherwise show to a speech of less power. To influence and orchestrate hundreds and thousands of people in the audience to precisely coordinate their response to applaud (and cheer) together as a group at the right time and place is no mean feat. Such a feat also influences the wider society through broadcast on television and other news and social media. The combined effect could be enormous there and then, and its downstream influence far-reaching, crossing country boarders and inspiring generations to come.

To accomplish the feat, an orator has to excite the audience to applaud, build up the excitement to a crescendo, and simultaneously cue the audience to synchronize their outburst of stored-up applause with the ongoing speech. Rhetorical formats that aid the orator to accomplish the dual functions include contrast, list, puzzle solution, headline-punchline, position-taking, and pursuit (Heritage & Greatbatch, 1986 ). To illustrate, we cite the contrast and list formats.

A contrast, or antithesis, is made up of binary schemata such as “too much” and “too little.” Heritage and Greatbatch ( 1986 , p. 123) reported the following example:

Governments will argue that resources are not available to help disabled people. The fact is that too much is spent on the munitions of war, and too little is spent on the munitions of peace [italics added]. As the audience is familiar with the binary schema of “too much” and “too little” they can habitually match the second half of the contrast against the first half. This decoding process reinforces message comprehension and helps them to correctly anticipate and applaud at the completion point of the contrast. In the example quoted above, the speaker micropaused for 0.2 seconds after the second word “spent,” at which point the audience began to applaud in anticipation of the completion point of the contrast, and applauded more excitedly upon hearing “. . . on the munitions of peace.” The applause continued and lasted for 9.2 long seconds.

A list is usually made up of a series of three parallel words, phrases or clauses. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” is a fine example, as is Obama’s “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day , in this election , at this defining moment , change has come to America!” (italics added) The three parts in the list echo one another, step up the argument and its corresponding excitement in the audience as they move from one part to the next. The third part projects a completion point to cue the audience to get themselves ready to display their support via applause, cheers, and so forth. In a real conversation this juncture is called a “transition-relevance place,” at which point a conversational partner (hearer) may take up a turn to speak. A skilful orator will micropause at that juncture to create a conversational space for the audience to take up their turn in applauding and cheering as a group.

As illustrated by the two examples above, speaker and audience collaborate to transform an otherwise monological speech into a quasiconversation, turning a passive audience into an active supportive “conversational” partner who, by their synchronized responses, reduces the psychological separation from the speaker and emboldens the latter’s self-confidence. Through such enjoyable and emotional participation collectively, an audience made up of formerly unconnected individuals with no strong common group identity may henceforth begin to feel “we are all one.” According to social identity theory and related theories (van Zomeren et al., 2008 ), the emergent group identity, politicized in the process, will in turn provide a social psychological base for collective social action. This process of identity making in the audience is further strengthened by the speaker’s frequent use of “we” as a first person, plural personal pronoun.

Conversational Power

A conversation is a speech exchange system in which the length and order of speaking turns have not been preassigned but require coordination on an utterance-by-utterance basis between two or more individuals. It differs from other speech exchange systems in which speaking turns have been preassigned and/or monitored by a third party, for example, job interviews and debate contests. Turn-taking, because of its centrality to conversations and the important theoretical issues that it raises for social coordination and implicit conversational conventions, has been the subject of extensive research and theorizing (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990 ; Grice, 1975 ; Sacks et al., 1974 ). Success at turn-taking is a key part of the conversational process leading to influence. A person who cannot do this is in no position to influence others in and through conversations, which are probably the most common and ubiquitous form of human social interaction. Below we discuss studies of conversational power based on conversational turns and applied to leader emergence in group and intergroup settings. These studies, as they unfold, link conversation analysis with social identity theory and expectation states theory (Berger et al., 1974 ).

A conversational turn in hand allows the speaker to influence others in two important ways. First, through current-speaker-selects-next the speaker can influence who will speak next and, indirectly, increases the probability that he or she will regain the turn after the next. A common method for selecting the next speaker is through tag questions. The current speaker (A) may direct a tag question such as “Ya know?” or “Don’t you agree?” to a particular hearer (B), which carries the illocutionary force of selecting the addressee to be the next speaker and, simultaneously, restraining others from self-selecting. The A 1 B 1 sequence of exchange has been found to have a high probability of extending into A 1 B 1 A 2 in the next round of exchange, followed by its continuation in the form of A 1 B 1 A 2 B 2 . For example, in a six-member group, the A 1 B 1 →A 1 B 1 A 2 sequence of exchange has more than 50% chance of extending to the A 1 B 1 A 2 B 2 sequence, which is well above chance level, considering that there are four other hearers who could intrude at either the A 2 or B 2 slot of turn (Stasser & Taylor, 1991 ). Thus speakership not only offers the current speaker the power to select the next speaker twice, but also to indirectly regain a turn.

Second, a turn in hand provides the speaker with an opportunity to exercise topic control. He or she can exercise non-decision-making power by changing an unfavorable or embarrassing topic to a safer one, thereby silencing or preventing it from reaching the “floor.” Conversely, he or she can exercise decision-making power by continuing or raising a topic that is favorable to self. Or the speaker can move on to talk about an innocuous topic to ease tension in the group.

Bales ( 1950 ) has studied leader emergence in groups made up of unacquainted individuals in situations where they have to bid or compete for speaking turns. Results show that individuals who talk the most have a much better chance of becoming leaders. Depending on the social orientations of their talk, they would be recognized as a task or relational leader. Subsequent research on leader emergence has shown that an even better behavioral predictor than volume of talk is the number of speaking turns. An obvious reason for this is that the volume of talk depends on the number of turns—it usually accumulates across turns, rather than being the result of a single extraordinary long turn of talk. Another reason is that more turns afford the speaker more opportunities to realize the powers of turns that have been explicated above. Group members who become leaders are the ones who can penetrate the complex, on-line conversational system to obtain a disproportionately large number of speaking turns by perfect timing at “transition-relevance places” to self-select as the next speaker or, paradoxical as it may seem, constructive interruptions (Ng et al., 1995 ).

More recent research has extended the experimental study of group leadership to intergroup contexts, where members belonging to two groups who hold opposing stances on a social or political issue interact within and also between groups. The results showed, first, that speaking turns remain important in leader emergence, but the intergroup context now generates social identity and self-categorization processes that selectively privilege particular forms of speech. What potential leaders say, and not only how many speaking turns they have gained, becomes crucial in conveying to group members that they are prototypical members of their group. Prototypical communication is enacted by adopting an accent, choosing code words, and speaking in a tone that characterize the in-group; above all, it is enacted through the content of utterances to represent or exemplify the in-group position. Such prototypical utterances that are directed successfully at the out-group correlate strongly with leader emergence (Reid & Ng, 2000 ). These out-group-directed prototypical utterances project an in-group identity that is psychologically distinctive from the out-group for in-group members to feel proud of and to rally together when debating with the out-group.

Building on these experimental results Reid and Ng ( 2003 ) developed a social identity theory of leadership to account for the emergence and maintenance of intergroup leadership, grounding it in case studies of the intergroup communication strategies that brought Ariel Sharon and John Howard to power in Israel and Australia, respectively. In a later development, the social identity account was fused with expectation states theory to explain how group processes collectively shape the behavior of in-group members to augment the prototypical communication behavior of the emergent leader (Reid & Ng, 2006 ). Specifically, when conversational influence gained through prototypical utterances culminates to form an incipient power hierarchy, group members develop expectations of who is and will be leading the group. Acting on these tacit expectations they collectively coordinate the behavior of each other to conform with the expectations by granting incipient leaders more speaking turns and supporting them with positive audience responses. In this way, group members collectively amplify the influence of incipient leaders and jointly propel them to leadership roles (see also Correll & Ridgeway, 2006 ). In short, the emergence of intergroup leaders is a joint process of what they do individually and what group members do collectively, enabled by speaking turns and mediated by social identity and expectation states processes. In a similar vein, Hogg ( 2014 ) has developed a social identity account of leadership in intergroup settings.

Narrative Power

Narratives and stories are closely related and are sometimes used interchangeably. However, it is useful to distinguish a narrative from a story and from other related terms such as discourse and frames. A story is a sequence of related events in the past recounted for rhetorical or ideological purposes, whereas a narrative is a coherent system of interrelated and sequentially organized stories formed by incorporating new stories and relating them to others so as to provide an ongoing basis for interpreting events, envisioning an ideal future, and motivating and justifying collective actions (Halverson et al., 2011 ). The temporal dimension and sense of movement in a narrative also distinguish it from discourse and frames. According to Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle ( 2013 ), discourses are the raw material of communication that actors plot into a narrative, and frames are the acts of selecting and highlighting some events or issues to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and solution. Both discourse and frame lack the temporal and causal transformation of a narrative.

Pitching narratives at the suprastory level and stressing their temporal and transformational movements allows researchers to take a structurally more systemic and temporally more expansive view than traditional research on propaganda wars between nations, religions, or political systems (Halverson et al., 2011 ; Miskimmon et al., 2013 ). Schmid ( 2014 ) has provided an analysis of al-Qaeda’s “compelling narrative that authorizes its strategy, justifies its violent tactics, propagates its ideology and wins new recruits.” According to this analysis, the chief message of the narrative is “the West is at war with Islam,” a strategic communication that is fundamentally intergroup in both structure and content. The intergroup structure of al-Qaeda narrative includes the rhetorical constructions that there are a group grievance inflicted on Muslims by a Zionist–Christian alliance, a vision of the good society (under the Caliphate and sharia), and a path from grievance to the realization of the vision led by al-Qaeda in a violent jihad to eradicate Western influence in the Muslim world. The al-Qaeda narrative draws support not only from traditional Arab and Muslim cultural narratives interpreted to justify its unorthodox means (such as attacks against women and children), but also from pre-existing anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism propagated by some Arab governments, Soviet Cold War propaganda, anti-Western sermons by Muslim clerics, and the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. It is deeply embedded in culture and history, and has reached out to numerous Muslims who have emigrated to the West.

The intergroup content of al-Qaeda narrative was shown in a computer-aided content analysis of 18 representative transcripts of propaganda speeches released between 2006–2011 by al-Qaeda leaders, totaling over 66,000 words (Cohen et al., 2016 ). As part of the study, an “Ideology Extraction using Linguistic Extremization” (IELEX) categorization scheme was developed for mapping the content of the corpus, which revealed 19 IELEX rhetorical categories referring to either the out-group/enemy or the in-group/enemy victims. The out-group/enemy was represented by four categories such as “The enemy is extremely negative (bloodthirsty, vengeful, brainwashed, etc.)”; whereas the in-group/enemy victims were represented by more categories such as “we are entirely innocent/good/virtuous.” The content of polarized intergroup stereotypes, demonizing “them” and glorifying “us,” echoes other similar findings (Smith et al., 2008 ), as well as the general finding of intergroup stereotyping in social psychology (Yzerbyt, 2016 ).

The success of the al-Qaeda narrative has alarmed various international agencies, individual governments, think tanks, and religious groups to spend huge sums of money on developing counternarratives that are, according to Schmid ( 2014 ), largely feeble. The so-called “global war on terror” has failed in its effort to construct effective counternarratives although al-Qaeda’s finance, personnel, and infrastructure have been much weakened. Ironically, it has developed into a narrative of its own, not so much for countering external extremism, but for promoting and justifying internal nationalistic extremist policies and influencing national elections. This reactive coradicalization phenomenon is spreading (Mink, 2015 ; Pratt, 2015 ; Reicher & Haslam, 2016 ).

Discussion and Future Directions

This chapter provides a systematic framework for understanding five language–power relationships, namely, language reveals power, reflects power, maintains existing dominance, unites and divides a nation, and creates influence. The first two relationships are derived from the power behind language and the last three from the power of language. Collectively they provide a relatively comprehensible framework for understanding the relationships between language and power, and not simply for understanding language alone or power alone separated from one another. The language–power relationships are dynamically interrelated, one influencing the other, and each can draw from an array of the cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions of language. The framework is applicable to both interpersonal and intergroup contexts of communication, although for present purposes the latter has been highlighted. Among the substantive issues discussed in this chapter, English as a global language, oratorical and narrative power, and intergroup leadership stand out as particularly important for political and theoretical reasons.

In closing, we note some of the gaps that need to be filled and directions for further research. When discussing the powers of language to maintain and reflect existing dominance, we have omitted the countervailing power of language to resist or subvert existing dominance and, importantly, to create social change for the collective good. Furthermore, in this age of globalization and its discontents, English as a global language will increasingly be resented for its excessive unaccommodating power despite tangible lingua franca English benefits, and challenged by the expanding ethnolinguistic vitality of peoples who speak Arabic, Chinese, or Spanish. Internet communication is no longer predominantly in English, but is rapidly diversifying to become the modern Tower of Babel. And yet we have barely scratched the surface of these issues. Other glaring gaps include the omission of media discourse and recent developments in Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (Loring, 2016 ), as well as the lack of reference to languages other than English that may cast one or more of the language–power relationships in a different light.

One of the main themes of this chapter—that the diverse language–power relationships are dynamically interrelated—clearly points to the need for greater theoretical fertilization across cognate disciplines. Our discussion of the three powers of language (boxes 3–5 in Figure 1 ) clearly points in this direction, most notably in the case of the powers of language to create influence through single words, oratories, conversations, and narratives, but much more needs to be done. The social identity approach will continue to serve as a meta theory of intergroup communication. To the extent that intergroup communication takes place in an existing power relation and that the changes that it seeks are not simply a more positive or psychologically distinctive social identity but greater group power and a more powerful social identity, the social identity approach has to incorporate power in its application to intergroup communication.

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All of our exchanges with other people are mediated by language. Language can transmit information and knowledge, but it can also influence us—even manipulate us—in unexpected ways.

What is “power” and how does it manifest in language? According to social theorist Michel Foucault , power is not only about CEOs or politicians making rules for their subordinates. Instead, there are different forms and nuances of power that are exerted by all people in everyday situations such as conversations with friends, lessons at schools, and reading the newspaper or engaging in social media. Importantly, power in language is both ubiquitous and sometimes hardly perceptible.

What does this mean? Control and dominance through language are not obtained only in a conversation between adults and children or between a teacher and a student. They are actually achieved in every kind of communication, ranging from written and oral texts (e.g., newspaper articles, books, and presidential speeches) to informal Instagram posts, and even comments from passersby (e.g., catcalling). Language expresses the beliefs of a single person or of a group, and can change or reinforce the points of view and opinions of everyone involved in the interaction (writers and readers, speakers and hearers).

Making language powerful can be a matter of the social position in which we find ourselves as participants in a communicative event. Language can become more powerful or less powerful depending on the economic position, the education level, the gender, or the language of the speaker/writer in relation to the listener/reader. There are many stable processes of communication in society that we take for granted but which clearly express and maintain power relationships related to the social factors listed above. One manifestation of power can be found in the grammar and lexicon of languages which use what linguists call “the T-V distinction”, i.e., tu/Lei in Italian, du/Sie in German, or tu/Vous in French. Using them is a matter of subscribing to and reproducing different social norms and rules of behaviour. (Try to imagine using them for a day not in the “right” way and think about what consequences this might incur).

However, power does not only manifest in structural aspects of language. It depends from communication stemming from different cultures, histories, social contexts, and on a sense of belonging to a group and a community. Power relations are not only created in personal exchanges, but also occur at the level of systems and institutions. Especially language that creates information, such as a history course in school, a speech by a politician, or even a thread on Twitter, can have different influential power on us. That is, we may treat the most experienced teacher at our school as the most trustworthy source of information on history, or the politician speaking on the biggest news platform as the most trustworthy source of information on economic matters. This trustworthiness and the power gained from it goes beyond the individuals involved in the interaction to the institutions and ideas that these speakers represent.

Looking behind the scenes in all of these types of powerful communication, how they are constructed, and how we sometimes easily take for granted their dynamics, can give us all the power to question problematic communicative power structures and eventually weaken them.

Elias Telser

Elias interprets dynamics on a socio-political and cultural basis with language as the space where power and ideologies come together. Sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis are the specifics of some of the subjects he investigates, with a firm focus on the nexus between culture and identity. In his free time, Elias particularly enjoys travelling and having talks next to a beer and eventually a rolled cigarette.

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

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The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society

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4 Language and Power

Luisa Martín Rojo is Professor of Linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma (Madrid, Spain), and Member of the International Pragmatic Association Consultation Board (2006–2011; re-elected for the period 2012–2017). Through her research trajectory, she has conducted research in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and communication, mainly focused on immigration and racism. Since 2000, she has focused on studying the management of cultural and linguistic diversity in Madrid schools, applying a sociolinguistic and ethnographic perspective and analyzing how inequality is constructed, naturalized, and legitimized through discourse (Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms, 2010). Currently she is exploring the interplay between urban spaces and linguistic practices in new global protest movements (Occupy: The spatial Dynamics of Discourse in Global Protest Movements, 2014). She is also a member of the editorial boards of the journals Discourse & Society, Journal of Language and Politics, Spanish in Context, Critical Discourse Studies, and Journal of Multicultural Discourses, and she chairs the Iberian Association of Discourse in Society (EDiSO).

Published: 05 December 2016
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This chapter examines the extent to which shifts in the understanding of power within a poststructuralist frame are compelling researchers to re-examine the relationships between language and power. In the light of current notions of power, such as those developed by Foucault, this chapter shows how new research questions and objects of study are emerging for sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and applied linguistics, among other research fields. The chapter focuses on five postulates about power and on the conditions research on power in relation to language should fulfill in order to take them into account. Starting with a critique of earlier approaches which tend to localize power in the state (e.g. linguistic policies), the chapter examines how subsequent contributions made by critical approaches in sociolinguistics and in discourse analyses have prepared the ground for a more fluid and dynamic understanding of the microphysics of power in relation to language.

Introduction

This chapter will examine in depth what the implications of the changes in our understanding of power are in relation to language. In order to give an idea of the difficulty but also the interest of this task, I first try to show some of the implications of the current postulates of power. First, if, as Foucault’s work shows (1978: 92–95), power is not concentrated in a single place, such as the state apparatus, but is, instead, ubiquitous and at once visible and invisible, present and hidden, research cannot focus merely on state policies, institutional regimes, and the discourses of the elites, but should rather focus on a multiplicity of nodal points and/or relations in which power is exercised.

Second, if power is not a thing or substance but rather a network of relations ( Foucault, 1978 : 92–95), and if no one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power and, as a result, power is not always exercised in a single direction, with some people on one side and some on the other, it will be difficult to ascertain who holds power in a precise sense. As we find out when we approach power, it is easier to identify who lacks power ( Foucault, 1977b : 213), or even who becomes empowered and depowered within a particular context or conflict. In fact, Foucault’s notion of a microphysics of power means that power is not only experienced but is also exercised in a myriad of social encounters in which participants have to define who has access to the management of power resources and technologies.

Third, if power is repressive and/or destructive, but productive as well, since it produces knowledge (about the individual, illness, penalties, languages, etc.) and action (such as resistance), as researchers we must study the multiple sources of knowledge and their power effects, including the knowledge produced about language by our own academic disciplines. Thus, it should be of great interest to examine the knowledge evoked in speakers’ categorization and assessment, and in the regulation of their language practices.

Fourth, in addition to looking into how power relations are negotiated and settled, we need to understand how “power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” ( Foucault, 1980 : 39). In this respect, not many studies have tacked the technologies of power and how they are applied in relation to language and speakers, when many authors consider that we are experiencing a transformation related to the way power is exercised ( Fraser, 2003 ; Rampton, 2014 ). If forms of power are mutable, we must explore those changes.

Finally, whenever there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance, “and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” ( Foucault, 1978 : 95). If power must be understood as an asymmetrical set of relations in which there exists a multiplicity of nodal points or relations, this multiplicity necessarily also entails the possibility of resistance at each node. Thus, in this chapter I take the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point to understand power relations 1 in which language is somehow involved, in order to examine how power is exercised in the linguistic sphere, by whom, and by what means ( Foucault, 1982 : 211).

From this point onward, I will focus on these five postulates about power and on the conditions that research on power in relation to language should fulfill if it is to take into account those assumptions. In the second section of this chapter I will apply the first and the second postulates to a critique of earlier approaches that, in their study of language and discourse, mainly focused on power as localized in government and the state and in elite sectors of society. In fact, over the past decades, a critical perspective in sociolinguistics has also challenged this localized view of power, and the study of the network of power relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent, from bottom to top and laterally at different levels of the social body. In this section, I also refer to critical discourse analysis (CDA), which made a significant contribution, showing how the production of knowledge takes place through discourse and how these social representations of social events and groups, social class, ethnicity, and gender are connected to a particular status quo. In spite of this contribution, in accordance with the third postulate, CDA has mainly focused on the production and circulation of elite discourses through media or in political discourses. As a result, CDA leaves to some extent aside how these discourses are reproduced, assumed, challenged, and defeated by individuals and groups, and correlatively how through these discourses power reaches into the very grain of individuals, and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes. In the third section of the chapter, I present what I consider a second step in a deep understanding of power in relation to language within this frame; in particular, I will study the management of power relations in everyday encounters and their imbrication with other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, gender, ethnic relation, among others). Bearing in mind the first and the second postulates, I will focus on the unequal distribution of symbolic resources, which empowers and disempowers social agents, reducing their possibilities of social mobility and compromising their position in the production of knowledge, and the possibilities of resistance. In the fourth section, I examine the power mechanism I consider most significant in producing disciplinary effects on speakers and on their linguistic “conduct.” Considering all the current postulates about power, I will refer to those mechanisms through which the exercise of power in relation to language takes place, that is, normalization, governmentality, and subjectivation. Finally, despite the advances in our understanding of power in relation to language evidenced in this chapter, we still face many challenges, which are examined in the final section, where I review some key unsolved questions and present some concluding remarks.

The First Step in Disclosing Power and Language Relations: From Localized Power to a Multiplicity of Nodal Points

One of the main advances in this disclosing of the productive relation between power and language was the critical examination, made by sociolinguistics in the second half of the twentieth century, of the role played by the deep-rooted language ideologies of early modernity, such as the ideologies of monolingualism and standardization in producing a state of “domination,” that is, a massive, crystallized, and universalizing form of power at the level of the entire body of society (see, for the distinction between power relations and domination, Foucault, 1983 : 226). In fact, the identification of language, culture, and territory, which is taken as the basis for the construction of the national identities that legitimize a nation-state, blocked a field of relations of power, rendering them impassive and invariable and preventing “all reversibility of movement—by means of instruments which can become economic as well as political or military” ( Foucault, 1984 : 114).

The deep-rooted belief that a state must have a single language then laid the foundation of the liberal nation-state during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, supplanting the former regime ( Grillo, 1989 ; Hobsbawm, 1992 ; Pujolar, 2011 ) and questioning the legitimacy of other varieties different from the standard, as well as other languages (e.g., local languages within colonial processes, minority languages in multilingual nation-states). Beneath that ideology there are at least two underlying ideological components. The first is political: the use and prevalence of a single language brings nations cohesion. The second is social: the prevalence of a single language makes access to all spheres of social life easier for the whole social body. Over the past decades, both of these statements have become increasingly controversial, and have been denounced by sociolinguists, who question the imposition of a unified national language as a condition of equality and social integration (see May, 2004 , and May, Chapter 2 in this volume, for a discussion of this issue). The spread of these two ideological components has led to the exportation of the monolingual state model all over the world—as often denounced by postcolonial and indigenous movements today (see, among others, Ukaga and Afoaku, 2005 )—and the homogenization of diversity and the unification of the linguistic national market.

Related to both processes—state construction and linguistic homogenization—the effects of power can be easily identified ( Bourdieu, 1991 ; Duchêne, 2008 ; Heller, 2002 ; Moyer and Martín Rojo, 2007 ). Imposing a language is always a form of domination, and it has meant, on many occasions, that a particular language has become a symbol of the power of the state over the different social classes, regions, nationalities, colonies, and so on. This imposition, which at times has gone as far as to involve bloodshed, has brought about social discrimination and the extinction of languages. We know that the imposition of a language or language variety for many speakers has involved disciplining, even to the extent of corporal punishment, in some schools across the world. 2

However, very often the description of the process that we, as experts, undertake, is very close to a previous understanding of power, concentrated in a single place, such as the state apparatus, and exercised from top to bottom. Such understanding ends up being, nevertheless, misleading. First, the massive, crystallized, and universalizing form of power we find in these cases goes far beyond a mere concentration of power in the state apparatus, but rather is distributed and permeates the entire body of society, with the intervention of a multiplicity of social actors. For instance, if we examine in this light the processes called diglossia, which was considered a neutral functional distribution of languages, what we will see now is a domination process, mediated by a linguistic regime, which impedes the participation and blocks the access of an important part of the population to socially significant social spheres. For example, in the case of Mexico, the imposed, pervasive, and established use of the Spanish language in the field of justice restricts access to justice for members of indigenous communities, as the UN Special Rapporteur has attested, given the absence of interpreters to enable indigenous people to understand proceedings in local courts and the lack of sensitivity displayed by the court system regarding the legal tradition of indigenous communities ( Mexico, 2003 : 5). And, in Guatemala, one of the most frequent complaints made to the UN Special Rapporteur is that courts prohibit the use of indigenous language in judicial proceedings, even when both parties to the litigation are indigenous (see, for both countries, Faundez’s work, 2010 : 93). Thus, in both countries, members of indigenous communities who face trial often do not understand the charges brought against them. As a result, many cases have been denounced by civil rights organizations in the south of Mexico of women who have been convicted after signing confessions they did not understand due to illiteracy and/or unfamiliarity with the official language (Shadow Report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 2012).

Thus, we cannot capture the intensity and extension of these processes by focusing exclusively on state policies and regulations. As Bourdieu notes (1991 : 50), the unification of the market is “always exerted through a whole set of specific institutions and mechanisms, of which the specifically linguistic policy of the state and even the over interventions of pressure groups form only the most superficial aspect.” Bourdieu stressed the role of schools in the devaluation of linguistic varieties other than the legitimate language. However, a careful examination of this role shows that it entails not only the introduction of educational qualification, but also the (re)production of knowledge about language, linguistic competences and skills, and so on (for instance, knowledge that dismisses some varieties as dialects or slang), which introduces a principle of asymmetry among speakers, and among languages. Critical sociolinguistics has more recently shown, in this and other similar conflicts, that the imposition of a language (the national or the colonial language) is only possible though the reproductive effect of a thousand encounters, which are framed within different institutions or take place in several social domains. This reproduction results in the marginalization of those speakers for whom access to a language variety is not made easy and who therefore have difficulty accessing public services, greatly limiting their possibilities of social mobility (in Duchêne, Moyer, and Roberts, 2014 , a plurality of examples across the world are analyzed). Thus, in examples such as the previously mentioned case of Mexico, colonial domination has imposed a repertory of dominant languages, which are valued as languages of culture and languages of instruction in the colonies, and thus are an unavoidable requirement for gaining access to education, justice, and so on. This linguistic regime has been often transferred to the metropolis. Thus, this process of domination is also active in situations faced by migrants or refugees when linguistic support and translation services are not available (see, among others, Codó, 2008 ; Jacquemet, 2014 ; Kurvers and Spotti, 2015 ; Piller, 2011 ).

From this perspective, the situation of domination appears as a very complex and crystallized network of power relations, in which the possibilities of reversals are very much restricted. This understanding can give us new insights on liberation and the struggles for liberation, and contributes to avoiding a second misleading effect of an understanding of power concentrated in the power of the state. Thus, research on linguicide and linguistic endangerment, which are part of the struggles of liberation, as are language revitalization movements (see Phillipson, 1992 , 2009 ; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2013 ; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 1995 ), if it focuses its action on states and regulation, could be inefficient or even have undesired side effects. As Heller has critically observed, the same linguistic minorities who have often challenged the domination produced by the unequal distribution of linguistic resources rarely challenge the principles and language ideologies on which this domination is based. And as Duchêne and Heller (2007) show in their critical review of the expert discourse on language, these attempts could paradoxically reinforce essentialist views on identity, in which language is still seen as a distinctive and constitutive element in the construction of ethnic and national identities.

In fact, for the revitalization of a language, it is not sufficient to challenge a situation of linguistic domination based on a colonial order, as in the example from Mexico. A decolonizing attempt requires the production and legitimation of new discourses, which recognize the contexts of colonization and raise awareness of the colonized knowledge, including linguistic hierarchies and values, which affirm reformulated individual and collective identities, among other complex processes (see, for instance, Mignolo and Escobar 2009 ) (see later in this chapter the example of the Zapatista movement in the autonomous communities in the south of Mexico).

During the 1990s, another major contribution in disclosing power and language relations was made by critical discourse analysis (CDA), particularly through the study of how power, knowledge, and discourse are imbricated. In fact, this trend has successfully contributed to the micro-analysis of how social representations are built through discourse, in connection with the analysis of the broader socio-political and historical context in which the discursive practices are embedded ( Fairclough and Wodak, 1997 ). However, the view on power, in critical discourse studies, is mainly localized in the state, in the administration, and in elite sectors of society. Thus, in bringing out the linguistic resources and discursive strategies used to construct social categories and their social representation, the perspective applied is mainly top to bottom, and not as performed in a substrate of force relations. It also is focused on bringing out self-categorization processes (i.e., assimilation, comparison, and boundary work), as well as the polarization between “us and them” and the exogenous attribution to social categories. In addition, besides these strategies of construction of categorization and otherness, researchers in discourse studies have focused on how these representations are naturalized and legitimized in discourse ( Martín Rojo and van Dijk, 1997 ). Some of the hegemonic discursive representations of social actors and groups (such as genders, students, immigrants, Arabs, Europeans, and so forth) bias their perception by others and themselves, and intervene in their own (and in others’) identity-building processes (see the discussion of normalization later in this chapter for a deep understanding of these processes).

However, recognizing resistances to linguistic inequality, hierarchization, linguistic domination and exclusion, as well as acknowledging the social effects of essentialization and stereotyping, does not always allow us to understand what mechanisms of power are at play, or to understand how these instances of social and discursive domination take place. Therefore, the interest lies not only in determining whether given discourses generate biased or simplistic representations of persons, groups, events, or identities and how the elites spread those discourses in the media, which has been the primary research goal for CDA. It is also interesting to observe how power forges asymmetries in everyday encounters, within and outside institutions, and how it is precisely there that these representations and the knowledge they generate become naturalized, but are also where they are disputed (see further discussion later in this chapter).

Similarly, if we focus only on laws and policies, we shall be reproducing a conception of power as a force concentrated in the state that is exercised from top to bottom and not as performed in a substrate of force relations ( Foucault, 1978 : 93). The imposition of monolingualism and the standard variety of a language is not only explicable from the state apparatus. To understand how these power mechanisms operate, trickle down, and are transmitted, we should discover the assemblages (or agencements ), that is, the processes of “agencing,” 3 in which different constituent elements (such as discourses, institutions, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, etc.), intersect, fold together, and transform themselves and each other ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 ). We reach a more accurate vision of these assemblages when we observe how linguistic and other policies are played out in everyday practices and encounters within institutions (e.g., medicine, education, law, welfare) as localized sites where the state constructs and regulates citizens’ practices, who reproduce or resist this regulation.

In the following sections, I provide an in-depth analysis of the management of power relations and the technologies of power through asymmetrical everyday encounters, in order to gain a better understanding of how power is exercised in the linguistic sphere, by whom, and by what means.

The Second Step: The Management of Power Relations in Interaction and the Unequal Distribution of Resources

In accordance with the five postulates of power previously mentioned, interactions can be seen as the main locus of power and resistance, as we will see in this section. Recently, several authors have precisely recognized the contribution of Gumperz to a fluid understanding of power relations, “in which power resides not on opposing blocks but in myriad asymmetrical everyday encounters” ( Jacquemet, 2014 : 201; also pointed out by Heller, 2014 ). This has paved the way toward understanding how power operates, rather than merely attesting power and demonstrating its existence. Furthermore, Rampton (2014) sees Gumperz and interactional sociolinguistics as approaches that can provide the Foucauldian agenda with a microscope, sharpening its empirical grasp of how “power reaches into the very grain of individuals” ( Foucault, 1980 : 39).

Returning to the previous example of diglossia, schools are one of the more significant institutions through which “ideal standard language” ( Lippi-Green, 1997 ), which excludes vernaculars or other geographically based varieties ( Bourdieu, 1991 ), is established. While the goal of producing homogeneous citizens with equal life chance opportunities through education is still upheld in theory by teachers and educational institutions, what prevails in schools is a diversity of languages, behaviors, cultures, and social groups that are formally unrecognized and even actively suppressed during day-to-day instructional processes (see, among others, Heller and Martin-Jones, 2001 ; Martín Rojo, 2010 , 2013 ). Thus, if we wonder how a monolingual and a standard rule is implemented within an institution such as a school, we must necessarily focus the analysis on the places where power is exercised and the exact way in which this occurs, such as by establishing requirements to use a specific language variety within the lessons, or through continuous corrections, and commands/instructions to students to “say it right” or “say it in the language of the school.” In fact, ethnographic sociolinguistics has often revealed how not only the administration, but also teachers and students, consider the emphasis on normative linguistic behavior part of the role of school in the regulation of differences, and a strategy for guaranteeing social inclusion (see, for example, Martín Rojo, 2010 , for the presentation of monolingualism in Spanish as an advantage for newcomers’ integration in Madrid schools). As I discuss in the next section, only through the “assemblage,” in which different constituent elements intersect and fold together in daily practices and in face-to-face interactions, could a principle of asymmetry among students and teachers be established and its impact on social relations examined.

The following example, extracted from the research I led on multilingual schools in Madrid, and recorded in a Madrid secondary school, in a program of Spanish as a second language for newcomers, can help us clarify how power relations are managed in everyday encounters. Traditionally within sociolinguistics, the exercise of power in school is understood as the effect of the assessment of linguistic and cultural differences. From the so-called difference hypothesis, the unequal status of individuals and groups is projected on the assessment of their linguistic capacities and performance, in such a manner that those who are “different” are valued as not competent, leading to invidious predictions regarding their potential success or failure ( Bernstein, 1975 ; Labov, 1972 ; Erickson, 1987 , 1998 [2004] for a more interactional and critical approach). In this line, the normalizing, socio-political role played by schools within the structures of class domination has been highlighted ( Willis, 1977 ) by focusing on the wholesale negative appraisal by educators of nonstandard linguistic and cultural features that occur in the speech of minority groups.

However, if we look carefully at the following example, we will see that the existence of these educational differences is not an objective fact, nor is it prior to the interaction itself, but it is rather built and assessed at the same time, and even legitimized through the process. This assessment is part of a process of distribution of economic and symbolic resources, which is mediated by the power to act that every participant enjoys and can reach within the interaction. In fact, a detailed analysis of daily encounters in institutional settings shows how social agents struggle for resources. Through these struggles, agents try to reproduce, challenge, or resist the patterns of distribution. I draw on the concepts of capitalization and decapitalization ( Martín Rojo, 2010 , based on Bourdieu’s notion of the convertibility of different forms of capital and social distribution [1986]) to study the roles that participants have in the production and distribution of resources in everyday practices, and in education, as well as other institutional settings. Capitalization and decapitalization refer to acts of conferring and withholding symbolic capital—such as students’ failure in the following example to give value to their own previous schooling, languages, and knowledge—through interactional practices.

In this example, two students with a Moroccan background (Fatima and Nadia) are in the classroom with Alicia and Juan, teachers at this program, and Esther, the ethnographer from our team. They talk with the researcher about their visit to the Initial Professional Training Programme in hairdressing (this is why they refer to chemicals and chemical knowledge). These visits are part of the orientation these students receive to decide how to continue their studies and how to define their academic trajectories. In this extract, they are discussing the difficulty they find in the secondary education vocational program compared with mainstream classes, and what exactly these students find more “difficult.” Fatima starts talking about her impression of the vocational programme (called PCPI). (see Appendix , for transcription conventions).

In this example, we can see that what matters is the unequal social position in the interaction, and not the cultural or linguistic differences per se. The teacher, Alicia, contradicts and constructs Fatima in her first turns (2, 4, 6, and 8) as lacking reason: “yes it’s difficult, but here it’s harder” (especially in 2 and 4). Then she turns to the other teacher present in this conversation for confirmation (in turn 6: “isn’t it/Juan?”), and then she switches the pronoun of her previous addressee, and instead of “you,” the students become a “they,” a third person in plural (in turn 8): “[the funny thing] is that they ’re saying that the PCPI is very hard // they think they have to study a lot/but here it’s harder.” So “they”—the students present in the classroom (i.e., Fatima and Nadia)—become bystanders in conversation while Alicia is talking ( Alcalá and Martín Rojo, 2010 ). Counseling practices take place in this case, as in other similar cases studied by Erickson and Shultz (1982) , within a frame in which asymmetries in the participation framework and in the management of interaction are prevalent. Students’ voices are taken off or taken on by those participants legitimated in the conversation flow (through power relations), and they are judged as unreasonable or incredible. Simultaneously, an assessment of their capacities and of the education in Morocco is imposed. Nadia, empowered by the researcher’s question, decides to give her opinion in turn 31: “[in Morocco I think we study more than here].” Alicia overlaps this intervention, trying to lead the conversation flow, by changing the topic; however, Esther repeats Nadia’s intervention in order to make it explicit again. Nadia approves Esther’s intervention in a low voice first: “(yes)º.” But then, when Alicia asks: “that they study more than here?” (turn 35), showing her skepticism and how incredible what Nadia said is for her, the student seems to feel empowered and answers in a higher tone of voice: “yes” ( Alcalá and Martín Rojo, 2010 ).

Thus, it is precisely the management of power relations in this interaction that produces the difference and associates some knowledge with it. At least one of the participants with a more powerful institutional role disempowers the students. Thus, during the course of the interaction, the students are constructed as lacking: “(1) access to the possibility of self-representation or representing others (turn level); (2) a legitimated voice, as well as credibility, reason or decision (interaction level); and (3) institutional authority and possibilities for moving up the social ladder (socio-institutional level)” Alcalá and Martín Rojo, 2010 ). The articulation at the three levels leads to the disempowerment of the students, and the empowerment of the teachers as representatives of the institution.

The analysis of the management of power also shows that what is at stake is not simply a dissimilar assessment of their linguistic competence and performance, but a complex process of distribution of the linguistic and social resources necessary for educational integration and social mobility. Thus, in the fragment we are examining, it is not only that the students’ prior education and linguistic competence are not valued, and therefore they are being advised to go into a professional program with a low level of consideration; what happens, instead, is that this “recommendation” limits the possibility of having an educational trajectory that would provide them with other resources (academic titles, teaching in other languages, etc.), which would enable them to access better regarded and better paid jobs. So this exchange is a main locus for power, where some young girls are minoritized, their resistance is silenced, their exclusion is justified due to their “deficits,” but especially, they are prevented from accessing or “gaining” more resources or capital.

Focusing our analysis on interaction has shown us a multiplicity of “relations of force” and has prevented us from locating power in the state apparatus, not even as inherent to the institutional functioning. In this example, power is not always exercised in a single direction; different participants can reach different positions, amplifying or reducing their possibilities of resistance. But, in addition, it shows how power relations in everyday encounters are fully imbricated with other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, gender, and ethnic relations, among others). The exercise of power is integrated first in a mode of social discipline. In fact, we can easily recognize some of the mechanism that Foucault (1998) identifies as a form of disciplinary power, which is detected in institutions and in particular is associated with individuals’ training, given that in this case discipline comes from a standard that is considered normal (the level and kinds of competences and skills students must have), specifically in education, which is in turn evoked by those running the institution in order to assess and rank students (see discussion of normalizing judgment and surveillance later in the chapter).

Second, this exercise of power is framed in a mode of production and distribution of resources and also produces knowledge on social agents and on the processes in which they are involved (education, immigration, etc.). Finally, the exercise of power favors, or encourages, certain social practices, for instance, in the case analyzed here, hierarchical observation and examination, and subsequently educational tracking.

Thus, in order to take into account the five postulates about power presented in this chapter, our research must be framed within the relation between discourse, knowledge, and power. As we have seen in the analyzed fragment, students are not allowed to produce an alternative representation of themselves, their educational background, and their competences, given the fact that their access to the floor is restricted and their voice undermined. But what is crucial in terms of power relations is that both the standard norms, from which it is possible to measure gaps and determine levels, and the correlative discursive representations that undervalue those who failed are taken as true. Thus, students’ lack of power would not be situational, but rather would be reproduced in other moments within and outside school. Thus, what is at stake is not a matter of representation of a preexisting object, nor even of creating through discourse an object that does not exist. Rather, what is at stake is a set of practices, discursive or not, that makes something enter the “game of truth and falsehood” (regardless of its form, i.e., moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.) ( Foucault 1994 , Vol. IV: 670). Discourse then becomes a type of action, and becomes inextricably involved in the exercise of power relations, and in the production of discourses that legitimate the forms of power.

The analysis of this and similar encounters reveals the “micro-physics” of power ( Foucault, 1977a ) through the unequal distribution of capital; these kinds of struggles for capital are becoming crucial to survive in global capitalism (see discussion in the following section). However, we need to go further in our understanding of how power is exercised in the linguistic sphere, and by what means.

An Unavoidable Task: The Analysis of the Technologies of Power

One of the key and still unanswered questions is how power reaches into the very grain of individuals, and inserts itself into their actions and linguistic attitudes and practices. In order to answer this question, in this section I examine the means and in particular those processes designed to shape the linguistic behavior of a population ( Rose, 1999 ), as well as individuals’ subjectivities. I call them technologies of power, and I include among them any institution that shapes behavior, such as prisons or schools, and any concept that is considered the “normal” or “natural” way of doing things. In this section I also study the new forms of governmentality linked to neoliberalism and the role of language in current societies. Finally, in order to understand how the impact of both technologies shapes individuals’ subjectivities, I refer to the process of subjectivation.

Linguistic Normalization

Despite its potential interest, there has not yet been a genealogy in linguistic thought that shows in detail how and in what circumstances languages and speakers came to be defined as objects of study (that is, how they were “objectivated”) and to what extent the production of scientific discourses has contributed to a hierarchization of linguistic varieties (legitimate languages vs. other varieties), establishing a space of differentiation between normality and abnormality (e.g., between parallel monolingualism [ Heller, 2001 ] and hybridized language), and making explicit the norms of adequacy.

In this sense, more studies are needed showing the genealogy of the rise and consolidation of the deep-rooted belief that a state must have a single language that laid the foundation of the monolingual nation-state and questioned the legitimacy of other varieties different from the standard, as well as other languages (e.g., local languages within colonial processes, minority languages in multilingual nation-states). In recent decades, some outstanding contributions have been made in different geopolitical areas. For instance, only recently the postcolonial linguistic construction of national and pan-Hispanic identities in Spain and Latin America has been examined by authors such as del Valle ( del Valle, 2007 ). Spain’s contemporary language policies and geopolitical interests in Latin America have been also studied by del Valle (2002) , while Moreno Cabrera’s work explains the cumulative production of the ideologies and myths of Spanish linguistic nationalism, stressing the role of linguistics and language academies in this production ( Moreno Cabrera, 2015 ). Both authors show how globalized capitalism is reinforcing the linguistic hegemony of Spanish.

Another recent development is the recognition of the role of prescriptive approaches to linguistic practices and variation in the recreation of the “good language” and the “competent speaker,” and in affirming the deviant nature of speakers of nonstandard languages, and their “incorrect” and “deformed” practices, such as mixing languages, by speakers lacking competence.

We can easily recognize, in these linguistic norms and rules, the disciplinary procedure called “normalizing judgment,” and the distinct normalizing effects it brings into play. The objectivation of a linguistic norms and standards and/or hierarchies of languages refer individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation, and the principle of a rule to be followed. As Foucault states in relation to discipline, these rules “differentiate individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected, or as an optimum toward which one must move” (1984: 197). In similar terms, the negative view of linguistic differentiation introduces a “value-giving measure,” and draws the line between normal and abnormal linguistic forms, between normal and abnormal social dialects, and between legitimate (healthy) and illegitimate (destructive) linguistic tendencies (homogenization vs. heterogeneity). In short, the traditional approach to language variation and linguistic practices normalizes. Furthermore, it allows a second process of appropriation of “language” to take place—only legitimate forces and legitimate social groups have a right to a language. Minorities, like Roma in Spain or Berbers in Morocco, and social and dissenting groups do not; what they speak instead is a dialect, or a dangerous and evil “jargon” ( Martín Rojo, 1997b ).

Despite linguistics itself (and in particular sociolinguistics) having included in its agenda the task of problematizing this knowledge, the truth is that the configuration of the concept of abnormality in linguistic variation and in practices such as linguistic hybridization is still deeply rooted in our societies. These linguistic ideologies are often rooted in a nineteenth-century view of society (especially, social Darwinism and evolutionist theories): social order depends on the balance between a process of differentiation and a process of integration or control. On the basis of this view, we find a radical distinction between the legitimate forces of order (society, integration, control, normality), and the illegitimate forces of disorder (tension, illegitimate violence, abnormality). Social order and languages were considered to be a very fragile entity, threatened by social differences and changes: difference was a permanent cause of disorder, as changes are always a source of tension ( Martín Rojo, 1997b ). A contemporary example of the survival of this knowledge was seen recently when the Real Academia Española included the following definition of “Espanglish”: “(from Eng. Spanglish, a fusion of Spanish ‘español’ and *English ‘inglés’) Variety of speech of some Hispanic groups in the United States of America where lexical and grammatical elements of Spanish and English are mixed and deformed.” Only the pressure of researchers such as Ana Celia Zentella and José del Valle (with the support of the Social Justice Task Force of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology) has managed to modify this definition.

The imposition of a monolingual standard, which establishes a single language of use within institutions and rejects the practices in which speakers use (often creatively) different resources from their linguistic repertoires, has always been discriminatory given the multilingual reality, de facto if not in law, of most nation-states. The power effects of these norms become particularly evident in schools and other institutions, which function as “observatories” of linguistic “normalized” practices, where students are trained and examined in accordance with them.

We can understand now the difficulties that the revitalization of a language entails, particularly in the challenges of knowledge produced by disciplines, and the production of alternative theories and ideologies. One particularly critical and reflective attempt of linguistic decolonization is provided by the Zapatista movement in the autonomous communities in the south of Mexico, where a bilingual and independent education program has been implemented as part of their search for an alternative form of economic development and which allows the communities to learn in their own languages, and for education to be culturally relevant ( Gómez Lara, 2011 ; see also Baronet, 2009 ). The analysis of this and other similar movements in Latin America shows critical discourse awareness and a deep understanding of how discrediting and delegitimizing representations of languages, cultures, and communities have been built and circulate through discourse in colonial and postcolonial regimes, and the extent to which these discourses are deeply rooted in European episteme.

Besides this postcolonial scenario, the imposition of monolingual standards is particularly striking, as the increased mobility and diasporic trajectories of many speakers contribute to the polyglot forms of their linguistic repertoires, which encourage increased hybridization practices and translanguaging ( Blackledge and Creese, 2014 ; Blommaert and Backus, 2013 ; García and Li Wei, 2014 ) as well as the emergence of new identities. The maintenance of linguistic ideologies in institutional settings, such as the ideologies of monolingualism and standardization in schools (see Martín Rojo, 2010 : 221–260, for an overview), entails not valuing the languages spoken by many students, and the rejection of heteroglossic speech practices. The weakening of nation-states may be opening spaces, such as communication through new technologies and social networks, so that these practices of resistance to monolingual norms and separation of languages acquire more visibility ( Blommaert, 2010 ; Rampton, 1995 ). Despite this, in the spaces where an institutional order is imposed, the norms regulating them are maintained.

Concurrently, to the weakening of nation-states and the opening spaces for multilingual practices, new forms of governmentality are emerging within our current neoliberal context (see further discussion later in the chapter). In relation to the objectivation of the speaker, more research is also needed to re-examine the emergence of the native and non-native distinction, which is an artificial construct, and its normalizing effects on speakers. As Bonfiglio shows ( 2007 , 2013 ) the enracination of language and its configuration within the matrix of race and ethnicity was born with nationalism in the early modern period, and it was “articulated in the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of maternality and nativity, as well as in the ideology of a natural connection between national character and national geography” (2013: 56). These organic metaphors, taken from body and nature to construct the myths of imagined congenital communities, still persist today. Their effects also persist in relation to the condition of citizenship, since many present-day examinations for citizenship include language tests, in which applicants must adhere to the stipulated model of a native speaker. As a result of this objectivation, “native speakers” are constructed as both a model and the authority. The examination (for example, the assessment of speakers’ competences in schools) is a method of control that involves hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment, and combines into a unified whole “the deployment of force and the establishment of truth” ( Foucault, 1977a : 184). It both elicits the truth about those who undergo the examination (tells what they know or what their level of language is) and controls their linguistic behavior (by forcing them to study or directing them to special courses or programs). Thus, the introduction of the concept and those in connection to it (native vs. foreign; native vs. non-native; quasi-native; native vs. learner; native vs. second language speaker) could have a clear impact on speakers’ trajectories. By analyzing speakers’ trajectories and life stories, it would be possible to reveal the distinct operations that the hierarchization of languages and types of spearkess (native vs. non-natice, for example) rings into play: it links individual language practices to a whole that immediately becomes a field for comparison; it differentiates individuals from one another; it measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes linguistic competence and performance, linguistic levels, and the “nature” of individuals in terms of value; it introduces, through this “value-assigning measurement,” the constraints of a conformity that must be achieved 4 . In order to understand the power effect of this knowledge, and these categories and linguistic ideologies, and their impact on linguistic behavior and on speakers’ self-esteem, we need to examine two more technologies of power.

Governmentality and Subjectivation

The question that remains to be answered is how the knowledge produced by linguistic disciplines about language and speakers ends up regulating the behavior of individuals and the population in general. In order to answer this question, we can apply Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which refers to “the conduct of conduct” and ranges from the governing of others in all aspects of life to the governing of the self ( Foucault, 1982 ; see also 2000 ). This concept involves the regulation of populations through multiple institutions and technologies in society.

The observation that I see as relevant in relation to governmentality is this: now that neoliberalism is globally a prevalent economic model, a mode of governance, and a general policy, other significant changes related to languages are taking place. In this line, a clear example associated with the prevalence of this model is the involvement of language in a globalized neoliberal economy, as a source of symbolic added value, and as a mode of management of global networks, contributing to the circulation of good, capitals and people. Correlatively, it has been attested with an increasing frequency of discourses that celebrate multilingualism and present linguistic competencies and skills as a requirement of our times that would guarantee insertion and mobility in the job market ( Duchêne, 2011 ; Duchêne and Heller, 2012 ). We have then to examine the extent to which these social and economic transformations lead to a particular form of governmentality. As Urla (2012) notes, under neoliberalism, the logics and discourse for managing social life, and in this case speakers’ linguistic trajectories, on the one hand, and the logics and discourse of the market, on the other, have fused (see, especially, Rose, 1999 ). As Flores (2013) also notes, in parallel to the production of a neoliberal subject that fits the political and economic context of our current sociohistorical period, new forms of governmentality are emerging, particularly related to the desire for flexible workers and lifelong learners to perform service-oriented and technological jobs as part of a post-Fordist political economy. This change takes place precisely at a time where jobs have become precarious, inequality has risen, and struggles for resources have increased ( Fraser, 2003’ Standing, 2011 ). In this context, the new discourses of language commodification—and the production of knowledge about languages, competencies, the market, and so on—have a clear impact on speakers’ conduct.

Earlier in this chapter, we have seen that school is an institution where linguistic normalization takes place. Students are surveilled, and they have to behave according to linguistic norms. However, within the frame of neoliberal flexibilization and globalization, this disciplining action places language capacities and skills at the core of the institutional action ( Pérez-Milans, 2015 ). Schools must then provide bilingual courses and programs, and also teach the languages of instruction to a diverse body of students who often have had transnational trajectories. Subjects respond to this pressure trying to meet market demands, increasing their linguistic competencies, demanding bilingual teaching courses and programs, and paying for certificates that accredit linguistic training and education; all these responses lead to greater revenues for the language industry. As former inequalities, prejudices, and social hierarchies are still active and even amplified in many apparently liberal societies today, and in spite of increased demands for linguistic competence, access to linguistic capital is not guaranteed ( Martín Rojo, 2017 ; and Martín Rojo et al., 2017 , for a more detailed analysis of neoliberalism and linguistic governmentality). Linguistic competence and skills do not guarantee access to a better job ( Duchêne, 2011 ). Most jobs on offer do not require all those linguistic credentials ( Standing, 2011 ). To present the learning of languages as preparing people for jobs is to set up tensions and frustrations that will give way to disillusion. Considering this, increasing linguistic demands could be seen as a gatekeeping mechanism ( Erickson and Shultz, 1982 ) that does not give but rather constrains access to key educational, employment, legal, and political fields, among others. Thus, speakers’ self-regulation is also connected to the increasing demands for linguistic competences. In the following example of an interview with a student of Romanian origin (Ioana), successfully studying at a university in Madrid, we observe this self-regulation in the ways of using language to avoid discrimination or to increase social and economic mobility. 5 The interviewee focuses on her linguistic trajectory and her “new-speaker” status.

Lilia, the interviewer, poses a first question that already establishes an unattainable goal, “to speak perfectly (line 4),” which is nonetheless shared by the interviewee. For both, their term of reference is the standard variety and passing for a native speaker, which seems to indicate that nation-state models of personhood have not disappeared under neoliberalism, but are still active for diasporic speakers. In the second question, we see how the interviewer has detected the disciplining effort (line 7) and asks Ioana to give reasons for it. In the interviewee’s answer, again, we find the demand of “speaking well (line 21),” and how the knowledge of a hierarchy of speakers and competencies has been internalized. Her effort has been invested out of fear of rejection and of reproducing the experience of people who spend time in Spain without speaking the dominant language (line 28). This shows a superposition of experiences and knowledge regarding dominant language ideologies and immigration. This example shows clearly the permeability of the subject who faces “linguistic surveillance,” reproducing the norm internally. Later in the interview, she explains how she put the greatest effort into the pronunciation of the Spanish “zed”: “It was a goal for me to learn how to pronounce the zed. Once I learned that, it was as if I had achieved everything. (.) And it took me about a year.” This reflects how she has incorporated this as an index that local speakers use to try to distinguish local speakers from nonlocal speakers. Surveillance produces exercise, demands training, and has a general effect on language practices.

The modes of objectivation, which establish the norm, act on individuals to regulate, shape, and/or influence them to conform their linguistic practices into “normal.” However, the effects of the modes of objectivation go even further, becoming modes of subjectivation that are used by individuals for understanding themselves ( Martín Rojo, 1997a ). Thus, human beings recognize themselves as subjects, constitute themselves as objects of knowledge for themselves: they are driven to examine themselves, decipher themselves. Subjectivity is the way in which subjects turn the experience of themselves into a truth game with themselves; and in that game, the legitimated and dominant discourses internalized by individuals play an essential role, provided that the individuals have appropriated them in the process of understanding themselves. This is not merely a question of whether linguistic norms and ideologies are accepted or rejected, but also of how, when they are internalized by individuals, they impact the construction of subjectivity. Taking into account the role of subjectivation, we may ask ourselves what could happen if individuals internalize normalizing discourses that undermine them as competent and legitimate speakers: Could these speakers lower their social and educational expectations or even self - exclude themselves from significant social fields? Could the internalization of this ideology compel non-native speakers to censor themselves, or to place their linguistic practices within an evaluative frame, and to derogate their own linguistic practices?

We have some noteworthy testimonies of the internalization of these ideologies and of the resistance produced. Chicana feminist scholar Anzaldúa (1987) describes how the assimilationist pressure to speak English without an accent, together with the shame felt in speaking Spanish, amounts to a taming of the tongue, to a disciplining and denigration of the subject, which can only be escaped by proudly expressing a hybrid language, a mestizo language blending Spanish and English. This denigration of the subject is reflected in the verses of the Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera in “My Graduation Speech,” “Ay, Virgin Mary, I cannot speak!” Experiences such as those of Anzaldúa and Laviera have been mirrored by other authors in geopolitical areas dominated by the spirit of colonialism. Derrida (1996) discusses those for whom the use of French, the only language they knew, was equivalent to a dispossession, to speaking the language of the colonizer. And this is even more so in bilingual situations, such as the one referred to by Fanon (1952) , for whom the adoption of the language of the colonizers was like wearing a white mask over his black skin.

The construction of subjectivity can be grasped by analyzing the discourses produced by “non-native speakers” (see Cioè-Peña, Moore, and Martín Rojo, 2016 ). Shame (in the sense of Howard, 1995 , and Scheff, 2000 ) for not having achieved enough proficiency, for not being able to speak as a “native” ( Relaño, 2014 ) can be pervasive. In fact, linguistic norms are enforced through the calculated administration of shame. However, discourses also reveal various kinds of resistance: pride in the “native” language, hybridized practices, and “passing for a native speaker” of one or more languages. As a consequence, speakers could discursively present themselves as “split subjects” who reflect the tension between power (that is, exclusion and delegitimization, if they fail to sound like a “native speaker”) and desire for the acceptance and legitimation of their own languages and ways of speaking.

Concluding Remarks and Review of Key Points

This chapter has examined the extent to which shifts in the understanding of power within a poststructuralist frame are compelling researchers to re-examine the relationships between language and power. In the light of current notions of power, such as those developed by Foucault, this chapter has examined the new research questions and objects of study that are emerging. In exploring the relations between power and language, I have also tried to answer the questions concerning who exercises power, in what sphere, and by what means. Ultimately, answering these questions is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power.

In order to avoid a simplified vision where power appears as a monopoly of the state, exercised from top to bottom, and to capture the complexity of power relationships, according to the current five postulates I have summarized following critically a Foucauldian approach, it is necessary to frame the study of power in the flow of interaction, in all institutions and outside them. Likewise, to capture the generating or productive nature of power, it is necessary to study its relationship with discourse and knowledge. From there, some of the technologies of power have been brought to light, such as normalization, through objectivation and subjectivation, and governmentality. Thus, the exercise of power has been framed within other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, gender, ethnic relation, among others), and has been integrated in a mode of production and distribution of resources. At the same time, it produces knowledge about the language and the models of speakerhood that promote self-regulation practices among speakers (for instance, self-demanding requirements to learn a specific language or to adopt a particular accent). In other domains, such as ethnic and gender relations or sexuality, several groups (for example, young people, women, ethnic groups, LGBTs) have spoken against forms of domination and constraint, which respond to a form of power that links individuals with their identity, transforming them and constraining them as subjects. In the linguistic domain, however, the effects of linguistic policies, the knowledge produced by disciplines and linguistic ideologies and norms that question the status of speakers, their competency, and their qualification, have not yet been fully examined. As a result, struggles against these forms of constraint are still incipient.

In order to go a step further, we have explored the main mechanisms through which production of knowledge about languages takes place, and their disciplinary effects on speakers and on their linguistic “conduct.” Finally, we have examined the power mechanisms, such as normalization, governmentality, and subjectivation, and how they are applied to speakers’ trajectories and practices. Thus, studying the forms of neoliberal governmentality, associated with the commodification of languages, allow us to better understand the current forms of control of the population and of behavior, as well as the role that language training plays as an instrument for increasing competency and competitiveness and filling the void of the long periods without employment in a precarious job market. Thus a more critical treatment of the concept of multilingualism is needed to avoid complicity with the promotion of a covert neoliberal agenda ( Duchêne and Heller, 2012 ; Flores, 2013 ). At the same time, the opposition between native and non-native speakers is not a valid instrument to describe people’s experiences in the context of increasing social mobility and diversity of contemporary societies. The analysis of the internalization of the native-speaker model can contribute to increase speakers’ reflexivity and to learn how to resist domination mechanisms associated with this model and to promote self-oriented, liberating techniques ( Martín Rojo, 2017 ).

Appendix Transcription conventions (adapted from Schegloff 2007)

In this text I follow a Foucauldian approach focused on power relations from the antagonistic reactions it produces, and on the contestation of specific objects and impositions of power on subjects.

There are many testimonies all over the world, and also academic reactions against those punishments. In 2014, at the time I was writing this chapter, newspapers reported different cases. In Luxembourg, Portuguese workers denounced that children are being punished and separated from the group if they speak Portuguese in some kindergartens and “maison relais”; http://www.wort.lu/en/luxembourg/shocking-luxembourg-expose-children-punished-for-speaking-portuguese-in-kindergarten-maison-relais-5458e9a7b9b3988708082cb4 ; while Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire denounces different modes of punishment in Uganda, where the most common is wearing a dirty sack until the offender meets someone else speaking their mother tongue and then he or she could pass the sack on to him or her (September 17, 2014).

Bogue (2007 : 145–146)—an active bringing-into-existence of its own agency.

In fact, the use of the concept follows a now established concern about political inequalities within EFL (for example, Canagarajah, 1999 ; Pennycook, 2007 ).

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On Language and Power

First Online: 02 August 2023

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relationship between language and power essay

Lieven De Cauter 38

Part of the book series: Law and Visual Jurisprudence ((LVJ,volume 9))

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In this concise synthetic little essay the author tries to overlook the problem of the link between language and power from antiquity to the present. From the Greek belief in rhetoric as the basis of power, via Foucault’s concept of ‘the order of discourse’ as the control of who can say what and the concept of hegemony of Gramsci, he casts his gaze on neoliberalism, alt right and woke as power battles based on language.

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De Cauter, L. (2023). On Language and Power. In: Fleerackers, F. (eds) The Rearguard of Subjectivity. Law and Visual Jurisprudence, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26855-7_5

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Language and Identity Essay

Introduction.

Language and Gender
Language and Racial Identity
Language and Social Status

Works Cited

Language serves as a vital means of expression, facilitating communication and interaction. It’s not merely a tool for conveying thoughts but is intrinsically linked with an individual’s identity. The question arises: How is language profoundly intertwined with identity?

Individuals, each with their unique characteristics, employ language to express their distinctions or commonalities. In particular, language can be a unifying force for people belonging to a specific social group, highlighting the bond between language and identity from the beginning.

An individual’s identity is not fixed; it varies depending on the situation, purpose, and context. When people find themselves in new environments, they often reshape their identities to adapt. This adaptability underscores the need to explore how environmental changes can redefine the link between language and identity.

Language can also indicate a person’s social status, race, nationality, or gender. Typically, members of a specific group share a common language, reinforcing their unity. This shared linguistic experience solidifies group identity and fosters a sense of belonging through shared experiences and ease of communication.

In this language and identity essay, we explore the dynamic interplay between these two concepts, exploring how they mutually influence and define each other.

Language and Identity: Gender

The intersection of language and gender identity reveals distinct patterns. Across various cultures, gender-based variations in speech are prevalent. Historically, linguistic differences have been observed in how women and men communicate. These differences often stem from the divergent social statuses of men and women, significantly influencing their manner of speaking. Power dynamics and societal roles of subordination between genders typically manifest in their vocabulary choices.

In many societies, there is an expectation for women to use more refined and polite language compared to men. Such cultural norms frequently discourage women from using profanity or obscene language. In these contexts, women often occupy a subordinate position, with their social liberties being more restricted than men’s. This disparity can increase insecurity, uncertainty, and a lack of confidence among women (Talbot 35). Consequently, the use of language within a society can indicate the level of social freedom and gender equality. The linguistic choices of men and women are integral to the discourse on language and identity. Those are not merely reflections of individual preferences but norms deeply embedded in societal structures and expectations. Gendered language norms, as explored in educational settings, not only shape communication styles but also reinforce gender stereotypes and roles, perpetuating inequality. Thus, studying language about gender identity, a key component in teacher education programs, provides critical insights into the broader societal dynamics and power relations that govern gender interactions.

Language and Identity: Race

The intricate relationship between language and racial or ethnic identity is undeniable. An individual’s history shapes their language, leading to those with similar racial backgrounds often using similar languages for communication. One’s mother tongue, acquired at birth, is a fundamental aspect of racial identity, providing a crucial sense of belonging, especially in early life.

In many households, a specific language is used for family communication. This habitual use of a language fosters an association with affection and intimacy, setting it apart from the language used in public settings. For example, Hispanic families living in America often identify Spanish as a critical component of their racial identity.

Consequently, while they might use English in public spaces, they prefer Spanish for intimate conversations with friends and family. Spanish allows for expressing emotions and thoughts in ways that might be more challenging in English (Talbot 173). Speaking a particular language can create a bond among its speakers, delineating an ‘us versus them’ dynamic with those who do not say it.

However, this practice can also lead to social isolation for minorities who speak a different language than the majority. They may struggle to relate to those who do not speak their native language or express themselves in the dominant public language. Even in monolingual societies, people often resort to a distinct language or dialect within their close social circles, aiding in more apparent emotional expression.

The narrative “Aria” by Richard Rodriguez illustrates the role of language as a marker of racial identity. Rodriguez recounts how Spanish, the sole language spoken at home, influenced his upbringing in California, where English was the norm. This use of Spanish fostered a warm, familial environment.

This language choice created a comfortable and inviting atmosphere at home, but it also labeled English speakers as “flos gringos” – the others (Rodriguez 134). While Spanish strengthened familial bonds and provided a sense of identity, it simultaneously isolated the family socially, limiting their interactions to Spanish-speaking relatives.

The exclusive use of Spanish at home adversely affected Rodriguez and his siblings’ educational progress. A shift occurred when nuns from their school intervened, prompting the family to start using English at home. This change markedly improved their social interactions. However, over time, Rodriguez lost proficiency in Spanish, leading his relatives to call him “pocho derogatorily” – a term for someone who has lost their identity (Rodriguez 137). To his relatives, speaking Spanish was a crucial element of their identity. “Aria” underscores the significance of language in racial identity. Despite assimilating into American society, Rodriguez experienced a nostalgic connection to his heritage whenever he heard Spanish spoken, indicating its enduring link to his racial identity.

Language and Identity: Social Status

The social status of individuals often manifests in their speech patterns. Educational attainment significantly influences language proficiency, as those from higher social classes typically access better education. This access equips them with the skills to use language effectively in communication.

People from various social backgrounds tend to exhibit distinct dialects. These dialectic variations reflect their diverse social experiences. Grammatical differences are not the only distinguishing factors; phonological and phonetic variations are also prevalent, leading to distinct accents among different social statuses. Therefore, the linguistic divide between social classes acts as both a consequence and a reinforcer of social stratification, mirroring the complexities of societal hierarchies. This phenomenon underscores the intricate relationship between language use and social identity, where speech patterns become markers of social positioning and mobility.

During the nineteenth century, slavery was a prevalent institution in America. Slaves were relegated to the lowest social echelon. Slave owners were intent on preserving this hierarchy, deeming it improper for slaves to acquire literacy skills. The ability to read and write was seen as a potential elevation of the slaves’ intellectual status, which could threaten the established order. Thus, the enforced illiteracy of slaves perpetuated their subjugation and created a linguistic divide between them and their masters (Jones and Christensen 45). In modern times, every society exhibits some form of social stratification. This concept refers to the structured ranking of social classes within a societal hierarchy. Their relative social distances influence the linguistic impact between social groups. Language changes in a higher social class might have little to no effect on the language used by lower social classes. Conversely, social groups closely aligned in status may share similar linguistic traits.

Language is integral in facilitating effective communication between two parties. However, its efficiency largely depends on both parties’ language understanding. As such, language can be a tool for enhancing or impeding communication. Individuals need to understand the nuances of words within the specific language used.

Misinterpretation of language can lead to incorrect perceptions of the message being conveyed. This issue often arises because some words may have varied meanings depending on the context. Therefore, the speaker must assess the listener’s ability to comprehend the information, which should be a central consideration in the communication process (Tan 142). This ensures that the intended message is accurately understood.

Language has two main functions. It helps communicate and gives a group of people a sense of identity and pride. People usually identify themselves with a specific language. Various groups use jargon that is only comprehensible to people within the group.

Language may show the social status, gender, and race of an individual. People who belong to different social statuses usually use other languages. In addition, different genders use different language vocabularies. A study on the language vocabulary of different genders may help determine a society’s social freedom. Language is a source of racial identity. People usually use a specific language when communicating with people from their race. The use of this language creates racial identity.

Jones, Malinda E., and Ann E. Christensen. “Learning to Read.” Constructing Strong Foundations of Early Literacy . Routledge, 2022. 33-46.

Talbot, Mary, ed. Language and Power in The Modern World . Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Rodriguez, Richard. “Aria.” The Blair Reader: Exploring Issues and Ideas . Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Ontario: Pearson Education Canada, 2007, pp. 133-139.

Tan, Amy “Mother Tongue.” The Blair Reader: Exploring Issues and Ideas . Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Ontario: Pearson Education Canada, 2007, pp. 140-144.

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Language has the potential to yield tremendous, influential power - just take a look at some of the world’s most ‘successful’ dictators. Hitler managed to convince thousands of people to help him undertake one of the worst genocides the world has ever seen, but how? The answer is in language's influential power.

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Nie wieder prokastinieren mit unseren Lernerinnerungen.

Dictators aren’t the only people who have a way with words. The media, advertising agencies, educational institutions, politicians, religious institutes, and the monarchy (the list goes on) all use language to help them maintain authority or gain influence over others.

So, how exactly is language used to create and maintain power? This article will:

Examine various types of power

Explore different language features used to represent power

Analyse discourse in relation to power

Introduce theories that are key to understanding the relationship between language and power.

English language and power

According to linguist Shân Wareing (1999), there are three main types of power:¹

Political power - power held by people with authority, such as politicians and the police.

Personal power - power based on an individual's occupation or role in society. For example, a headteacher would likely hold more power than a teaching assistant.

Social group power - power held by a group of people due to certain social factors, such as class, ethnicity, gender, or age.

Which social groups do you think hold the most power in society, why?

Wareing suggested that these three types of power can be divided into instrumental power and influential power . People, or organisations, can hold instrumental power, influential power, or both.

Let’s take a look at these types of power in more detail.

Instrumental power

Instrumental power is seen as authoritative power. Typically speaking, someone who has instrumental power has power simply because of who they are . These people do not have to convince anyone of their power or persuade anyone to listen to them; others must listen to them simply because of the authority they have.

Headteachers, government officials, and the police are figures who have instrumental power.

People or organisations with instrumental power use language to maintain or enforce their authority.

Features of instrumental power language include:

Formal register

Imperative sentences - giving requests, demands, or advice

Modal verbs - e.g., 'you should'; 'you must'

Mitigation - using language to reduce the seriousness of what is being said

Conditional sentences - e.g., ‘if you don’t respond soon, further action will be taken.'

Declarative statements - e.g., 'in today's class we will look at declarative statements.'

Latinate words - words derived from or imitating Latin

Influential power

Influential power refers to when a person (or group of people) does not have any authority but is trying to gain power and influence over others. Those who wish to gain influential power may use language to persuade others to believe in them or support them. This type of power is often found in politics, the media, and marketing.

Features of influential power language include:

Assertions - presenting opinions as facts, e.g., ‘we all know that England is the greatest country in the world’

Metaphors - the use of established metaphors can reassure the audience and evoke the power of memory, establishing a bond between the speaker and the listener.

Loaded language - language that can evoke strong emotions and/or exploit feelings

Embedded assumptions - e.g., assuming the listener is really interested in what the speaker has to say

In some spheres of society, such as in politics, both aspects of power are present. Politicians have authority over us, as they impose the laws we must follow; however, they must also try to persuade us to continue voting for them and their policies.

Language and power examples

We can see examples of language being used to assert power all around us. Among other reasons, language can be used to make us believe in something or someone, to persuade us to buy something or vote for someone, and to ensure we follow the law and behave as ‘good citizens’.

With that in mind, where do you think we most commonly see language being used to assert power?

Here are a few examples we came up with:

In the media

Advertising

Can you think of any examples you could add to this list?

Language and power in politics

Politics and power (both instrumental and influential power) go hand in hand. Politicians use political rhetoric in their speeches to persuade others to give them power.

Rhetoric: the art of using language effectively and persuasively; therefore, political rhetoric refers to the strategies used to effectively create persuasive arguments in political debates.

Here are some of the strategies used in political rhetoric:

Rule of three - e.g., Tony Blaire’s ‘Education, Education, Education’ policy

Use of 1st person plural pronouns - 'we', 'us'; e.g., the Queen’s use of the royal ‘we’

Hyperbole - exaggeration

Rhetorical questions

Leading questions - e.g., 'you don’t want your country to be run by a clown, do you?'

Changes in tone and intonation

Use of lists

Using imperative verbs - verbs used to create imperative sentences, e.g., ‘act now’ or ‘speak up’

Use of humour

Tautology - saying the same thing twice but using different words to do so, e.g., ‘it’s 7 am in the morning’

Prevarication - not answering direct questions

Can you think of any politicians who regularly use any of these strategies? Do you think they create persuasive arguments?

Language and Power Image of politician StudySmarter

Features of Language and Power

We’ve seen some examples of how language is used to represent power, but let’s take a look at some more language features in both spoken and written discourse that are used to maintain and enforce power.

Lexical choice

Emotive language - e.g., emotive adjectives used in the House of Commons include 'depraved', 'sickening', and 'unimaginable'

Figurative language - e.g., metaphors, similes, and personification

Forms of address - someone with power may refer to others by their first names but expect to be addressed more formally, i.e., 'miss', 'sir', 'ma'am' etc.

Synthetic personalisation - Fairclough (1989) coined the term ‘synthetic personalisation’ to describe how powerful institutes address the mass as individuals to create a feeling of friendliness and reinforce their power.²

Can you identify any of these language features used to maintain and enforce power in the following quote?

And you have changed the face of Congress, the Presidency, and the political process itself. Yes, you, my fellow Americans, have forced the spring. Now we must do the work the season demands.

(Bill Clinton, January 20, 1993)

In Bill Clinton’s first inaugural speech, he utilised synthetic personalisation to address the American people individually and repeatedly used the pronoun ‘you’. He also used figurative language, using spring (the season) as a metaphor for the country moving forward and away from debt.

Interrogatives - asking the listener/reader questions

Imperative sentences - commands or requests, e.g., 'vote now!'

Can you identify any of these grammatical features in the following Coca-Cola advertisement?

Language and power image of coca-cola advert StudySmarter

This advert from Coca-Cola uses the imperative sentence, 'open happiness', to tell the audience what to do and persuade them to buy Coca-Cola's product.

Alliteration - the repetition of letters or sounds

Assonance - the repetition of vowel sounds

Rising and falling intonation

Can you identify any of these phonological features in this UK Conservative Party election campaign slogan?

Strong and stable leadership. (2007)

Here, the alliteration of the letter ' S' makes the slogan more memorable and gives it staying power.

Spoken conversational features

We can examine discourse in conversations to see who holds power based on which language features they use.

Here is a handy chart to help you recognise the dominant and submissive participants in a conversation:

Language and power theories and research

Understanding language and power theories are key to identifying when language is being used to maintain power.

When engaging in conversation, people who have power or wish to have it will utilise specific strategies when talking to help them establish their dominance. Some of these strategies include interrupting others, being polite or impolite, committing face-saving and face-threatening acts, and flouting Grice’s Maxims.

Not sure what some of those terms mean? Don’t worry! This brings us to the key theorists in language and power and their arguments, including:

Fairclough 's Language and Power (1984)

Goffman 's Face Work Theory (1967) and Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory (1987)

Coulthard and Sinclair's Initiation-Response-Feedback Model (1975)

Grice's Conversational Maxims (1975)

In Language and Power (1984), Fairclough explains how language serves as a tool to maintain and create power in society.

Fairclough suggested that many encounters (this is a broad term, encompassing not only conversations but also reading advertisements, for example) are unequal and that the language we use (or are constrained to use) reflects the power structures in society. Fairclough argues that, in a capitalist society, power relations are typically divided into the dominant and dominated classes, i.e., business or landowners and their workers. Fairclough based a lot of his work on Michel Foucault's work on discourse and power.

Fairclough states that we should analyse language to recognise when it is being used by the powerful to persuade or influence us. Fairclough named this analytical practice ' c ritical discourse analysis '.

A key part of critical discourse analysis can be split into two disciplines:

Power in discourse - the lexicon, strategies, and language structures used to create power

Power behind discourse - The sociological and ideological reasons behind who is asserting power over others and why.

Fairclough also discussed the power behind advertising and coined the term ‘synthetic personalisation’ (remember we discussed this earlier!). Synthetic personalisation is a technique that large corporations use to create a sense of friendship between themselves and their potential customers by addressing them on a personal level.

Goffman, Brown, and Levinson

Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson created their Politeness Theory (1987) based on Erving Goffman’s Face Work theory (1967). Face Work refers to the act of preserving one’s ‘face’ and appealing to or preserving another's ‘face’. 3

'Face' is an abstract concept and has nothing to do with your physical face. Goffman recommends thinking of your ‘face’ more like a mask we wear in social situations.

Brown and Levinson stated that the levels of politeness we use with others are often dependent on power relations - the more powerful they are, the more polite we are.

Two important terms to understand here are ‘face-saving acts’ (preventing others from feeling publicly embarrassed) and ‘face-threatening acts’ (behaviour that may embarrass others). Those in less powerful positions are more likely to perform face-saving acts for those with more power.

Sinclair and Coulthard

In 1975, Sinclair and Coulthard introduced the Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) model . 4 The model can be used to describe and highlight power relations between the teacher and the student in a classroom. Sinclair and Coulthard state that the teacher (the one with the power) initiates the discourse by asking a question, the student (the one without the power) gives a response, and the teacher then provides some sort of feedback.

Teacher - 'What did you do this weekend?'

Student - 'I went to the museum.'

Teacher - 'That sounds nice. What did you learn?'

Grice’s conversational maxims , also known as 'The Gricean Maxims' , are based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle , which aims to explain how people achieve effective communication in everyday situations.

In Logic and Conversation (1975), Grice introduced his four conversational maxims. They are:

Maxim of Quality

Maxim of Quantity

Maxim of Relevance

Maxim of Manner

These maxims are based on Grice’s observation that anyone who wished to engage in meaningful conversation usually attempts to be truthful, informative, relevant, and clear.

However, these conversational maxims are not always followed by everyone and are often violated or flouted :

When maxims are violated, they are broken secretly, and it’s usually considered quite serious (such as lying to someone).

When maxims are flouted, this is considered less severe than violating a maxim and is done far more often. Being ironic, using metaphors, pretending to mishear someone, and using vocabulary you know your listener won’t understand are all examples of flouting Grice’s Maxims.

Grice suggested that those with more power, or those wishing to create the illusion of having more power, are more likely to flout Grice’s maxims during conversations.

Grice’s conversational maxims, and the flouting of them to create a sense of power, can be applied to any text that appears conversational, including advertising.

Language and Power - Key takeaways

According to Wareing, there are three main types of power: political power, personal power, and social group power. These types of power can be divided into either instrumental or influential power.

Instrumental power is held by those who have authority over others due to who they are (such as the Queen). On the other hand, influential power is held by those who aim to influence and persuade others (such as politicians and advertisers).

We can see language being used to assert power in the media, the news, advertising, politics, speeches, education, the law, and religion.

Some language features used to convey power include rhetorical questions, imperative sentences, alliteration, the rule of three, emotive language, modal verbs, and synthetic personalisation.

Key theorists include Fairclough, Goffman, Brown, Levinson, Coulthard and Sinclair, and Grice.

L. Thomas & S. Wareing. Language, Society and Power: An Introduction , 1999.
N. Fairclough. Language and Power, 1989.
E. Goffman. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, 1967.
J. Sinclair and M. Coulthard. Towards an Analysis of Discourse: the English used by Teachers and Pupils, 1975.
Fig. 1: Open Happiness (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Happiness.png) by The Coca-Cola Company https://www.coca-cola.com/) in the public domain.

Frequently Asked Questions about Language and Power

--> what is the relationship between language and power.

Language can be used as a way of communicating ideas and for asserting or maintaining power over others. Power in discourse refers to the lexicon, strategies, and language structures used to create power. On the other hand, power behind discourse refers to the sociological and ideological reasons behind who is asserting power over others and why.

--> How do systems of power intersect with language and communication?

Those with power (instrumental and influential) can use language features and strategies, such as using imperative sentences, asking rhetorical questions, synthetic personalisation, and flouting Grice’s maxims to help them maintain or create power over others.

--> Who are the key theorists in language and power?

Some of the main theorists include: Foucault, Fairclough, Goffman, Brown and Levinson, Grice, and Coulthard and Sinclair

--> What is language and power?

Language and power refers to the vocabulary and linguistic strategies people use to assert and maintain power over others.

--> Why is the power of language important?

It's important to understand the power of language so we can recognise when language is being used to persuade or influence our thoughts or actions.

Test your knowledge with multiple choice flashcards

Choose the best definition of discourse in accordance with Foucault.

Fairclough believes that a language is a form of _______?

What is an assertion?

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According to Wareing, what are the three main types of power?

Political, personal, and social group power.

Power can either be instrumental or _________?

Influential.

True or false: politicians typically hold both instrumental and influential power?

What is political rhetoric?

The use of language strategies to effectively create persuasive arguments in political debates.

In a conversation, who is more likely to change the direction of the conversation, the dominant or the submissive participant?

The dominant participant.

Name three phonological language features used to create a sense of power.

Alliteration, assonance, and change in intonation.

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SUMMARY: LANGUAGE AND POWER

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Prep With Harshita

Relationship Between Language and Society

The relationship between language and society is multifaceted, as language plays a crucial role in shaping and reflecting various aspects of identity, power dynamics, and discrimination within a society.

Here are some key points to consider:

Identity: Language is closely intertwined with individual and group identities. The language(s) we speak often reflect our cultural, ethnic, and regional affiliations. It serves as a means of self-expression and helps to define who we are. Language can reinforce a sense of belonging and community among those who share a common linguistic heritage. For example, speaking a particular dialect or language can signify membership in a specific cultural or ethnic group, and it can foster a sense of pride and solidarity within that community.
Power: Language is a tool of power that can both empower and marginalize individuals and groups. Dominant languages associated with political, economic, or cultural power tend to exert influence over marginalized languages and communities. The control and dominance of certain languages can create power imbalances. Those who speak the dominant language often have access to greater opportunities, resources, and social privileges, while those who do not may face marginalization, exclusion, and limited access to education, employment, and public services. Language can be used as a means of asserting authority, maintaining social hierarchies, and perpetuating inequalities.
Discrimination: Language discrimination refers to unfair treatment or exclusion based on an individual’s language use or proficiency. Discrimination can take various forms, including linguistic profiling, language-based stereotypes, or unequal access to opportunities due to language barriers. For example, individuals who speak with a non-standard accent or dialect may be subjected to prejudice or negative assumptions about their intelligence or competence. Language discrimination often intersects with other forms of discrimination, such as racial, ethnic, or national discrimination, amplifying marginalization and reinforcing social inequalities.

Language discrimination can also be institutionalized through language policies that prioritize certain languages over others. Language policies may impose the use of a dominant language in educational, governmental, or business settings, effectively excluding individuals who do not speak the dominant language fluently. Such policies can limit opportunities for social mobility and reinforce existing power structures.

Language Policies: Language policies play a significant role in shaping the linguistic landscape of a society. Governments, educational institutions, and organizations implement language policies to regulate language use, promote linguistic diversity, or impose the dominance of a particular language. Language policies can have both positive and negative impacts on society.

Positive language policies may aim to protect and promote endangered languages, support bilingual education, or recognize linguistic rights. These policies acknowledge the value of diverse linguistic expressions, foster cultural diversity, and promote inclusivity.

However, language policies can also be used as tools of assimilation, oppression, or exclusion. For instance, policies that impose a dominant language as the medium of instruction in schools may suppress the use of minority languages, eroding cultural heritage and undermining the educational opportunities of marginalized communities. Discriminatory language policies can contribute to social divisions, reinforce power imbalances, and hinder the social, political, and economic advancement of affected groups.

Linguistic Relativity: Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, suggests that the language we speak influences our perception of the world and our cognitive processes. Different languages encode and emphasize different concepts, shaping how individuals within a society perceive and interpret reality. For example, languages with grammatical gender may influence perceptions of objects or people based on their assigned gender. Linguistic relativity can impact social dynamics, cultural practices, and worldviews within a society.
Language as a Vehicle for Social Change: Language can also be a powerful tool for social change, resistance, and empowerment. Communities may reclaim and revitalize marginalized languages as a means of asserting their identities and challenging dominant power structures. Linguistic activism seeks to combat language discrimination, promote linguistic rights, and advocate for linguistic diversity. Inclusive

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Article contents

Introduction

Conceptual Approaches to Power

Language–Power Relationships

Power Behind Language

Language Reflects Power

World Englishes and Lingua Franca English

Power of Language

Language Unites and Divides a Nation

Language Creates Influence

Power of Single Words

Oratorical Power

Conversational Power

Narrative Power

Discussion and Future Directions

Further Reading

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4 Language and Power

Introduction

The First Step in Disclosing Power and Language Relations: From Localized Power to a Multiplicity of Nodal Points

The Second Step: The Management of Power Relations in Interaction and the Unequal Distribution of Resources

An Unavoidable Task: The Analysis of the Technologies of Power

Linguistic Normalization

Governmentality and Subjectivation

Concluding Remarks and Review of Key Points

Appendix Transcription conventions (adapted from Schegloff 2007)

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Language and Identity Essay

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Language and Identity: Gender

Language and Identity: Race

Language and Identity: Social Status

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English language and power

Instrumental power

Influential power

Language and power examples

Language and power in politics

Features of Language and Power

Lexical choice

Spoken conversational features

Language and power theories and research

Goffman, Brown, and Levinson

Sinclair and Coulthard

Language and Power - Key takeaways

Frequently Asked Questions about Language and Power

--> How do systems of power intersect with language and communication?

--> Who are the key theorists in language and power?

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Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language