UNIVERSTY OF ILORIN, ILORIN,

KWARA STATE

LEVEL: 200 LEVEL

COURSE TITLE:
LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

FACULTY OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT:
LINGUISTICS AND NIGERIAN LANGUAGES

COURSE CODE: ENG 209

GROUP 5

QUESTION:
LANGUAGE AND POWER

LECTURER-IN-CHARGE:
MR. TAIWO OLORUNTOBA-OJU
 GROUP MEMBERS NAME’S AND MATRIC NUMBERS

-OLADUNJOYE SHARON OYINDAMOLA 29840128JA

-BAMITEKO GABRIEL GBENGA 19/15CB071

-AHMAD IMAM AISHAH 19/15CB048

-AYANWALE ABIGAIL 19/15CB064

-EMEREMNINI CHIKADIBIA MARY-JANE 29777627EF

-UDOISONG EDIKAN 19/15CB173

-ODEYALE DAMILARE MICHAEL 19/15CB109

-BALOGUN TOHEEB DAMILOLA 19/15CB069

-OMONIREGUN IBUKUNOLUWA VERONICA 19/15CB144

-OLATUNJI ABDULMALIK OLUWATOBI 19/15CB136

INTRODUCTION
Language is used in order to describe the world around us as well as to build and
maintain social relationships. In this respect, language is also a potential tool to
exercise power. In totalitarian states, language can constitute an efficient instrument
of power, but even in Democracies, Power is exercised through language. Those
who posses political power and control media can influence language and
determined discourses in society. At the same time, power often provokes opposition
and protest and forms the basis for contrasting discourses. Also, in such cases,
language offers a means to understand and change underlying power structures.
Language is also a unique and powerful means, to influence the individual’s as well
as society’s social, economy and educational conditions. Language can determine
an individual’s or a groups potential to be part of the society as well as play an
important role in creating identity.
The topic explores the relationship between language and power which is exercised
in society, politics, media and art. The research area is inter-disciplinary and includes
cultural theory, semiotics, linguistics, literature studies, translation studies, history
and media studies. The term language is to be understood in a wider sense and
comprises not only spoken and written language, but also other semiotic and
multimodal systems of meaning.

WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
Language is a body of words, and set of methods of combining them (called a
grammar), understood by a community and used as a form of communication. It is
said to be the ability to communicate using words.
According to Sapir, 1921, he defined Language as purely human and non-
instinctive method of communicating the ideas, believe, emotion, by the means of
a system voluntarily produced symbol. There are two keywords that are prominent
in this definition which are “purely human” and “non-instinctive”. Language is
purely human means that it is only human being that have the ability to articulate
words, and when language is non-instinctive simply means language is not
transferable, likewise not an in-built, it rather means that language can only be
studied or learn in the society.
Language is a cognitive process by which we communicate our thoughts and feelings
to others.

WHAT IS POWER?
Power is the right or means to command or control others with the definition of
Merriam Webster 2019 edition.
Power refers to the process of having the authority, resources and the ability to
control and determine the living conditions of people based on their socio-cultural
ideology. Moore and Hendry describe power as ‘…the force in society that gets
things done, and by studying it, we can identify who controls what, and for whose
benefit’. (Moore & Hendry, 1982, p.127).
Power can be enforced through individual such as Judges, Police officers and
politicians whose job give them the right to affect other people’s live. Again, various
roles people play in the society can give them power. For instance, teachers,
employers and parents have powers as a result of their roles they play in the society
to control their subordinates. Thomas and Wareing classified such power as
‘personal power’. (Thomas & Wareing, 2003, p.11).
Power is often demonstrated through language; it can also be achieved through
language. Political power for instance, exists by way of language, through speeches
and debates. Laws are also codified and discussed in language; individuals also give
orders through language. This form of power being implemented through language
is not only in the public sphere but also in individual homes (Thomas & Wareing,
2003, p. 311).

LANGUAGE IS FOR COMMUNICATION AND POWER

Language is a natural human system of conventionalized symbols that have
understood meanings. Through its 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=MC2), 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).

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POWER AND LANGUAGE AMONG THE

GENDER
Societies have preserved certain roles in their oral and traditional customs,
institutional powers and predetermined gender related roles and norms. This gender-
based systems seek to control both sexes. As a result, there are institutional conflicts,
thus, the control of institutional power about who will get to speak and with what
effect, where can the different sexes speak and how. The control of representations
occurs in social, institutions and in verbal interaction, how these are displayed,
communicated and reproduced equally are sources of social power. Coulmas affirms
this by saying that, ‘Sex variation in language behaviour is seen as expressing and
reinforcing power differentials. (Coulmas 2005, p.39).
In most societies ‘men tend to control and dominate women while women struggle
to emancipate. These ‘dominance’ and ‘emancipation’ are observed in our daily
activities, jobs, naming, proverbs, idioms etc. which are all expressed using
language. Therefore, the more power you have, the more language you can use.

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).

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.
CONCLUSION
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 languages–power relationships in a different
light.
Language itself may not be anti- woman (sexist), men and women use language to
achieve certain sociocultural, political, economic and religious purposes as society
expects from each of them. There is a relationship between language, gender and
power. Men and women use language as means to construct their power and to
maintain it. Power may be exercised through coercive (force) means but it can also
be established or maintain mainly using language or discourse, thus, public discourse
(the media), or private discourse. Gender relations are basically power relations and
hence power is demonstrated and achieved through language.
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