LANGUAGE AND C OMMUNICATION

Language involves the meaningful arrangement of

sounds into words according to rules for their combination and
appropriate usage.

Approaches to Language Study in the

Communication Field
Noam Chomsky's theory of
transformational generative grammar emphasized cognitive
aspects of language use, theorizing that linguistic competence
(i.e., the ability to produce proper sentences in any language) is
innate in all humans. This led linguists to study linguistic
performance (i.e., actual sentences) in order to infer what may
be going on in the brain. That is, the study of surface structure
provides information about the deep structure of language.

Some scholars in the communication field take a

cognitive approach to language, examining perceptions of
and attitudes toward a speaker based on the language they
use.

Other researchers employ a descriptive approach (i.e.,

ethnography of speaking) to examine how culture may
influence different aspects of language use. "Discourse
analysis" can be thought of as an umbrella term that refers to a
range of different approaches, including speech act theory,
interaction analysis, and critical approaches. Stephen
Chapter 1 Levinson (1983, p. 286) describes discourse analysis as "a
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series of attempts to extend the techniques so successful in 1. Babbling Stage.
linguistics beyond the unit of the sentence." 2. Holophrastic Stage.
3. Two-word Stage.
4. Telegraphic Speech. .
The Origins of Language
Language is made up of various components. These have
been studied under the rubrics of phonetics, phonemics, syntax,
First, it is claimed by some that language was the result semantics, and pragmatics.
of a pivotal development in the human brain,. Chomsky (1957)
is an important proponent of this theory. It is thought by some,
such as Philip Lieberman (1998), to be a result of the evolution
of the brain, nervous system, and vocal cords. Regarding the Phonetics
character of language itself, some propose that language
"expresses" the character of nature itself, in the manner
that an onomatopoeic word such as "whoosh" captures the
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language.
character of the sound it is designed to name..

Language Acquisition Phonology

This suggests that children are born with the neural Phonology is the study of the sound patterns that are
prerequisites for language. On the basis of the fact that feral found in language.
children (i.e., children who have grown up separated from any
human contact) do not speak any sort of language when they
are found, it has been suggested that social stimulation of Syntax
language is essential. Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman
(1993) have identified the following stages in language
acquisition:
In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and
processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given

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language, usually including word order. The term syntax is also used
to refer to the study of such principles and processes.
The basic unit of grammar is the morpheme. A morpheme is a
minimal linguistic sign: "a phonological form which is arbitrarily
united with a particular meaning and which cannot be analyzed into
simpler elements" (Fromkin and Rodman, 1993, p. 114). Thus, the
word "lady" -"ladylike" consists of two—"lady" and "-like".
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning.
Pragmatics
culture. Sociolinguists and ethnographers of language and
communication have devoted significant attention to the
interplay between language and communication.
Language and Diversity
Communication scholars have given extensive attention
to linguistic markers and their effect on how people are
perceived. Linguistic markers are those features of speech that
are taken as an indicator of a person's social identity. For
example, Robin Lakoff (1975) suggested a number of features
that some take to characterize women's speech.

Language and Relationships

Pragmatics is the study of how words are used, or the
study of signs and symbols. An example of pragmatics is how
the same word can have different meanings in different
settings. An example of pragmatics is the study of how people It has been suggested that different stages in the
react to different symbols. development of relationships are marked by distinct ways of
talking. However, there is debate regarding whether being at a
particular stage of a relationship produces a particular way of
talking or whether talk constructs relationships. Work on
Language and Culture linguistic idioms suggests that couples may use "private
language" in public and in private as a way of both displaying
and creating special integration or "togetherness."
As with theories of context, there is debate regarding
whether culture shapes language or language shapes culture.
Language use is widely thought to be strongly related to

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Chapter 2
Cross-Cultural Misinterpretation
Interpretation occurs when an individual gives meaning
to observations and their relationships; it is the process of
making sense out of perceptions. Interpretation organizes our
experience to guide our behavior. The interpretation is always
based upon the native culture belief and norms and then those
belief becomes a hurdle in cross culture communication. Based
on our experience, we make assumptions about our perceptions
so we will not have to rediscover meanings each time we
encounter similar situations. For example, we make
assumptions about how doors work, based on our experience of
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entering and leaving rooms; thus we do not have to relearn
each time we have to open a door. Similarly, when we smell
smoke, we generally assume there is a fire. We do not have to
stop and wonder if the smoke indicates a fire or a flood. Our
consistent patterns of interpretation help us to act appropriately
and quickly within our day-to-day world. So in this way people
interpret the same in other culture even though their
interpretation to the same can be different.
Cross-Cultural Misevaluation
Even more than perception and interpretation, cultural
conditioning strongly affects evaluation. Evaluation involves
judging whether someone or something is good or bad. Cross-
culturally, we use our own culture as a standard of
measurement, judging that which is like our own culture as
normal and good and that which is different as abnormal and
bad. Our own culture becomes a self-reference criterion: since
no other culture is identical to our own, we judge all other
cultures as inferior and these standard results into
misevaluation, because other culture cannot result the same
standard. Evaluation rarely helps in trying to understand or
communicate with people from another culture.
Barriers to Effective Multicultural
Communication
Obviously, not all cultures are similar. Some find the
daily challenges of responding to another culture to be too
stressful and overwhelming. If possible, such individuals will
choose to return to their cultural origin; if they cannot do so,
various kinds of maladaptive adjustments, or even mental
illness, can occur. People misunderstand each other for a wide
variety of reasons, and these misunderstandings can occur
between people who are culturally similar as well as those who
are different and for the communication to be effective it is
important that message should be decoded with the perception
of the encoder.
However there are some unique issues to consider whenever
from different cultural backgrounds come together:
1. Stereotyping-The most significant barrier to effective
cross-cultural communication is the tendency to
categorise and make assumptions about others based on
identified characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity,
age, religion, nationality socio-economic status
examples as job interviews, teachers, store owners…
More subtle examples include shying away from people
who are culturally different or assuming people will
behave a certain way based on their race gender, place
of origin or position within an organisation. We
stereotype because of our tendency to categorise
everything and everyone around us, so we can interact
with the world more efficiently. The Social Cognition
theory – as Dr. Tyrone A. Holmes describes – states
that stereotyping occurs from natural processes we use
to understand the world around us.
Cognition approach outlines four, largely
unconscious human actions that lead to the creation of
stereotypes:
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A. Formation of “US” and “THEM” Groups
The step in the development of
stereotypes is the categorisation of people in to
two groups: “us” (in-group) and “them” (out-
group). This happens all the time, and we often
don’t realise it. The groups are formed along a
wide variety of diversity dimensions such as
race/ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, religion,
geographic location, family status,
socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and
physical characteristics.
B. Preference for the In-group
The second step consists of the natural
tendency to prefer the group of which one is a
member (in-group). It makes sense that we
would come to prefer the group that we are
constantly a part of. These bonds are usually
drawn based on geography and the community.
C. Illusion of Out-group Homogeneity
The third step is where actual
stereotyping takes place. Simply stated, we tend
to perceive members of out-group to be more
like one another than members of our in-group.
This is probably because we have the
opportunity to directly experience the diversity
within the in-group while we have limited
experience interacting with members of the out-
group.
That is what leads to making
generalisations about members of out-group.
 Some examples include statements like, “those
people all look alike to me”, “they are good
dancers”, “they are great at maths, but not very
good leaders” and “they are such bad drivers”.
D. Expectancy Confirmation
Once we develop stereotypes about
members of different groups, there is a powerful
psychological process at work that leads us to
maintain these stereotypes. This process, known
as expectancy confirmation, consists of the
tendency to use instances when stereotypes are
supported as “proof” that the stereotype is valid.
And once again, this will often happen
unconsciously.
2. Lack of Understanding– Another major barrier is the
lack of understanding that is frequently present between
people from different backgrounds and this barrier is
very common among the cross culture people. Because
people may have differences in values, beliefs, methods
of reasoning, communication styles, work styles, and
personality types, communication difficulties will
occur. In order to avoid this barrier, each party must
have a clear and accurate understanding of the thoughts,
feelings, ideas, values, styles, desires and goals of other
person and many of us are not very effective at getting
to understand the ways in which others may differ.
3. Judgmental Attitudes – The third major barrier
includes the judgmental attitudes of us have when it
comes to interacting with people who are different.
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Because all the time we interact with other culture
people; we set the standard of our culture and compare
with it. Most of us would like to believe we are open
minded and accepting. But in reality, a great many of us
find discomfort with those who are different in terms of
values, beliefs and behaviours. We may then evaluate
them in a negative light. This is the essence of
ethnocentrism, where we evaluate good and bad, right
and wrong relative to how closely the values,
behaviours and ideas of others mirror our own. We
must suspend judgment about their ways, and try to get
to understand them from their perspective. But for most
of us, this is not as easy as it is stated.
Solution to Effective Cross Cultural
Communication
In order to effectively overcome all the barriers which
lead to failure in cross cultural communication, the following
factors should be critically considered:
Observation: It is always best to observe the behaviors of the
group and follow their lead. This observation may help in
understanding the two; High- and Low-Context Cultures:
Communication in high-context cultures depends heavily on
the context, or nonverbal aspects of communication; low-
context cultures depend more on verbally expressed
communication. A highly literate, well-read culture is
considered a low-context culture, as it relies heavily on
information communicated explicitly by words. Thus it can
reduce the possibility of miscommunication.
Interpreters: Get to know the interpreter in advance. Your questions to ensure listeners understand you. The questions
phrasing, accent, pace, and idioms are important to a good may include, ‘Do you have any questions so far’? Do not wait
interpreter. Review technical terms in advance, because the until the end of your presentation. Do not be afraid to use facial
good interpretation will result into positive feedback from the expressions, body language and other signs of emotion to
receiver. Ensure a shared understanding of terms in particular enhance your message.
and your message in general before you speak. Speak slowly
Emotional Responses: Emotional responses will vary among
and clearly. Try to phrase your thoughts into single ideas of
different cultures. As many times expression can reveal those
two sentences; work this out with the interpreter in advance. Be
feeling which words cannot. While some cultures will not react
careful with numbers. Write out important numbers to ensure
emotionally to your messages, others will. Do not become
understanding.
concerned whether there are emotional outbursts during your
Nonverbal Communication: In low-context cultures, such as conversation. Be prepared to compassionately acknowledge the
in academic communities, communication is mostly verbal and emotional impact that your message may have on your
written. Very little information in this culture is communicated listeners.
nonverbally. In high-context cultures, much of the
Watch your body language. There should not be
communication process occurs nonverbally and nonverbal
unnecessary movements. The audience will be checking your
communication involves body language and signs, which may
body language while your words are being converted into their
be different in different cultures. Body language, status,
language. The interpreter will not be able to transmit your
tonality, relationships, the use of silence, and other factors
inflections and tone, so you must find other ways to
communicate meaning. Many cultures determine the
communicate your message. Watch their eyes. Watch to see if
seriousness of your message by your actions and emotions
the interpreter’s words seem to register with them. Avoid
during your delivery. There still more about body gestures.
humour and jokes. Rely on a pleasant facial expression. Use
Verbal Communication: Avoid use of technical phrases, visuals where possible. A picture really is worth a thousand
jargon (words that are commonly understood), and acronyms words; the universal language of pictures can make your job
(it is not much serious if the acronyms are broadly used or easier. Spend time to let the interpreter become acquainted with
commonly known for example, UN is mostly understood as the your visual material.
United Nations).The belief should be left at the time of
communication that what u know necessarily may not be
understand in the same way as u can.So explain the meaning of
technical language and acronyms throughout your conversation
or presentation. Pause between sentences and ask some

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 Tactics for Setting Appropriate Conditions of
Intercultural Communication
Once we have established the prerequisites for
understanding intercultural communication issues, we should
then seek to remove those barriers from the way of effecting
interactions. The When people from diverse cultural
backgrounds come together in one place, the possibility of
someone saying or doing something that could offend another,
increases significantly. However, there are some things you can
do to minimise this possibility.
The major tactics that might be employed for this purpose
fall under two categories:
– Removing language which appears to stereotype
participants
– Reducing violations of cultural rules during
discussions and conversations.
These are some Do’s and Don’ts of Intercultural
Communication:
1. Don’t talk to people in a patronising fashion.
2. Don’t make assumptions about people, particularly
those who are culturally different from you.
3. Don’t assume a culturally different person is an
“expert” about his or her cultural group
4. Don’t assume a culturally different person is
representative of all the members of his or her cultural
group.
5. Don’t ask inappropriate questions or engage in
inappropriate behaviours, especially of a personal
nature.
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6. Don’t try to speak or act like a culturally different
person just to build a relationship.
7. Do talk to others as equals if they are lower on the
organisational chart.
8. Do recognise that cultural differences exist but
confirm these differences before you act on them.
9. Do stick to the tasks at hand until you have
established an effective relationship
10. Do treat every person you come into contact with as
an individual.
Conclusion
It should be clear by now that inter-culturally
competent communicators integrate a wide area of culture-
general knowledge into their behavioural repertoires, and they
are able to apply that knowledge to the specific cultures with
which they interact. If the basic norms of other culture should
be studied before interacting then the hurdles can be removed
upto an extent.
Intercultural communication skills are needed for the
development of intercultural competence .And it is a necessary
part of people’s personal and professional lives. It should also
be clear that intercultural communication is a complex and
challenging activity. Intercultural competence, although
certainly attainable in varying degrees, will elude everyone in
at least some intercultural interactions. Although all hurdles of
cross-culture communication cannot be overcome but these can
be minimized up to an extent.
Chapter 3
 LANGUAGE AND NATIONHOOD: THE
IMPACT OF A NATIONAL LANGUAGE ON OUR
SOCIO-POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT IN GHANA
Introduction
The main objective of the paper is to bring to fore the
extent to which a national language could contribute to national
cohesion amongst Ghanaians thereby fostering socio-political
and economic development of our dear country. The position
of the paper, however, is not to relegate the study of foreign
languages in Ghana to the background but rather to help give
Ghanaians of all origin a true sense of identity and
belongingness otherwise referred to in this paper as the
“Ghanaianhood concept”. It should be noted that the part
language might play in socio-political and economic
development has long intrigued scholars from various
disciplines. However, no clear story has emerged from the
investigations published to date, and the empirical evidence
remains inconclusive. That is to say that though this paper
seem to give premium to the coming up with a national local
language in Ghana, it has equally taken cognizance of the role
foreign languages such the English language play in the
international life of the country. Hence the calling that the
proposed national language, be in a symbiotic relationship
with other already existing foreign languages for the benefit of
all.
Before diving into the heart of our discussion, let us
look at the concept of language. Language
as defined by Herbert (1996: 1), “…is the system of signals,
both linguistic and non-linguistic…”
He continues to say:
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Language is used for doing things. People use it
in everyday conversation for transacting business,
planning meals and vacations, debating politics,
gossiping. Teachers use it for instructing students,
preachers for preaching to parishioners, and
comedians for amusing audiences. Lawyers, judges,
juries, and witnesses use it in carrying out trials,
diplomats in negotiating treaties, and actors in
performing Shakespeare. Novelists, reporters and
scientists rely on the written word to entertain, inform,
and persuade.
From kin and Rodman (1983:4) on their side say:
When you know a language, you can speak and
be understood by others who know that language. This
means you have the capacity to produce sounds that
signify certain meanings and to understand or
interpret the sounds produced by others.
The concept “language” is very difficult to define and
its definition is based on the discipline.
The purpose of our discussion, language, linguistically,
is a universal arbitrary and conventional means by which
humans transmit and share ideas, thoughts, feeling, opinions
and information of all sort from one person to the other.
According to Awute (2013:1), language is at the origin
of all human evolutions in that such evolutions take their
source from the past which of course is made known through
language. Besides, the bible was very emphatic in letting us
know that there is nothing new under the sun. This suggests
that every new thing is grafted on its archetype or prototype.
And the past or archetype is only made known to us through
language in all its forms; be it oral, written,
graphical or pictorial. All we do, as humans, is simply
rebranding or repackaging of past information by adding some
amount of innovation, creativity and novelty.
The power of language in nation building
The power of language in nation building could clearly
be seen in the biblical story of the Babylonians where, feeling
insecure about foreign aggression, the Israelites migrated to
Babylon and decided to build for themselves a city with a
tower, which can reach the heavens so as to protect themselves
against any aggression. But soon after the work started, God, in
his own wisdom, created confusion amongst them by replacing
their common language with different and varying languages
thereby compelling them not to pursuit their aim but rather
scatter around the surface of the earth. This biblical story really
put our topic into perspective in that it categorically tells us that
speaking a common language fosters unity whereas variety of
languages bring about disunity. Reason for which the
Babylonians, having been divided into different language
grouping stop pursuing their common goal (that of building a
tower to protect themselves) and scattered all around the earth.
The Ghanaian Identity
It should be made known here that in Ghana, our
cultural values do, to some great extent, overlap such that, with
the exception of language or dialect, it is practically difficult to
know ones’ native identity or origin. Taken for instance my
name (Awute) though an Ewe by origin, hailing from Blekusu
a village in the Ketu District of the Volta Region, very many
people do misconstrue my identity simply on the basis of my
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name. Some say: “I am a Ga” others say “Gadangme” and to
some “Krobo”. The concept of identifying someone base on his
or her name is a thing of the past. Names, most especially, in
Ghana and beyond cut across ethnic or regional boundaries and
therefore are insignificant in identifying one’s natal origin or
nativity. Names such as Ayittey, Akorkor, Akweley are shared
names between the Ga group and the Ewe group. In fact, those
names even transcend the borders of Ghana to Togo. And so,
names cannot, in any way, betray one’s origin. Again, very
many cultural practices in Ghana do not vary much from one
geographical area to the other hence our ability to organize
event free national activities such as state burial, national
durbar and others. The only divisive force, as far as our identity
as Ghanaians is concerned, is the issue of language or dialect. It
is more or less inherent that people of same language group
mostly see the sense of belongingness or the concept of we
feeling. This conception of we feeling transcend beyond people
of the same dialect or ethnic background to something include
people who share in our dialect or language. So, we often hear,
in the course of conversations and discussions, people ask
questions such as “are you a Dagomba?” “Do you come
Winneba?” and the like. This implies that the questioner first
and foremost is either of the linguistic background used in the
interaction or perfectly understand the language used. And so,
having assessed the linguistic ability and proficiency level of
the one been questioned, the speaker would have no option that
to estimate that the one been questioned is of the linguistic
background used. A situation which might possibly be true or
not. But whichever the case, there is always the sense of ful-
fillment on the part of the ones’ engaged in the interaction and
hence the sense of belongingness. It is clear from the above
discussion that Ghanaians generally have the sense of we
feeling per the fact that we have or share the same cultural
values. Just like the Babylonians, our problem, however, is at
the level of the multiplicity of the very many local languages
and their respective linguistic culture. According to Thomas
(1971: 766),
… African continent, in effect, distinguishes itself from
others by the very large
number of its ethnics and it very many local languages. The
estimations go beyond3000 languages.
So, on very many occasions, when people speak a
language that we probably do not understand,
we turn to make fun of them by making such derogative
statements such as: “Which language is that” “What are you
saying” “I don’t understand that language” and the like. The
multilingual
nature of our country impedes, to some great extent, our socio-
political and national cohesion which of course will be
discussed in the coming paragraphs.
The Effect of Language as in Dialect or Ethnic on our Socio-
political Discourse
According to Hansford (1994: 77),
…of the over sixty languages in Ghana more than fifty could
be called
“minority languages” in terms of the number of
speakers. Akwapim,
Asante, Fante, Ga and Ewe were developed as vernaculars
over the last hundred years by mission and government policy.
Hansford’s statement does not only re-echo but also
reinforces that of Thomas on the plurilingual or multilingual
nature of African countries including Ghana. The multiplicity
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or varieties of languages in the country bring about disunity
and hence the retardation of the country’s developmental
agenda. That is, once a southerner moves from the south to the
north, he or she automatically perceives himself or herself as an
alien and in the same vain, others also identify and treat him or
her as an alien. So, we often hear Ghanaians residing home
saying: “I’m going home” to mean “I am going to my native
home or my hometown” The concept of nationhood is then
relegated to the background and ethnicity or tribalism sets in.
Even within same geographical location, the concept of
“dialectism” comes to fore. No wonder, we witness, these days,
a lot of rejection in our political landscape on dialect, tribal or
ethnic grounds. We also have cases where people believe that
government appointees should be one of theirs or else whoever
is appointed is out rightly rejected no matter his or her
competencies in our developmental agenda. This argument of
rejection extends its boundary to the level of the presidency
where the belief is that the president should of necessity come
from one’s language zone.
The case for instance of all Ewe being tagged as NDC
sympathizers regardless of their political affiliation and the
Ashantis as NPP attest to this. Of course, our argument is
grounded on the fact that very many politicians and citizen
refer to the Volta Region as the world bank of NDC and the
Ashanti Region as the world bank of the NPP as far as national
elections are concerned.
The magnitude of this socio-political division go
beyond social class in that, even presidential aspirant who by
virtue of their political status are supposed to be an
embodiment of the “Ghanaianhood” are seen to make divisive
pronouncement such as “Yɛn Akanfoɔ” literarily “We the
Akans”. In the light of such frivolous dialect, tribal or ethnic
divisions, the country suffers a lot of setbacks as competence
and performance are relegated to the back ground. Again, on
tribal issues, in recent time, we witness the emergence of a
group of people known as The Homeland Study Group
Foundation (HSGF) based in Ho in the Volta Region of Ghana
“agitating for the restoration and declaration of independence
for Western Togoland otherwise referred to as the Trans-Volta
Togoland. For the benefit of those who are not preview to this
piece of historical information, a quick background story is
provided below. It should be noted that the geographical area
under discussion bears a lots of designations due to its
transitional political history. It is sometimes referred to as
British Togoland, Mandate Territory of Togoland,Trust
Territory of Togoland, Western Togoland, Trans-Volta
Togoland among others.
Language and Economic Performance
In our earlier discussion, we asserted that language has
a part to plays in the economic development of the supposed
big nations. Here, we will consider the connection between
language and economic growth. But it must be noted that like
Arcand and Grin (2013:1) our discussion does not seek to
establish the distinct question of whether languages differ from
onea nother in the ways in which they affect development, and
then if one particular language, such as English, influences
development in specific ways than the others notably our most
envisaged national language. But rather, our aim is to
determine whether a national language could possibly affect
our economic growth into the direction we all are hoping for.
To start with, language permeates through all human
activities. And of course, it is really one of the major things
that make the distinction between humans and animals most
especially the like of gorillas and chimpanzees. There is no
12
economic activity without human interaction of sort. Even the
barter system of trading entails some amount of
communication sometimes in the form of sign language.
Ghana, like most African countries, is said to be a
tourist destination. As a matter of fact, tourism plays a
significant role in our national economy. No wonder our
minister of tourism, culture and creative arts, Mme. Catherine
Ablema Afeku and her entourage, having paid a four-day
working visit to the western region is calling for the revamping
of the Ghanaian tourism industry in the wake boosting our
economic growth. On the 20thof June 2017, on
citifmonline.com, she said:
…her ministry has identified the poor
hospitality standards in some of the facilities across the
country, which will be addressed. The government is
partnering some… experts to help address the education and
training deficit we see in the industry. Their modules are going
to help us train our people to exhibit high customer relations
among hoteliers and other related stake holders. Our trained
people will become trainers for others too.
The statement of the minister presupposes that the
Ghanaian tourism industry, for one reason or the other is under
exploited and hence the call for the revitalization of the sector.
Tourism, to some great extent, is directly link to culture in the
perspective when we are talking about our traditional sites and
some traditional festivals and beliefs systems such as
“voduism, afãism,trɔism” in Ewe land and other places.
Besides, it is said that during her visit, “some traditional and
modern managers bemoaned the many taxes and other rates
slapped on them in the face of utility hikes and low patronage”.
This affirms the fact that we do really have some traditional
tourists destinations. We, much, are aware that language is
embedded in culture and so, to best appreciate a tourist event
like our traditional festivals, it is imperative to share in the
language culture of the traditional setting. Taking for instance
the Hogbetsotso festival of the Anlos in the southern Volta of
Ghana, most communication is done in Ewe in the wake of
driving their historical message home. Let us not at this point
think of translation for there are some linguistic concepts that
are not liable to translation from the course language to the
target language. An Ewe statement like “Tɔgbuiwo mie nyiba
nami” can just not be translated accurately in English and so,
any attempt would be a misrepresentation. In like manner, it is
practically impossible, to the best of my knowledge, to
translate the concept of “atom” or “molecule” from English to
any The statement of the minister presupposes that the
Ghanaian tourism industry, for one reason or the other is under
exploited and hence the call for the revitalization of the sector.
Tourism, to some great extent, is directly link to culture in the
perspective when we are talking about our traditional sites and
some traditional festivals and beliefs systems such as
“voduism, afãism,trɔism” in Ewe land and other places.
Besides, it is said that during her visit, “some traditional and
modern managers bemoaned the many taxes and other rates
slapped on them in the face of utility hikes and low patronage”.
This affirms the fact that we do really have some traditional
tourists destinations. We, much, are aware that language is
embedded in culture and so, to best appreciate a tourist event
like our traditional festivals, it is imperative to share in the
language culture of the traditional setting. Taking for instance
the Hogbetsotso festival of the Anlos in the southern Volta of
Ghana, most communication is done in Ewe in the wake of
driving their historical message home. Let us not at this point
think of translation for there are some linguistic concepts that
are not liable to translation from the course language to the
target language. An Ewe statement like “Tɔ gbuiwo mie nyiba
13
nami” can just not be translated accurately in English and so,
any attempt would be a misrepresentation. In like manner, it is
practically impossible, to the best of my knowledge, to
translate the concept of “atom” or “molecule” from English to
any of our Ghanaian languages let alone to talk of translating
concept like “protons and electrons”. Awute (2013:1) citing
Lado (1961:13) says that “…every language is a unique system
of communication, self-contained within its own structure”.
That is to say that not only does each language have its
linguistic culture (combination of alphabets to form words and
how those words are used to convey meaning) but also that
each language has its language culture (what a word represents
or indicates). For example, the word “va” means “ go” in
French but means directly the contrary in Ewe. In Ewe, “va”
means “come”. It should then be noted that language is such
that it represents or designates what is perceivable within the
linguistic set up reason for which our local languages are
limited in the field of science most especially chemistry as
demonstrated earlier.
Again, it must be underscored that culture vary from
one geographical area to the other and so, when the expatriate
come, our artists and craftsmen are not able to best
communicate the symbolic orientation of our art works better
and this really impedes to some great extent marketing our
products for economic growth. With the above discussion, it is
evident, that a section of our tourism industry would have been
best marketed in the source language rather than the
approximations we make in English in the wake of carrying or
conveying the messages attached to these tourism events or art
works across.
According to Arcand and Grin (2013:3)We therefore
deliberately put aside a wide range of perfectly legitimate
questions regarding the interplay between language and
economic activity, including some that are likely to be
connected with development. For example, we do not address
the internal communication practices of
businesses that may ‘develop’ more or less
successfully depending on
the languages in which this internal communication
takes place. This is not to deny that internal communication
practices within firms may be one conduit through which
language impacts on their economic performance and, by way
of consequence, on aggregate measures of development.
However, our main concern is on establishing the plausibility
and magnitude of a link between language on the one hand, and
development on the other hand,
Empowering the Youth for Economic
Development
Government, all over the years, have aimed at
empowering the youth with employable skills so as to ensure
the economic growth of the country. If that is, why do we still
have a lot of unemployed youth in our society? Are our youth
employment modules not feasible? Indeed youth employment
programmes go beyond sitting down on national television in
Accra and Kumasi to organize seminars, workshops and
conferences most especially using big English grammar and
vocabulary. Youth employment programmes, as it were, entail
reaching out to the economically deprived mostly found in
remote communities. Those concern are mostly the uneducated
youth of varying linguistic background and so the use of
English as share language in this context remains highly
questionable. And this is explicit in Ngugi Wa
Thiongo(1985:119) statement:
The choice of language and the use to which it is put
are central to people’s definition of itself in relation to its
14
natural and social environment, indeed, in relation to the entire
universe.
Given the situation, we also cannot think of using
anyone of our Ghanaian languages for this would imply
sidelining a cross section of our target group. Going from
village to village would have been more prudent for the
likelihood of reaching out to the vast majority of unemployed
youth could then have been much more assured. But that, on
the other hand, is practically impossible considering the fact
that it would truly be capital intensive. Looking at the above
arguments, one could not but think of the role of a national
language in our socio-economic and developmental strides.
English as a Lingual Franca
The advent of the English language in Ghana started
with the history of colonization. And so, like any other foreign
language in Africa, the English language is closely tied to slave
trade. It all started with the missionaries coming to Africa to
spread the gospel. But on reaching here, they realized that the
African continent, though rich in resources of all kinds, was
undeveloped and its people uncivilized and primitive. So,
contrary to the dictates of the very gospel which they profess,
they quickly turn themselves, first and foremost into slave
masters and subsequently to the over-lord of the land. In the
wake to establish themselves on the continent and to perpetuate
their diabolic acts (that of better enslaving Africans and to
exploit their mineral resources), they opened up some few
schools so as to train their children in order that these little
ones of theirs would not be deracinated (lost their root). They
later on extended the doors of their schools to the slave
masters, mostly our own people who are trained in foreign
languages so that they could better serve the colonial masters.
With the passage of time and to consolidate their dominance
over our people, the opened up more of what was then called
mission schools. A place where we are made to believe that we
are less of humans and needed to be ruled. Premium is given to
their culture and tradition at the expense of ours. Indeed, to
them, there is nothing good in Africans. Not even in their
linguistic systems and hence the need to impose on them the
English language. Hitherto, every formal communication and
learning in the school setting was done in English language.
The mission schools opened up at an alarming rate covering
our entire territory and virtually became the official language
use in administering the country. It should be on record that
though African country had their independence, the leadership
at the time saw no need to reverse the linguistic order of the
day. This is because most of them had foreign education and
so, they were linguistically high indoctrinated. All they crave
for, during independence, was socio-political and economic
emancipation not considering our linguistic emancipation
which of course would have been the true reflection of our total
liberation from colonialism and slavery.
The Effect of English as a Lingual Franca
Although the English language remains, undoubtedly, a
language of inter-regional and inter-ethnical exchange and
relation, a close look at the ideology that established it in the
country as a lingual Franca leaves much to be desired. To begin
with, Africans per our history and culture area united people in
the sense that communal living is at the base of our lives. This
is amply demonstrated in the many empires and dynasties we
do have in Africa. We can talk of the Ghana empire, the Mali
empire, the Songhai empire, the Ashanti Kingdom, the Bongo
kingdom among others. These are vast territories that share a
15
common cultural values among which is the language they
speak. But during the colonial era, the Europeans, in the wake
of achieving their parochial interest, first and foremost re-
demarcated the continent without taken into account our socio-
linguistic grouping. That is, people of same language
background are split into different geographical settings
referred to as countries. Such that, the Akan group is shared
between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. So in Ghana, we talk of
Ashantis whereas in Côte d’Ivoire, we talk of Baoulé. The
migration story of the Baoulé reveals indeed their origin.
Again, they put in place political, economic and ideological
systems that sought to ensure the total dominance and
exploitation of Africans to their own benefits. Having
succeeded in splitting the once united groups into smaller ones,
they quickly, drew our attention to the multiplicity of our many
and varying languages and their implication on national
development. And in their quest to administer the country, they
forcibly imposed their language on us making us believe that it
was
the way to go in order to get unified. The use of the colonial
master’s language, according to them, answers a major
preoccupying issue: that of bringing us together as Ghanaians
under a common linguistic umbrella. But, indeed, has the
imposition of their language helped solved our linguistic
unification problems? Is the northern region not riddled with
conflicts over ethnicity? We mean both inter and intra ethnic
conflicts. Do we not still have tribal and ethnic issues as
people? Is the English language not taught and spoken in
Konkomba and Nanumba lands? Has the use of the English
language eroded away our regional and tribal boundaries as a
people? In fact, in the northern region alone, one could count
not less than four (4) ethnic based conflicts: The Konkombas
and Nanumbas in Bimbilla, that of the Nawuris vrs Gonjas, the
Nawuris in Kpandai and Nawuris in Balai, and that of the
Dagombas (the Adani vrs Abudu gates). Why then should the
English language be referred to as a unifier? Those are really
mind boggling questions regarding the use of the English
language in our Ghanaian context.
Generally, languages could be classified into three main
groups depending on their socio-linguistic use:
-an ethnic, is more or less a shared language between
people of same socio-cultural background ( Ewe, Twi, Dagbani
etc). An ethnic normally has dialects: various linguistic
realization of the same language source. Eg the Asante Twi and
the Akwapim Twi-
-a national language, is a shared language by people
within the same territory (not necessary sharing the same socio-
cultural values: Wolof, Swahili, Mandarin etc)-
-an international language which is a language shared
among different territories(English, French etc) for the purpose
of cross border communication and international relation.
The misapplication of one language group for the other
can really create a lot of socio-linguistic and administrative
problems. This is precisely the case of the English language in
Ghana. The use of the English language at the national level
appears a bit problematic in that it marginalizes across section
of the populace to the detriment of national cohesion. On this
account, Nadjir(2003: 36) never miss words in saying that:
The maternal speech does not permit any grip on social
life: it does not, [in any way], cross any administrative counter.
“all bureaucratic procedures, all judicial procedures, all
16
technological procedures do only understand and use the
colonial masters’ language…
It should, however, be noted that the English or any
other international language is and would be apt for our
international relation and business. Without such international
languages, we would not have our place among our equals.
National language: the way to go
The concept of having national language in our
Ghanaian context, though laudable, appears really difficult per
the multilingual nature of our country. Which one of our
languages should we adopt as a national language always
remains the question? Another point well noting, is the fact that
there is always a misconception about the creation of a
language. We see the creation of a language from a historical
perspective because we believe that a language is a lay down
linguistic instrument handed over from one generation to the
other. Language, on the contrary, is simply a conventional and
arbitrary system of communication that must follow require
linguistic procedures as outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure
(1916:). Thus, the envisioned language must have linguistic
sign (concept/ notion), signified (sound impression) and
signifier (that which is the object of meaning or reference).
Taking for instance the concept “church”. The sound image or
impression in our minds is of the logo† (cross) representing
church, and through our language system we know how that
image sounds mentally. We know the concept or meaning
associated with this “sound impression” that “church” is a
place of Christian worship. For ease of communication, this is
how a language is structured such that the encoder and the
decoder would all have a common reference or meaning.
 To be able to put in place a national language, we
cannot but agree with the views of Agyeman AKEB
(2003:153) on the creation of our national language. According
to him:
Here also, the first phase of naming is to be effective.
Thereafter, there shall bea national committee for a round table
for the creation of the National Language. The logical and
reasonable criteria shall then be accepted for the definition of
all the compulsory elements, which qualify the parts of speech
of the Language to becalled Ghanny. Then, using any complete
bilingual Dictionary as a model, the committee will proceed in
choosing words from all Ghanaian languages, to be classified
respectively as nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. With a
minimum number of vocabularies in all the parts of speech in
Ghanny, by a common
agreement a Ghanny Dictionary shall be compiled as
we already have for some of the Ghanaian languages. This will
be followed by the setting up of a Ghanny Grammar.
Obviously, for both methods, the International Phonetic
Alphabet shall be retained as binding on matters of phonetics in
Ghanny. These could be, among others, the basic methods for
the creation of a National Language for Ghana.
Certainly, if the Government accepts to play its part in
accepting any proposition from committees or individuals,
where the means or the experts are lacking in particular fields,
International assistance could be sought and obtained from
Europe or any parts of the world.
Though, we perfectly agree with AKEB’s proposition,
it should be noted that he only considered the linguistic aspect
of the issue without diving deep into the cultural dimension of
the issue under discussion. In choosing the proposed Ghanny,
linguists and experts in the field of language creation should
17
take cognizance of regional and cultural balance. By that, we
mean all language groups should be fairly represented in order
to avert regional and cultural conflict that might arise out of the
creation of such a language. That is to say, all the languages
taught and written in our schools must constitute a certain
percentage of the new language. Here, the concept of dialect
should be out of the question and premium given to ethnic.
Taking for instance, the Ewe group, though there are many
varieties of the Ewe language, the Anlo dialect is the written
one. And that, over the years, has not been much questioned.
And so, the use of the Anlo dialect in the Ghanny, would
represent the Ewe quota regardless of the varieties.
Having created the Ghanny, government would again
come out with the policy of its dissemination. It should not be
just a language of school and offices but also the language of
home. It should be a culture that on certain days of the week,
only Ghanny should be spoken. And it should be, just like
others school subject, examinable on frequent basis and prices
awarded or given to deserving students. By so doing, the
language would spread in no time.
Conclusion
For the total emancipation of our country and by
extension the African continent, and for our own demographic
cohesion, Africans must remain Africans. We must, as a matter
of urgency, stop pretending to be the carbon copy of people
whose cultural values and ideologies do not converge with
ours. Reason for which, God in his own wisdom and power
created us differently. Some black with their own values and
some white with their values. Indeed, it is most regret able and
mind boggling that a continent like Africa is now battling with
ill values that are entire lyalien to our culture: homo sexualism,
arm robber, corruption among others.
It is now time for us to once again be Africans and to
expect that our country comes up with a national language of
our own. On this account, Nadjir (2003: 43) says:
…it is time to expect that this geographical region, one
day, speaks a language authentically west African. The
conditions of such a hope can be reunited because there still
exist, today, great languages which had been, not too long in
the past, instruments of communication of great west African
empires and kingdoms: the Bambara language, the Fufulde
language, the Dioula language, the Moore language, the Asante
language, the Fon language, the Hausa, etc. It would just be a
question of organizing them; the one that would impose itself
and would be accepted by the regional ethnic community
would then be the authentic west African official language.
He continued by saying that:
In order to get there, the good intensions of
linguists and scientist is probably note nough. There must
certainly be a lot of courage and political will on the side of
every west African state.
The Ghanny as we are proposing should be a group of
related Ghanaian languages, but in many cases mutually
unintelligible. It’s coming to being has the potency of making
us loose track of our ethnic and tribal identity thereby fostering
amongst us peace, unity and national cohesion in all its forms.
Besides, history tells us that we all virtually migrated from a
place to our current settlements. Why then do we not recognize
ourselves as immigrants in Ghana but natives? In like manner,
18
with the passage of time, our national language would give a
new identity: that of Ghanaian hood.
Chapter 4
Language, Religion, and the Politics
of Difference
Language and religion are arguably the two most
socially and politically consequential domains of cultural
difference in the modern world. The study of the political
accommodation of cultural difference— or what might be
called the political sociology of multiculturalism— would
therefore seem to require sustained attention to both.
Yet there have been few efforts to compare language
and religion, the outstanding exception— and an important
inspiration for this chapter— being a paper by Aristide Zolberg
and LittWoon Long (1999). Language and religion are of
course often discussed together in the literatures on ethnicity,
nationalism, minority rights, and multiculturalism, but most
such discussions involve passing juxtaposition rather than
sustained comparison. And the more sustained discussions (see
notably Bauböck 2002) tend to be normative rather than
empirical.
It might be suggested that the lack of sustained
comparison is not surprising since language and religion are
simply not comparable. I do not want to get sidetracked here by
a discussion of the meaning of comparison or the conditions of
comparability. My interests are substantive, not
methodological. One can certainly construe religion and
language in such a way that they are not comparable. If one
were to define religion in terms of beliefs and rituals, for
example, there would be little leverage for comparison. And
obviously religion (at least “or ganized religion”) has an
organizational dimension and a structure of authority that
language lacks. But I want to argue that one can nonetheless
construe language and religion in a way that makes comparison
both possible and fruitful.
My strategy for doing so is to begin by aligning
language and religion, provisionally, with ethnicity and
nationhood and by sketching fi ve ways in which language and
religion are both similar to and similarly intertwined with
ethnicity and nationhood. I will then identify some differences
between language and religion and between modes of
institutionalization of linguistic and religious pluralism in
contemporary liberal societies; and I will draw out their
implications for the politics of difference.
These implications— to anticipate— are ambivalent.
Language is in certain respects more chronically and
inescapably politicized today than religion is. The rules and
practices governing the language of public life cannot help
massively advantaging people with certain language
repertoires, while disadvantaging others. Po litical and
economic developments during the past several centuries have
made language a crucial form of cultural capital and a key
terrain of political struggle. During the same period, religion
has become for many a more individual, private, and subjective
affair.
Yet religion resists full relegation to the private sphere,
and recent decades have seen a dramatic resurgence of public
religious claims- making. Religious pluralism tends to be more
intergeneration ally robust and more deeply institutionalized
than linguistic pluralism in contemporary liberal societies, and
it entails deeper and more divisive forms of diversity. The
upshot, I suggest, is that the most vexed and contentious
19
conundrums of multiculturalism are increasingly grounded in
the deep diversity of religious worldviews and ways of life.
This recent tendency for religion to displace language as the
cutting edge of contention over the political accommodation of
cultural difference represents a striking reversal of the longer
term historical pro cess through which language had earlier
displaced religion as the key terrain of contention.
Again, it must be underscored that culture vary from
one geographical area to the other and so, when the expatriate
come, our artists and craftsmen are not able to best
communicate the symbolic orientation of our art works better
and this really impedes to some great extent marketing our
products for economic growth. With the above discussion, it is
evident, that a section of our tourism industry would have been
best marketed in the source language rather than the
approximations we make in English in the wake of carrying or
conveying the messages attached to these tourism events or art
works across.
According to Arcand and Grin (2013:3)We
therefore deliberately put aside a wide range of perfectly
legitimate questions regarding the interplay between language
and economic activity, including some that are likely to be
connected with development. For example, we do not address
the internal communication practices of businesses that may
‘develop’ more or less successfully depending on the languages
in which this internal communication takes place. This is not to
deny that internal communication practices within firms may
be one conduit through which language impacts on their
economic performance and, by way of consequence, on
aggregate measures of development. However, our main
concern is on establishing the plausibility and magnitude of a
link between language on the one hand, and development on
the other hand,

Language and Religion in Relation to
Ethnicity and Nationhood
Language and religion can be aligned with ethnicity and
nationalism in several respects. First, both language and
religion are domains of categorically differentiated cultural
practice that simultaneously unite and divide. By “categorically
differentiated,” I mean that language and religion are
understood by participants and observers alike as partitioned
into discrete categories rather than as a continuous spectrum of
variation. (That they are so understood is of course a product of
history and politics, not least a history and politics of
objectification, individuation, and boundary drawing that have
carved out distinct “languages” from dialect continua and
constructed and institutionalized distinct “religions” from fluid
and varying sets of practices.)2 In pop u lar understandings,
both language and religion sort people into distinct, bounded,
and largely self- reproducing “communities”; in this respect
they are both analogous to ethnic groups and nations and
variously intertwined with them.
Second, language and religion are basic sources and
forms of social, cultural, and politicalidentification. They are
ways of identifying oneself and others, construing sameness
and difference, and naming fundamental social groups.
Language and religion are again both analogous to ethnicity
and nationalism in this respect and pervasively intertwined
with them. Language, religion, or both are generally
understood as central to or even constitutive of most ethnic and
national identifications, and they frequently serve as the key
diacritical markers, emblems, or symbols of such
identifications.
20
Third, the family is a primary site of linguistic and
religious socialization, as it is of ethnic and national
socialization. Indeed language and religion are ordinarily more
central to primary socialization in the family than are ethnicity
and nationality. Language and religion are therefore often
deeply taken- for- granted and embodied identifications, and
both are routinely represented as primordial.
Fourth, however, neither religion nor language is in fact
primordial or fixed. Like ethnicity and nationhood, religion and
language are powerfully shaped by political, economic, and
cultural pro cesses, and they change as circumstances change.
From an individual point of view, as Benedict Anderson said of
nations, both religions and languages are “joinable in time”
(1991: 145); and in the contemporary world, both are
increasingly chosen rather than given. This shift is particularly
marked for religion. Although initial religious identifications
continue to be inherited, modalities and degrees of religious
engagement can no longer be taken for granted, but— in the
West at least— are increasingly reflexively negotiated and
embraced (or rejected) (see, for example, Taylor 2007).
Fifth, many of the claims made in the name of religious
or linguistic groups are similar to— and again, also intertwined
with— claims made in the name of ethnic groups or nations.
These include claims for economic resources, symbolic
recognition, equal representation, cultural reproduction, and
political autonomy.
In all these respects, language and religion are both
similar to ethnicity and nationalism and similarly intertwined
with them. This has led many scholars of ethnicity to treat
language and religion— implicitly or explicitly— as
functionally equivalent. Indeed ethnicity was constituted as an
object of study precisely by abstracting from the specificities of
language, religion, and other a scriptive markers such as
phenotype, region of origin, and customary mode of livelihood.
In the words of Joseph Rothschild, whose 1981 study Ethno
politics was one of the first, and remains one of the best, to
survey the field, it would be pointless to “separate out the
notion of ethnic consciousness, solidarity, and assertiveness
from religious, linguistic, racial, and other so- called primordial
foci of consciousness, solidarity, and assertiveness.” If this
were to be done, “it is difficult to see what precisely would be
left to, or meant by, the residual notion of ethnicity and ethnic
groups” (9; cf. Geertz 1963: 109ff; Horowitz 1985: 41).
The call to abstract from cultural content was given its
strongest formulation by Fredrik Barth (1969), who argued that
the study of ethnicity should focus on the nature and dynamics
of ethnic boundaries, not on what he somewhat dismissively
called the “cultural stuff” these boundaries enclose. This
perspective on ethnicity has been immensely fruitful, and it has
been important for my own work. But it is also inevitably
flattening since it neglects, by design, the specific cultural
practices, understandings, and institutions that are implicated in
the construction and working of ethnic identities and
boundaries.
It is not fruitful, I believe, to talk about multiculturalism
or the politics of difference in terms of highly generalized
notions of ethnicity, culture, identity, or difference. It is
necessary instead to attend to the specific logic and properties
— the specific “affordances”— of differing modes of cultural
difference. So in this chapter, following the lead of scholars
such as Stephen Cornell (1996) and Richard Jenkins (1997:
chapter 8), I want to return the “cultural stuff”— specifically
language and religion— to the center of analytical attention.
I want to register two caveats, however, about doing so.
First, “cultural stuff” is potentially misleading if it is taken to
imply an opposition between culture and social organization. I
21
treat language and religion not only as cultural forms but also
as modes of social organization and media of interaction.
Second, the specific configuration of the contemporary politics
of difference has been shaped not only by the intrinsic
properties of language and religion— not only by the cultural
and social- organizational “stuff,” considered as an a historical
constant— but also, and indeed more profoundly, by the
specific historical trajectories through which states understood
as “liberal” and “national” emerged, and were transformed, in
and through their confrontation first with religious and later
with linguistic heterogeneity.
Before proceeding further, it is worth underscoring that
religion is a much more elusive analytical object than language.
For all their complexity, linguistic phenomena have a
definiteness and regularity that religious phenomena lack. We
know what we are talking about when we talk about language,
but the same cannot be said for religion. It is not accidental that
linguistics is a relatively well- defined discipline, while
religious studies is a loose congeries of undertakings. Some
have argued that religion is meaningless or useless as an
analytical category (see, for example, Bloch 1996); I’m not
aware that anyone has made this claim about language.
While fully acknowledging that “religion” is a
problematic and deeply contested category— contested both as
a category of analysis and as a category of practice— I do not
want to enter here into the debate about the category. Since the
scope of my argument is limited to contemporary liberal
polities, I am content to work here with a relatively un
reflexive, commonsense category of “religion” (cf. Casanova
2009: 5), limiting my attention primarily to what we call
“organized religion,” and within that field primarily to the
Abrahamic religions.
 Trajectories of Politicization and Depoliticization
There are good reasons for expecting language to be
more deeply and chronically politicized than religion under
modern conditions. Language, after all, is a universal and
pervasive medium of social life, while religion is not. If one
defines religion broadly enough, to be sure, then religion too
can be seen as a universal social phenomenon. But it is not
universal in the same way.5 Language is a pervasive,
inescapable medium of social interaction; religion is not.6
Moreover, language is a necessary medium of public as well as
private life. It is an inescapable medium of public discourse,
government, administration, law, courts, education, media, and
public signage. However one defines religion, it cannot be said
to be an inescapable medium or necessary ground of action in
any of these domains.
Public life can in principle be areligious, but it cannot
be alinguistic. The modern state is characterized by direct rule,
intensive interaction with citizens, universal public education,
and a public sector that provides large numbers of jobs. As a
result, the rules and practices that govern the language of
public life directly affect the material and ideal interests of
people with differing language repertoires (Zolberg and Long
1999: 21). This holds a fortiori in an economic context in
which work is increasingly “semantic and communicative
rather than physical” (Gellner 1997: 85), involving the
manipulation of meanings, not of things. Language is therefore
chronically and pervasively politicized in linguistically
heterogeneous modern societies (Patten and Kymlicka 2003;
May 2001).
Religion is also politicized, but it is politicized in
different ways and for different reasons. The state must
privilege a particular language or set of languages, but it need
22
not privilege a particular religion, at least not in the same way
and not to the same degree. Complete neutrality, to be sure, is
now widely recognized as a myth (Bader 2007: 82ff), not least
because the state cannot help but take a position on the
question of what counts as “religion.”7 Moreover, one can
easily identify pervasive traces of Christianity in the public life
of Western liberal democracies, even in those with the
strongest traditions of separation of church and state or of
laicité (Alba 2005). One need think only of such taken- for-
granted frameworks as the reckoning of dates according to the
Christian calendar, the organization of holidays, or the
privileging of Sunday as a day of rest— the domain of what
Torpey (2010) calls “latent religiosity.” Yet contemporary
liberal polities— even those that still have some kind of
established church, notably the UK and Scandinavia (apart
from Sweden)— have made substantial, though contested,
moves in the direction of a more neutral stance toward
differing religions. Such moves have no counterpart in the
domain of language. The state can approach neutrality with
respect to religion, even if such moves are vulnerable to
political pressures;8 but it cannot even approach neutrality with
respect to language (Zolberg and Long 1999: 21; Bauböck
2002: 175– 176).
There is a second reason for thinking that language
should be more deeply and chronically politicized than
religion. According to secularization theory, modernity has
entailed the progressive privatization and hence the
depoliticization of religion. Events of the past three de cades
have made simplistic versions of secularization theory ripe for
criticism. But as several leading analysts of religion have
argued, secularization theory is more complex and interesting
than many critics suggest, and it cannot be dismissed out of
hand.9 For many in the modern world, religion has indeed
become a more individual, subjective, and private experience.
To the extent that this is the case, religion indeed becomes
depoliticized, and religious pluralism can flourish in the private
realm without generating conflicts in the public sphere. Over
the course of the past several centuries, religion has indeed
become much less central to public life and less politically
contentious in the West, while language has become much
more central and more contentious (Rothschild 1981: 88).
Yet while secularization theory captures an important
long- term trend, a powerful medium- term trend works in the
other direction, toward the deprivatization and therefore the
repoliticization of religion (Casanova 1994). On a time scale of
de cades rather than centuries, conflicts over religion have
intensified, while conflicts over language, as I argue below,
have eased.10 As a result, while religion is not necessarily,
chronically, and pervasively politicized the way language is,
the challenges posed by religious pluralism today— or at least
by some forms of religious pluralism— tend to be more
complex and diffi cult than those posed by linguistic pluralism.
I want to develop this argument in two stages. I will
begin by arguing that religious pluralism tends to be more
robust than linguistic pluralism in contemporary liberal
societies and polities. I will then argue that religious pluralism
entails deeper and more divisive forms of diversity.
The Robustness of Religious Pluralism
The greater robustness of religious than linguistic
pluralism results from the differing ways religious and
linguistic pluralism are generated, reproduced, and
institutionalized in contemporary liberal societies. I will
consider each in turn, starting with the generation of pluralism,
23
then moving on to address its reproduction and
institutionalization.
Conquest, colonization, and especially (in the
contemporary world) migration generate religious and
linguistic pluralism in similar ways, by importing it from
without. But religious pluralism is also generated from within.
I’m not concerned here with relatively rare cases of religious
splits and foundings, though historically these have been
important internal sources of religious pluralism. I’m
concerned rather with routine individuallevel changes in
religious affiliation and identity Individuals routinely change
their linguistic repertoires as well. But they do so in differing
ways and with differing consequences. For adults, at least,
language change is mainly additive, though there may of
course be some attrition of proficiency in languages that are
seldom used. Religious change, on the other hand, is often
substitutive and transformative. When adults add a new
language to an existing repertory of languages, this may inflect
their identity, but it is unlikely to transform it. Yet when they
convert from one religion to another, or from one form of
religious engagement to another, this can involve a basic
transformation of identity (Snow and Machalek 1984). People
do not ordinarily simply add a new religion to a repertory of
religions, notwithstanding the flourishing of various forms of
hybridity and syncretism, nor do they ordinarily “convert” from
one language to another.
For children of immigrants, to be sure, language change
is often substitutive rather than additive; but this reduces
heterogeneity in the receiving country, while religious
conversion often increases it. Conversion can also reduce
heterogeneity, and some immigrant groups to the United States
— Taiwanese, for example— exhibit high rates of conversion
to Christianity. But pressures and incentives for conversion to
the prevailing religion are on the whole relatively weak in
contemporary liberal societies, while incentives to learn the
prevailing language are strong. A whole series of factors, in
addition to immigration, promote religious pluralization in
contemporary liberal societies: new religious movements,
organized proselytism, transnational religious networks, an
open religious marketplace, and a general climate of spiritual
experimentation. There are no analogous forces generating
linguistic pluralization from within.
So religious conversion, broadly understood, is an
important source of politically significant cultural
heterogeneity, while individual- level language change is not.
In contemporary liberal societies, new forms and degrees of
linguistic pluralism are almost exclusively imported (through
immigration), while new forms and degrees of religious
pluralism are both imported and endogenously generated
through conversion.
The second reason for the greater robustness of
religious than linguistic pluralism is that religious pluralism is
more easily reproduced. Here I shift my perspective from
intragenerational to intergenerational change and reproduction.
And I adopt a stylized— and of course grossly oversimplified
— contrast between pre-modern and modern liberal societies.
In pre-modern societies, linguistic pluralism was more
or less self reproducing. Linguistic socialization occurred in
families and local communities, and it did not require any
specialized apparatus. Political authorities made no effort to
impose linguistic homogeneity (though they often did impose
religious homogeneity).
In contemporary liberal societies, the situation is
reversed: it is now religious pluralism that is more or less self-
reproducing. Religious socialization occurs in families and
local religious communities, and political authorities make no
24
effort to impose religious homogeneity. But linguistic
reproduction now requires what Gellner (1983: chapter 3)
called exosocialization. It requires prolonged and expensive
schooling on a scale that only the state is ordinarily in a
position to provide. So the state is much more central to
linguistic than to religious reproduction.
Children often acquire basic competence in a minority
language from their parents and extended families, and this can
be reinforced by minoritylanguage media. But without
comprehensive schooling in that language— and I mean
schooling with that language as the medium of instruction, not
simply as the object of instruction— it is diffi cult for the
minority language to be fully reproduced. Some countries with
long- established, territorially concentrated linguistic minorities
do provide comprehensive minority- language schooling, but
even this is not sufficient to ensure full reproduction. Minority-
language populations are shrinking even where such schooling
is available— as it is for the Swedish minority in Finland and
the Hungarian minority in Romania. This happens as some
children opt out of minority- language school systems and as
intermarriage often leads to intergenerational assimilation
(Brubaker et al. 2006: 297– 298, 370– 371).
Beyond comprehensive minority- language schooling, a
linguistic regime that constrains people’s choices may be
necessary to ensure the reproduction of minority languages.
This is what Philippe Van Parijs (2009: 163ff) has called a
“linguistic territoriality regime.” An example is the Quebec
policy that restricts who can attend English- language schools
(and notably requires almost all new immigrants to attend
Francophone schools). This underscores the crucial role of the
state in linguistic reproduction.
 Beyond comprehensive minority- language schooling, a
linguistic regime that constrains people’s choices may be
necessary to ensure the reproduction of minority languages.
This is what Philippe Van Parijs (2009: 163ff) has called a
“linguistic territoriality regime.” An example is the Quebec
policy that restricts who can attend English- language schools
(and notably requires almost all new immigrants to attend
Francophone schools). This underscores the crucial role of the
state in linguistic reproduction.
This argument might seem to be blatantly contradicted
by the sharp increase in linguistic heterogeneity in the United
States and other countries of immigration that do not provide
comprehensive minority- language schooling or other strong
state support for immigrant languages. Immigration does of
course generally increase linguistic heterogeneity, and the
effect is intensified when immigrants cluster in metropolitan
areas that sustain dense networks of mother- tongue
institutions. But this speaks to the generation of pluralism, not
to its reproduction.
Continuing large- scale immigration masks substantial
intergenerational linguistic assimilation. The Fishman model of
language shift among second- and third- generation
immigrants, set forth a half century ago (Fishman 1966;
Veltman 1983), remains valid in its broad outlines. Thickening
transnational ties, weakening assimilationist pressures, and the
growth of substantial foreign- language media markets may
have slowed down the pro cess, at least for some groups. As
Richard Alba and others have shown, this is notably the case
for the descendants of Spanish- speaking immigrants in the
United States. But even in this group, a majority of the third
generation speak only En glish at home (Alba et al. 2002).11
Samuel Huntington’s (2004) alarmist scenario of
25
ethnonationalconflict in the American Southwest, based on a
deepening language divide, has no basis in fact.
The reproduction of minority languages in
contemporary liberal states, then, requires a massive and
ordinarily state- provided educational apparatus, and it may
also require a territorial regime that limits language choice.
Such arrangements are in place in some historically
multilingual states, as a legacy of earlier nationalist struggles
over the language of public life. Examples include Canada,
Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, and India. But no such
arrangements protect minority languages generated by recent
immigration. The various limited forms of de facto
bilingualism or multilingualism that have emerged in the
United States and other countries of immigration are significant
as pragmatic ways of accommodating linguistic pluralism, but
they neither aim at nor are capable of reproducing that
pluralism intergener a tion ally.
The religious pluralism generated by immigration is
more easily reproduced. Of course it is not automatically
reproduced. The religious landscape of contemporary liberal
societies is fluid, especially in the United States, and I noted
earlier the importance of conversion. But the intergenerational
transmission of minority religions requires no state apparatus
like a minority- language school system. And it requires no par
tic u lar legal regime beyond the commitment to religious
freedom that is a constitutive element of liberal polities. The
transmission of religion, moreover, is not particularly costly.
The transmission of a language— beyond what is simply
picked up in the home, extended family, or neighborhood—
requires a major effort and carries a substantial opportunity
cost. But the transmission of a religious affiliation or
identification does not.
 What is transmitted, to be sure, may be little more than
a nominal religious affiliation or identification (Gans 1994).
But this nominal identity can later be revived or reconstructed.
Some second- and third- generation Muslim immigrants in
Western countries, for example, are more pious than their
parents or grandparents or have constructed new forms of
Muslim religiosity (Roy 2004; Duderija 2007); the same has
been true of many American immigrant groups (Hirschman
2004).13 The intergenerational staying power of religion
results in significant part from the flexible adaptation of
religious practices to changing circumstances. This has no real
analogue in the domain of language.
So the religious pluralism generated by immigration is
more likely to be intergener a tion ally per sis tent than the
linguistic pluralism so generated. Admittedly, one should
distinguish between nominal and substantive religious
pluralism. In the United States, immigration has sharply
increased the nominal pluralism of an already pluralistic
religious landscape; at the same time, however, immigrant
religions have become Americanized, notably by adopting
prevailing congregational forms of religious or ganization and
worship (Yang and Ebaugh 2001).
Still, among descendants of immigrants, religion offers
a more enduring locus for cultural pluralism than language
does 14. This is especially true in the American context,
characterized by high levels of religiosity. But elsewhere too
there is nothing in the domain of religion analogous to the
characteristic pattern of language shift for second- and third-
generation immigrants. While linguistic competencies and
identifications erode substantially across generations, religious
practices and identifications are more likely to persist and in
some cases may even grow stronger.
26
The fi nal reason for the greater robustness of religious
than linguistic pluralism is that religious pluralism is
institutionalized and legitimated as an enduring presence in
liberal societies in ways linguistic pluralism is not. Both
ideologically and institutionally, as Zolberg and Long (1999:
31) observed, contemporary liberal states tend to be pluralist
with respect to religion and monist or assimilationist with
respect to language. Their stance toward religion is an
attenuated pluralism, to be sure. A more far- reaching pluralism
is found in some empires and postcolonial polities, where
differing systems of personal law govern members of different
religious communities. But this kind of legal pluralism is
“incompatible with the structural character of modern nation-
states” (14; see also Hirschl and Shachar 2009). Still, even this
attenuated pluralism toward religion represents a sharp reversal
of the historical pattern in the Christian world, where states
were strongly monist with respect to religion and pluralist with
respect to language (or, more precisely, simply indifferent to
linguistic diversity).
Ideologically and normatively, the clearest expression
of these different stances toward religion and language is that
immigrants are not expected to adopt the prevailing religion but
are expected to learn the prevailing language (or one of the
prevailing languages). The liberal state is expected to be
neutral with respect to religion, even if it can never be fully
neutral in practice; but there is no such expectation of
neutrality with respect to language. Language tests for
citizenship are routine, but a religious test would be
unthinkable in a liberal polity.
Enduring religious pluralism is not simply normatively
accepted in liberal states but institutionally supported. To be
sure, as I noted earlier, some historically multilingual states
provide strong institutional support for linguistic pluralism. But
this strongly pluralist stance nowhere applies to immigrants.
I do not mean to suggest that liberal states generally
adopt harshly or even actively assimilationist stances toward
immigrant languages, although there has been a shift in the past
two de cades back to a moderately assimilationist stance
(Brubaker 2001). The point I want to underscore here is the
sharp distinction, both normative and institutional, between
endogenous and imported linguistic pluralism. International
minority rights regimes mandate expansive protection for long-
established minority languages but only minimal protection for
immigrant languages. And states that provide elaborate
institutional support for historically established minority
languages provide nothing comparable for immigrant
languages.
Liberal countries of immigration do of course
accommodate the linguistic diversity generated by immigration
in various ways. They may provide signage, information,
voting materials, or bureaucratic forms in minority languages;
translators in medical, legal, or administrative settings; or
various forms of bilingual education. But these pragmatic
accommodations are categorically distinct from the
comprehensive parallel school systems or regimes of territorial
autonomy that seek to facilitate the multigenerational
reproduction and preservation of multiple languages within a
single state.
There is thus a sharp distinction between endogenous
and imported linguistic pluralism. But there is no sharp
distinction between endogenous and imported religious
pluralism. This key point bears restating. Rights and
protections for long- established minority languages are
nowhere extended to immigrant languages. Linguistic
settlements, in other words, are not expandable to include
27
immigrant- borne languages. But religious settlements are
expandable: not easily or automatically expandable, but
expandable nonetheless. Many of the rights and recognitions
enjoyed by long- established religions have been extended to
immigrant religions. Liberal states have differing historically
conditioned modes of accommodating religious pluralism; but
whatever their established mode of accommodation, they face
nontrivial pressures to accommodate immigrant religions on
similar terms. These pressures have no counterpart in the
domain of language.
The most salient contemporary instance of course
concerns the accommodation of Islam in northern and western
Eu rope. It is impossible to do justice to this vexed and
complex issue here. Consider just one example, from the
domain of education. Accommodation on similar terms would
mean providing or permitting Islamic education in public
schools in countries that provide or permit other forms of
religious instruction; it would also mean subsidizing private
Islamic schools in countries that subsidize other private
religious schools. Moves to accommodate Islam in this and
other domains have been halting, uneven, and controversial;
many Muslims claim with considerable justice that the
measures taken have not even come close to realizing equal
treatment. And of course one can point to spectacular
counterexamples in other domains, such as the ban on the face-
covering niqab that has been enacted in France and Belgium
and is under discussion elsewhere, and the Swiss referendum
banning the construction of minarets. Yet if one looks beyond
cases of highly mediatized contestation, one can see a steady if
slow, contested, and often grudging move toward
accommodation in the educational sphere and other domains.
This has been driven by the courts on the one hand, which have
been receptive to parity claims (Koenig 2010; Joppke and
Torpey 2013), and by a statist and securitarian concern to
manage and supervise Muslim populations on the other
(Laurence 2012).
This part of the argument can be summed up as follows:
Normative expectations, institutional frameworks, and
individual incentives converge in fostering a deeper and more
robust religious than linguistic pluralism in liberal societies.
Not simply immigration but other factors too make for
increasing, per sis tent, and institutionalized religious
pluralism. Immigration generates at least as much linguistic as
religious heterogeneity, but migration- generated linguistic
heterogeneity is neither intergener a tion ally per sis tent nor
institutionally supported. Continuing immigration and clustered
settlement patterns sustain the appearance of increasing and per
sis tent linguistic pluralism, but an ongoing intergenerational
language shift tends to prevent the consolidation of self-
reproducing linguistic minorities.
Religious Pluralism and Deep Diversity
Having argued that religious pluralism tends to be more
robustly generated, reproduced, and institutionalized than
linguistic pluralism in liberal polities, I now want to suggest
that religious pluralism is also more likely to give rise to diffi
cult and sometimes intractable problems of “deep diversity.”
This is obviously not true for all forms of religious
pluralism. Insofar as religious pluralism involves
individualized, “subjectivized,” or otherwise privatized forms
of religious experience, it is easily accommodated in liberal
polities. Much of the recent pluralization of the religious
28
landscape in liberal societies has involved the proliferation of
new forms of individualized religiosity and spirituality that do
conform to the expectations of secularization theory about the
long- term privatization and depoliticization of religion. But as
I mentioned earlier, recent de cades have also witnessed a
significant countertrend toward the deprivatization and
repoliticization of religion. I’m concerned here with public,
organized, and collective forms of religious life, not with
private, individualized forms.
Much of the discussion of public or political religion
has focused on Islam, and for good reason. Privatized and
individualized forms of religiosity are more common among
Muslims, especially those living in the West, than essentialist
accounts of Islam as an intrinsically public and political
religion would suggest (Cesari 2002). But these have been
overshadowed by the centrality of various forms of public or
political Islam to political contestation in both Muslim-
majority and Muslim- minority settings. Public religion is of
course not unique to Islam; strong forms of public religion can
be found in Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions,
among others. Yet the claims of public Islam pose a
particularly diffi cult challenge to liberal states.
I am concerned here, however, with religion and
language more generally. In the era of modern nationalism,
language has been widely understood as the chief criterion and
main cultural substrate of nationhood. Territorially
concentrated linguistic minorities have therefore been
understood— by ethno political entrepreneurs on the one hand
and central state elites on the other— as potential nations, and
linguistic pluralism has been construed as a threat to national
identity and to the territorial integrity of the state. Even where
secession or territorial autonomy has been implausible,
language conflicts have been endemic. The expansion of state
employment, the introduction of universal schooling and
universal male military ser vice, and the growing importance of
what Gellner (1983: chapter 3) calls “context free
communication” in an urban, mobile, and literate society have
made language a crucial form of cultural capital, a central focus
of personal and collective identity, and a key terrain of political
struggle.
Yet I want to argue that language conflict has lost some
of its intensity and transformative potential in recent de cades,
as the high noon of language based nationalist conflicts appears
to have passed. The vast reorganization of political space along
national (and for the most part broadly linguistic) lines
throughout Europe and Eurasia has reduced, though of course
not eliminated, the scope for new language- based nationalist
claims. This has not only involved the disintegration of
multinational empires into linguistically more homogeneous
successor states; it has also involved the internal reorganization
of multilevel states to create linguistically more homogeneous
constituent states, as in India. Forms of federalism and
devolution that have allowed autonomous but non sovereign
polities like Quebec, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Wales
to pursue their own language agendas are part of the same
trend. Older language- based nationalist and ethnopolitical
conflicts of course remain alive, but— with some exceptions—
they have become less urgent and less destabilizing.
In the geopolitically relaxed zones of northern and
western Europe, the Americas, and Australia– New Zealand,
states no longer seek to impose the tight coupling of culture,
territory, and population that was central to the nationalizing
projects of a century ago; linguistic diversity is not only
tolerated but in some cases even celebrated. Even in central and
eastern Eu rope, historically the locus classicus of nationalist
language conflicts, the eastward expansion of the European
29
Union and the institutionalization of minority language rights
have taken some of the edge off formerly intractable ethno
linguistic conflicts. In the United States, conflicts over the
status of Spanish fl are up periodically, focused for example on
bilingual education or the symbolic question of an official
language. More striking, however, is the continuing piecemeal,
pragmatic, and largely uncontested accommodation of Spanish
and other languages in a variety of less visible settings.
Language continues to be a terrain of chronic struggle
in multilingual polities worldwide, especially where linguistic
minorities are territorially concentrated. But in liberal polities,
those struggles— again with some exceptions, most obviously
in Belgium— have become less intense and intractable. Yet
while language conflicts have eased somewhat in recent de
cades, conflicts over religion have intensified, driven by the
resurgence of public religion.
As a universal and inescapable medium of public life,
language can never be fully privatized or depoliticized.
Religion could in principle be fully privatized and
depoliticized, but the mid- twentieth- century Western vision of
a fully privatized religion has proved entirely chimerical. And
to the extent that religion is not privatized or depoliticized, the
conflicts arising from religious pluralism tend to be deeper and
more intractable than those arising from linguistic pluralism.
The reasons for this are found in the most elementary
differences between language and religion. Language is a
medium of communication; it is not a structure of authority,
and it has no intrinsic normative content. In Herderian,
Humboldtian, or Whorfian perspective, to be sure, languages
may be seen as constitutive of culture and as carriers of
distinctive world views. But strong versions of this
constitutivist view are untenable, at least in contemporary
settings. What ever normative content languages might have is
relatively thin.19 Religion, however, and especially public
religion, often involves an authoritative, binding, and
comprehensive set of norms.
These norms do not simply regulate private behavior;
they reach into the public realm, addressing such matters as
gender, sexuality, family life, education, social policy, the
economy, and even international affairs and war. Gender,
sexuality, and family life are particularly important (and of
course contested) domains of religious regulation (Friedland
2002; Casanova 2009: 17– 18). Some religious norms
constitute systems of law that directly and comprehensively
regulate family matters, as Jewish and Islamic norms do for
marriage, divorce, and inheritance. But nearly all forms of or
ganized religion seek to regulate gender, sexuality, and family
life.
The claims of public religion to provide binding and
authoritative norms for the regulation of public and private life
challenge the state’s claim to monopolize the regulation of
public life (and to authoritatively regulate certain areas of
private life as well). They also create conflicts with competing
forms of public religion and with those segments of the public
(including those who profess the same religion) who reject the
claims of public religion.
These are often deep conflicts of principle, involving
fundamental differences of worldview. It is these that warrant
speaking of “deep diversity.” Language conflicts do not
involve such conflicts of principle or worldview. As Gellner
puts it in another context (1983: 117– 118), they are conflicts
between people who “speak the same language,” as it were,
even when they do not speak the same language.
Liberal states are committed to a far- reaching
accommodation of religious pluralism, but this commitment
can generate quandaries. Liberal states may be obliged to
30
accommodate forms of religion that promote illiberal ideas or
practices, or they may be obliged to act illiberally in restricting
religious or other freedoms in the name of other values (see, for
example, Joppke 2009: 4– 5, Triadafilopoulos 2011).
Consider a few examples from the domain of education.
Should the state exempt Christian children from exposure to
“secular humanist” views in school, as some fundamentalist
Christian parents in Tennessee requested (Stolzenberg 1993)?
Should it exempt Muslim children from coeducational physical
education classes, as some Muslim parents in Eu rope an
countries have requested (see, for example, German Islam
Conference 2009: 20– 22)? Should it allow teachers or students
to wear religious clothing, including the face- covering niqab
(Joppke 2009; Joppke and Torpey 2013: chapter 2)? How much
leeway should it grant, and what kind of fi nancial or other
support should it provide, to conservative religious schools (or
to forms of home schooling) that cultivate ways of life at odds
with the state’s interest in fostering the development of
autonomous individuals and responsible citizens (Reich 2002:
chapter 6)? Or consider the question that was brought into
focus by the Rushdie affair in the late 1990s and revived by the
Danish cartoon affair some years later: Should the state restrict
potentially hurtful or offensive speech or expression so as to
protect the sensibilities of members of religious communities
(Parekh 2000: chapter 10)? No comparable quandaries arise in
the domain of language.
Conclusion
Language and religion have seldom been studied
together in a sustained way. To specialists in either subject,
language and religion have seemed too different, while to
students of ethnicity, they have seemed too similar. I have
argued that language and religion are similar enough, if
construed in a certain way, to make comparison possible, yet
different enough to make it interesting.
As fundamental domains of cultural difference,
language and religion have much in common. Both are ways of
identifying oneself and others, of construing sameness and
difference. In Bourdieusian language, both are basic principles
of vision and division of the social world. Both divide the
world, in pop u lar understandings, into distinct, bounded, and
self- reproducing communities. And claims are made in the
name of both kinds of communities for recognition, resources,
and reproduction.
These and other similarities have led students of
ethnicity to treat language and religion as functionally
equivalent and as theoretically uninteresting forms of “cultural
stuff,” significant primarily as grist for the mill of ethnic
classification and boundary formation. But this perspective is
flattening. It neglects important differences in the social or
ganization and political expression of language and religion in
liberal societies and polities.
Language is an inescapable medium of public as well as
private life; religion is not. The state must privilege a par tic u
lar language or set of languages, but it need not privilege a par
tic u lar religion. Language is chronically and pervasively
politicized in the modern world, while much of religion has
become privatized and depoliticized. Yet deprivatization is an
important countertrend, and the claims of public religion to
authoritatively regulate public and private life have no
counterpart in the domain of language. Immigration generates
new forms and degrees of both linguistic and religious
pluralism, but the religious pluralism generated by immigration
is more intergener a tion ally robust and more deeply
institutionalized than the linguistic pluralism. The result is that
31
religion has tended to displace language as the cutting edge of
contestation over the political accommodation of cultural
difference in Western liberal democracies— a striking reversal
of the longer term pro cess through which language had
previously displaced religion as the primary focus of
contention.
Chapter 5
LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM
Language and nationalism: 19th century
At a time of increasing nationalism, during the 19th
century, communal identity is often expressed through
commitment to a language. Language is everyone's earliest
personal acquisition. It is a secret territory shared with like
minds, a refuge impenetrable by outsiders. It is the ideal
weapon for resisting an invasive culture.
In some cases the language in question is already
widely spoken and the political demand is merely for its use in
official contexts. This is true in the Austrian empire. The
Hungarian diet insists in 1844 that Magyar shall be the
language of the state. In Bohemia there are similar demands for
the use of Czech in the law courts and in schools. And in the
British empire Afrikaner resistance is expressed in terms
of Afrikaans.
Elsewhere the political crusade may be to revive a
language. By the mid-19th century Catalan is spoken only in
rural districts, but the separatist movement in Catalonia makes
it an issue. Attempts are made to restore the language to
widespread use by the establishment of Catalan festivals of
poetry, a Catalan theatre and a Catalan newspaper.
 In the Celtic areas of the British Isles, language has
been a particularly important theme. Ireland leads the way,
with the formation in 1893 of the Gaelic League. At first the
campaign is largely to preserve Ireland's indigenous Celtic
language, by this time spoken only on the west coast. But
education eventually establishes Gaelic as one of the republic's
two official languages.
In Scotland the first Gaelic pressure group is founded
two years earlier, in 1891, as An ComunnGaidhealach (The
Highland Association). From 1892 it organizes the Mod, a
national festival of Gaelic music and poetry inspired by the
Welsh Eisteddfod.
Wales is the British region where the indigenous Celtic
language has fared best. Welsh has remained the native tongue
of a large proportion of the population. It is also the main
expression of local political aspirations. All signs and official
documents in the principality are in two languages. And the
Welsh nationalist party proclaims its identity in characteristic
manner through its name, incomprehensible to the English
- Plaid Cymru, Party of Wales.
The Role of Language in Advancing
Nationalism
Introduction
This paper on language and politics explores the use of
language when it is needed for creating and consolidating a
state’s power, such as in wartime. I examine how linguistic
resources and devices are used to regulate, reconstruct, and,
sometimes, manipulate reality. The operation of political
language is to categorize and label events, phenomena, people,
and the state’s goals, and to formulate them in a way desirable
to regulate and control the ideas and behavior of people.
32
The paper consists of three parts: the role of language in
the perception and understanding of reality; the function of
language in the creation and promotion of nationhood; and
specific language patterns such as metaphor and labeling that
leaders take advantage of, in order to manipulate the thoughts
of people.
Firstly, I introduce and critically examine the literature
on language, reality, and our conceptual system in relation to
political discourse. The discussion starts with a statement of
my personal position and belief in nominalism and language
relativism: the world is constructed by word, and any aspect of
language used, in political discourse especially, carries
ideological implications.
Hence, I critically analyze the validity of the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis, which is considered to be fundamental to
the study of language’s role in perceiving reality. In the second
section I explore the relationship between nation, people, and
language, focusing on the role of language in the formation of
nationhood and the advancement of nationalism. This is
followed by a discussion of authority in language: what is
authority in language, and how does it work in exercising
political control?
In the last section I specify what linguistic devices are
employed for mass mobilization or for managing public
opinion for a certain national cause such as consolidating the
state’s power or conducting a war. These devices include
metaphorical language and categorization.
1. Language, reality and our conceptual system
 1.1 World constructed by word: language and
ideology
My analysis of political language proceeds from the
philosophical idea of nominalism, which had been originally
advocated by Roscellinno, and later developed by Ockham,
Hume, Locke, Humboldt, and Wittgenstein. The idea also later
influenced American Structuralists like Sapir and Whorf. This
idea of nominalism originally developed as an antithesis to the
claim of Aristotelian realism that there are natural kinds and
categories: that any sort of knowledge of the world in itself or
any understanding of cause or of the essence of nature, things,
or phenomena was to be acquired by human beings using their
own faculties.
Instead, nominalists hold that general terms or
commonly used terms are, and can only be, names that human
beings attach to things or phenomena. They see the objectives
of Aristotelian realism as misunderstood: science of this form
cannot produce objective knowledge of the world, only the
knowledge of the way human beings use words.
I myself would hold a weaker version of this
nominalism, and I would reject realism. I am of the belief that
the world is created by the way human beings label and
categorize things, states, and processes. By extension, I would
represent the position of a weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, or linguistic relativism, which holds that a
linguistic structure to some extent determines the conceptual
system of the speaker of the language that he or she speaks. I
shall discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and my attitude
towards it, in section 1.2.
Ockham (c. 1280-1349) regarded our use of general
terms as a reflection not of the nature of the world, but of the
nature of our own minds. This is similar to Hume’s position,
and a more modern form was advocated by Quine (1960,
33
1969), who maintained that classification expresses a view that
reflects our needs and interests rather than the world as it is in
itself.
Locke (1632-1704) recognized that the way in which
people interpret the meaning of commonly used words often
leads them away from the truth. He stated that the words an
individual uses are signified by an arbitrary, spontaneous,
individual, and private act performed in the mind of the
speaking agent. He wrote:
And every man has so inviolable a Liberty, to make
Words stand for what Ideas he pleases, that no one hath the
power to make others have the same Ideas in their Minds, that
he has, when they use the same Words, that he does.
This view additionally implies that we cannot directly
confirm whether the idea we signify by a given word is the
same as is signified by other people when they use the very
same word.
Similarly, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767- 1835)
stressed the subjective feature of language: “Language is, as it
were, the external manifestation of the minds of people. Their
language is their soul, and their soul is their language”
(Humboldt, 1971: 24). He was the first European to combine
an extensive knowledge of non-Indo-European languages with
a broad philosophical background. This led him to develop a
linguistic philosophy that held that the view of the world of one
people differs from that of another people by a much greater
extent than ever conceived. He further stated that this is due to
the extreme differences in the internal structures of their
respective languages (Penn, 1972: 46-53). Franz Boas brought
Humboldt’s idea with him when he came to America. He then
had an influence on his student Edward Sapir.
 In brief, according to nominalist and relativist ideas, a
thing comes into being when it is given a name. To carry the
idea to its extreme, a thing does not exist until it is given a
name. That naming is done on the basis of our subjective needs
and interests. There is no objective existence, as the realists
proclaim. A weaker version of the nominalists’ ideas is
supported here in pursuit of the studies of language and
politics. A more modern form of this view is the well-known
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The account below deals with this
hypothesis in more detail, along with its criticisms.
Thus, naming is a function of our mind: our way of
thinking and our interests, and not reality in itself. This
subjective view is not restricted to the lexical level of language.
It can be said that any linguistic aspect of language structure,
especially when used in political discourse, whether syntactic,
lexical, semantic, pragmatic, or discoursal, could carry ethical
implications or have ideological significance, depending on the
speaker’s value systems.
Nation, people, and language
In an exploration of how language resources are used to
mobilize people or a nation for a certain cause (e.g., war), it is
necessary to look at the literature on the relationship between
nation, people, and language.
The role of language in the formation
of nationhood
Nationhood is the most primary unit in politics: it is
perhaps “the most universally legitimate value in the political
life of our time” (Anderson 1991: 3). Anderson (1983) argues
that a nation is simply an “imagined community”: imagined
because the members of even the smallest nation are unknown
34
and anonymous to one another, yet the image of their fellow
citizens’ communion is undoubtedly in the minds of each one’s
life (Anderson 1983: 15, 133). Anderson further states that the
existence of the community or nation is often imagined through
language (ibid.: 133), and thus stresses the role of language in
imagining and creating the nationhood. In much the same way,
Gellner (1964: 169) radically states that “nationalism is not the
awakening of nations to selfconsciousness: it invents nations
where they do not exist.”
Anderson discusses this importance of language in
forming solidarity to create such nationhood in the following
terms:
It is always a mistake to treat language in the way that
certain nationalist ideologues treat them as emblems of nation-
ness, like flags, costumes, folk-dance, and the rest. Much the
most important thing about language is its capacity for
generating imagined communities, building in effect particular
solidarity. (Anderson, 1983: 122)
He explains how the role of language in forming
solidarity differs from that of national flag and costume,
presenting the term “experience of simultaneity.” For instance,
language can provide a “special kind of contemporaneous
community,” especially in the form of poetry and songs (ibid.:
132). For example, in the act of singing national anthems,
however mediocre the words and the tune may be, there is an
“experience of simultaneity” shared by all people present. At
such moments when people totally unknown and anonymous to
each other, utter the same verses to the same melody, the image
of unisonance is created. Singing such national anthems or
songs as The Marseillaise or Waltzing Matilda, for example,
gives opportunity for “unisonality, for the echoed physical
realization of the imagined community” (ibid.: 133). At this
“selfless” moment of simultaneity, nothing but imagined sound
connects everybody present.
Just by listening to a certain mode of language with
members of a community provides the same “experience of
simultaneity”; it may take the form of sutra chanting, as
happens more frequently in Asian countries, or the form of
chokugo (guidance of morals) as used in schools in Japan
during the Second World War when mobilization of the nation
was an urgent necessity.
Brass (1974) presented the concept of “a pool of
symbols” that expresses the internal values of a community or
a people, as a tool for mobilization or nationality-formation.
Presenting the cases of Sikhs and Muslims in North India,
Brass explains the nationalist movements as “the striving to
achieve multisymbol congruence among a group of people
defined initially in terms of a single criterion (410)”. The
symbols are mainly linguistic and religious. In this process of
nationalityformation, or “myth construction” in a struggle
against opponents, values are affixed to symbols of language or
religious identity, depending on the social reality of that
community. For instance, when religion was not an acceptable
symbol (as happened in postindependence India), the Sikh
political leadership relied on and employed the symbol of
Punjabi language to create solidarity. In this way, the symbols
of group identity that were used to achieve the goal of a
community depended upon the political strategies adopted by
its leaders. In addition to attaching values to symbols of
language or religions, both Muslims and Sikhs in North India
used other associated symbols. As Brass puts it,
spokesmen for the Muslim community look for
inspiration from the past in the history of Muslim empires;
those for the Sikh community find their glory in the history of
the Sikh kingdoms and in the valour of the Sikh warriors of the
35
past. In this process of symbol selection from the past, it is
often necessary to ignore inconvenient aspects of a
community’s history. The process involves deliberate
selectivity in search of myth, not truth.
This echoes Brass’s idea that “assimilation is a
subjective more than an objective process” (ibid.: 423). Since
the linguistic, religious, historical, and cultural traits of a nation
or community may be employed as symbols, “a full-blown and
coherent myth may ultimately develop” to promote a sense of
nationalism (ibid.: 412).
Criticisms
One criticism to be raised against Anderson’s view that
language creates nationhood is that he perceives language
solely as a tool to regulate human behavior. Language controls
people, language forms a people ― and never vice-versa,
according to his view. Cannot people control language as well?
Fischte, the German philosopher, defined people as “a group of
those who develop their own language by the continuous
exchange of thoughts.” One counterargument is the creation of
an antitotalitarian language by underground activists in the
“totalitarian” states of Eastern Europe. Wierzbicka (1990) has
carried out research on the development of “antilanguage”
from the lexical to the discoursal level in Poland, where “‘the
antilanguage’ is most people’s mother tongue” (5), although
normally “antilanguage is nobody’s mother tongue” (Halliday,
1978: 171). Wierzbicka observes that the antilanguage actually
results from official propaganda.
War, peace, and language: linguistic devices
for control
 Thus far the role of language in forming a sense of
community or nationalism has been discussed in general terms.
Next I shall consider what specific linguistic devices are
employed to mass-mobilize for a war or to manipulate public
opinion for a certain cause. These devices include metaphor,
categorization, and the like.
Language and war
As we saw in the section on the SapirWhorf hypothesis,
language not only reflects reality, but it also affects reality and
makes changes to it. In the same way, language not only
mirrors history and politics (Wierzbicka, 1990: 1), it also
profoundly affects them. I disagree with the view of one war
analyst who states “the violent reality of war exists outside
language; everything, including language, melts into the brutal
reality of war” (Nishitani 1992: 3). This view devalues the role
of language, which dynamically operates in the discourse of
war.
Language has the power to mass-mobilize, and it was
used for this purpose by, for example, Hitler during World War
II. Language has the power, by metaphor, categorization, or the
like, to construct the image of an enemy (as we shall see in
section 3.2.). In modern politics, too, language can be used to
accelerate the potential for war or militarization. Expressions
like “to live with nuclear power” or “nuclear power is brighter
than thousands of suns” entail an assimilation process into our
daily lives and can even evoke war sentiment in a subtle way.
This view owes a lot to the literature of postmodernists,
such as Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and also to the
general semantics view, which has been influential in America
since Alfred Korzybski published Science and Sanity in 1933.
The above writers offer the belief that the misuse of language is
a major cause of human conflict and endangers the future of the
36
human race. Anatol Rapport also discusses the role of language
as a factor in accelerating militarization from the perspective of
general semantics. And, as we shall soon see, P. Chilton has
written extensively on the role of language as an agent
promoting militarization.
Summary
This paper started with a discussion of the relationship
between language, reality, and 109 our conceptual systems.
Some literature on nominalism and Whorf’s linguistic
relativism was presented, accompanied by criticism of these
ideas. Criticism focuses on Whorf’s lack of perspective on
complexities and dynamism in a culture and on diachronic
perspective on language, and on the limitation of his interest to
a fundamental physical sphere. When pursuing studies of
political language, the view of language as a dynamic entity is
essential because power relations in a society are very
complex, diverse, and subject to constant change with time.
The second part of this paper concerned the role of
language in creating nationhood and advancing a sense of
nationalism. Some literature on these subjects was introduced,
accompanied by criticisms of these ideas. Benedict Anderson’s
well-known idea of “imagined community” was presented
along with his view on how national print-languages can
contribute to the formation of nationhood ideologically and
politically. Next, Brass’s idea of a “pool of symbols” or
common possession by a nation of symbols as a historical or a
cultural heritage, was introduced. These symbols are
commonly presented to people in order to generate solidarity
by leaders of the time, in the form of poetry, popular songs, or
slogans, or in textbooks. This myth construction process
involves employing metaphorical or religious discourse
because myth-formation for assimilation is a subjective, not an
objective, process. It could be said that the more national
solidarity is essential, the more the rhetoric of this “pool of
symbols” is used for mobilization purposes.
The final section dealt with metaphorical language in
political discourse as specificlinguistic patterns to be employed
for massmobilizing public opinion or for particular national
goals.
As we have seen, metaphor makes it possible for human
beings to be transformed into dehumanized objects (e.g., being
referred to as a threat, an axis of evil, or an enemy), whereas,
conversely, inanimate objects are personified (e.g., by naming
weapons after animals or heroes) all for the purpose of
manipulation of the thought and conduct of people.
Thus, some of the meanings from the basic words and
to a more generalized level of discourse are implicated in
metaphorical language. We could easily become victims of
metaphorical processes constructed out of our own
conventional conceptual system by leaders of the time. The
underlying idea exploited is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which
explains how a language can reflect and control the conceptual
system of its speakers.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) observe that metaphor is not
only an issue of language but also one of thought and behavior.
This view implies that official discourse is not just a means by
which the leaders of the time intend to enforce a particular
view on a public that sometimes could be easily taken in. A
more serious implication here is that, as the metaphors of
Nukespeak suggest, official discourse is a way in which leaders
conceptualize the discourse of nuclear weapons (discussed in
Lee, 1992: 90). Metaphor encodes the pattern of thought that
formulates such discourses. Thus, according to Sauer (1988:
87), Nazi propaganda, metaphorically treating the Jews not as
37
human beings but as the enemy, 2) was not simply a static level
of misconceived ideas but more dangerously a part of
“dynamic processes of actual socialization.”
Thus, by conducting a careful analysis of the language
of metaphor, critical linguists may have revealed not only the
characteristics of propaganda or a deviant form of language
use, but more basic problems regarding the patterns of thought
that are deep-seated within such propagandistic discourses
(Lee, 1992: 90).
The varied topics discussed in this paper are
interrelated. The more a society is under bureaucratic or state
control, there seems to be a linguistic tendency for certain
patterns of political language involving metaphorical,
ideological and religious discourse to emerge.
Chapter 6
Law and Language
The use of language is crucial to any legal system, not
only in the same way that it is crucial to politics in general, but
also in two special respects. Lawmakers characteristically use
language to make law, and law must provide for the
authoritative resolution of disputes over the effects of that use
of language. Political philosophers are not generally
preoccupied with questions in the philosophy of language. But
legal philosophers are political philosophers with a
specialization that gives language (and philosophy of language)
a special importance.
Philosophy of law can gain from a good philosophical
account of the meaning and use of language, and from a good
philosophical account of the institutionalized resolution of
disputes over language. Philosophy of language can gain from
studying the stress-testing of language in legal regulation and
dispute resolution. And philosophers of language can gain from
the reminder that their task is not only to account for what
people share in virtue of the mastery of a language; they also
need to account for the possibility of disagreements over the
meaning and use of language, and for the possibility that there
might be good reason for resolving those disagreements in one
way rather than another.
In addition to their interest in the use of language in
law, philosophers of law have developed a second, interrelated
interest in using insights from the philosophy of language to
address problems of the nature of law. This article outlines
some problems in each of these two areas, after a brief
historical note on the linguistic preoccupations of legal
philosophers.
 1. Historical introduction
 2. The use of language in law
o 2.1 Law and signs
o 2.2 Language and legal interpretation
o 2.3 The pragmatics of legal language
Historical introduction
Systematic efforts to use philosophical insights about
language to solve problems in philosophy of law are relatively
recent. Jeremy Bentham was perhaps the first to make a
deliberate attempt at it. He developed a radically empiricist
theory of the meaning of words, which supported his
utilitarianism and his legal theory.
38
Bentham wanted to abandon what he considered to be a
nonsensical mythology of natural rights and duties—that is,
moral rights and duties that people have regardless of whether
anyone is prepared to enforce them. He looked for ‘sensible’
phenomena by which to explain the nature of law. Linguistic
acts struck him as respectably empirical phenomena, and he
made them an essential element of his theory of law. He based
his ‘legal positivism’ on his claims about the meaning and use
of words.
Language had not been especially important to
the natural law theorists whose views Bentham despised. They
accounted for a law as a certain sort of reason. From that
perspective, philosophy of language has no special role in
explaining the nature of law. Philosophy of language cannot
explain the nature of reasons; it has the ancillary role of
explaining the possibility of communicating reasons and the
possibility of creating reasons by the use of language (so that
natural law theorists have the same reason as others to seek a
good account of the legal effects of the use of language, and of
the role of courts in resolving disputes over it). Bentham, by
contrast, tried to use the ‘sensible’ phenomenon of a
perceptible, intelligible linguistic act for his purpose of
expounding the nature of law by reference to empirical
phenomena.
Bentham seems to have thought of the meaning of a
word in causal terms, as its capacity to act on a subject by
raising an image of perceptible substances or emotions for
which, he said, the word was a name. ‘By these general terms
or names, things and persons, acts, and so forth are brought to
view…’ (Bentham 1782, 82; see also Bentham 1776, 28,
108n). Words that do not bring to view such perceptible things
have no meaning, on his theory, except insofar as they can be
expounded by ‘paraphrasis’—Bentham’s method of translating
whole sentences in which those words are used into sentences
that do raise images of perceptible things.
To many legal theorists that approach appeared, as
H.L.A. Hart put it, ‘as a revelation, bringing down to earth an
elusive notion and restating it in the same clear, hard, empirical
terms as are used in science’ (Hart 2012, 84). The theory
supported not only Bentham’s empiricism, but also his
utilitarianism, because it privileged what he viewed as the
ultimate sensible (and therefore intelligible) ‘affections’: the
pain and pleasure that utilitarianism treats as the basis for a
theory of value and of morality.
In his legal theory, this view of language became the
basis of an innovative account of law as the expression of the
will of a sovereign in a political community. Bentham stated it
as follows:
A law may be defined as an assemblage of signs
declarative of a volition conceived or adopted by
the sovereign in a state, concerning the conduct to be observed
in a certain case by a certain person or class of persons, who in
the case in question are or are supposed to be subject to his
power… (Bentham 1782, 1)
He went on to explain that the signification of volition
by such an assemblage of signs must be backed by ‘motives’ of
pain or pleasure offered by the sovereign.
Two features of this theory tie the philosophy of law to
the philosophy of language. One feature is methodological, and
the other is substantive. First, Bentham proposes his theory as a
definition of the term a law (see section 3.1 below, on
‘Definition as a methodology in philosophy of law’). Secondly,
he defines a law as a particular kind of assemblage of signs
39
(see section 2.1 below, on ‘Law and Signs’). In Bentham’s
view, a law is an assemblage of signs, and legal philosophy is a
form of philosophy of language. The legal theorist has a
linguistic task of defining the terms (especially law, but others
as well) of legal discourse.
That, in brief, is the apogee of the use of philosophy of
language in philosophy of law. Bentham was ahead of his time.
His theory of the meaning and use of words anticipated various
trends in twentieth-century philosophy of language (including
Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s ‘context principle’, some views of
logical positivists, and the development of speech act theory).
It was H.L.A.Hart who, in the 1950s and 1960s, made a
concerted effort to use twentieth-century developments in
philosophy of language to ‘elucidate’ the nature of law. He did
so with an enthusiasm for the work of Wittgenstein, and also of
the Oxford philosophers J.L.Austin and Paul Grice. So Hart
had some advantages over Bentham.
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations had been directed
against the view that a word’s meaning is the thing for which it
stands as a name. That was one of the misconceptions that
distorted Bentham’s theory of the meaning of words: he
thought that a word like ‘right’ had to be a name for an entity,
and that since no such entity could be sensed, the word was a
name for a ‘fictitious entity’—(Bentham 1782, 251).
And J.L.Austin took an attitude to ordinary discourse
that was quite opposed to that of Bentham, who thought that
philosophy must tear away the ‘veil of mystery’ that ordinary
language throws over every object of study (Bentham 1782,
251). Wittgenstein’s attitude was more complex: he thought
both that philosophers create philosophical problems by
bewitching themselves with language, and also that a clear
understanding of the use of language could provide healthy
therapy for people suffering from philosophical problems.
Taking advantage of the insights of Wittgenstein and
J.L.Austin, Hart aimed to put philosophy of language to work
in addressing problems of legal philosophy, without making
what he regarded as Bentham’s extravagant mistakes.
In 1961, Hart’s book The Concept of Law raised issues
that have occupied legal philosophers ever since. He borrowed
J.L. Austin’s method of ‘using a sharpened awareness of words
to sharpen our perception of the phenomena’ (Hart 2012, v,
14). Hart’s observations about the use of language in law were
elements in an innovative approach to explaining the
normativity of law—that is, the fact that law presents itself as
conferring rights and powers and as imposing obligations and
liabilities. Hart argued that we can understand that feature of
law more clearly, if we understand where Bentham and his
nineteenth-century disciple John Austin (not to be confused
with J.L.Austin) went wrong in explaining the meaning and use
of normative language. Hart’s new approach to the issue has
been a starting point for discussions of the normativity of law
since the 1960s [see section 3.2 below].
Ronald Dworkin argued that Hart’s focus on language
had a toxic effect on his whole approach to legal philosophy.
He wrote that Hart suffered from a ‘semantic sting’, because he
wrongly thought ‘that lawyers all follow certain linguistic
criteria for judging propositions of law’ (Dworkin 1986, 45;
see section 2.4 below). That argument in the philosophy of
language has set an agenda for much debate in philosophy of
law (see, for example, the essays in Coleman, 2001).
Because of the allure of philosophy of language, and
partly as a result of the influence of Hart, the use of philosophy
of language in philosophy of law became the focus of much
jurisprudential thought and debate in the 20th century. One
40
notable example is the work of Jerzy Wróblewski, a Polish
legal theorist who developed a ‘semantic conception of a legal
norm’ (Wróblewski 1983), and offered a theory of legal
language as a sub-type of natural language with multiple
‘fuzzy’ characteristics (Wróblewski 1985). In Italian analytical
legal philosophy, the influential theorist Norberto Bobbio
began in the 1950s ‘to consider law as a language and legal
science as a meta-language’ (Pintore and Jori 1997, 3), in
service of a theory of law based on a non-cognitivist moral
theory. Two succeeding generations of Italian legal theorists
have engaged in ‘dispute on semiotic ground, rather than
directly by arguments of general legal philosophical positions’
(Pintore and Jori, 17).
That development was one instance of the widespread
use of views about language in debunking conventional views
about law in the 20th century. Perhaps this development
resulted not so much from the influence of Bentham’s own
writings, as from pursuit of the same search that he undertook,
for ways of identifying the elements of law that suit empiricist
philosophical sensibilities. The energetic 20th-century school
of ‘Scandinavian legal realism’ viewed legal terms like ‘right’
as ‘lacking semantic reference’ and ‘denoting nothing’. So they
considered statements asserting the existence of rights, duties,
and other legal relations to be incapable of being true or false
(Olivecrona 1971, 246, 255, 261). They variously explained the
use of such statements as attempts to perform magical
incantations, or as tools for taking advantage of the
psychological conditioning that leads officials and citizens to
act in one way or another when they hear such statements (see
the outline of Scandinavian realism in Olivecrona 1971, 174–
182, and see Ross 1956; see also section 5 of the entry
on Naturalism in Legal Philosophy).
 Similarly, various strands in the influential American
legal academic enterprise of ‘economic analysis of law’ share
Bentham’s debunking attitude toward central legal terms such
as ‘right’ and ‘obligation’. Like Bentham, some economic
analysts oscillate (or equivocate) between (1) a moral theory
that reduces those normative terms to terms describing
maximization of human satisfactions, and (2) a theory that does
not engage in moral argument, but only claims to describe
human motivation, accounting for terms such as ‘right’ and
‘obligation’ as rhetorical epithets that agents use to pursue what
they will [see the entry on The Economic Analysis of Law,
section 2.2].
Not all legal sceptics have been driven by the
empiricism of Bentham and the Scandinavians. Many other
forms of scepticism about law have also sought support in
scepticism about the meaning of language. Attacks on the
coherence of the idea of the rule of law, and on the
meaningfulness of legal discourse, have used ideas in the
philosophy of language as diverse as Saul Kripke’s
interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule following (see
entry on Interpretation and Coherence in Legal Reasoning),
and deconstruction (see Endicott 2000, chapter 1).
2. The use of language in law
2.1 Law and signs
There are insurmountable objections to Bentham’s idea
that a law is an assemblage of signs. Law (in the sense that is
relevant here) is the systematic regulation of the life of a
community by standards treated as binding the members of the
community and its institutions. A law is a standard that is part
41
of such a systematic form of regulation. Many such standards
have no canonical linguistic formulation (that is, no form of
words which, according to law, determines the content of the
standard). Lawyers in common law systems are familiar with
such norms: murder may be a criminal offence (or slander may
be a tort, or certain agreements may be enforceable as
contracts…), not because of the expression by any person or
institution of a rule that it should be so, but because the
institutions of the legal system customarily treat murder as an
offence (or slander as a tort...).
Moreover, common law systems cannot be
distinguished from legal systems consisting only of linguistic
acts, because no legal system consists only of linguistic acts. A
civil law system with a civil code and a criminal code may
make murder an offence (and slander a tort…) by a written act,
and it may be a written constitution that gives legal force to the
civil code and to the criminal code. But the validity of the
written constitution will depend on a norm which is not created
by the use of signs: the rule that that text is to be treated as
setting out the constitution.
Bentham and John Austin knew that there are rules of
law that were not laid down in language. Preserving their view
of law as signification of volition, they accounted for such laws
as tacit commands of the sovereign. That convoluted device
cannot provide the resources needed to explain the existence of
a norm. In the right circumstances, it is certainly possible to
communicate without using signs (and in particular, it is
possible to convey a volition, backed by a threat of force, just
by saying or writing nothing). But silence can only be a means
of communication when the circumstances give it a meaning.
We can say that a tacit command has been issued only if it is
possible to identify features of the situation that distinguish the
tacit communication from mere inaction communicating
nothing [see Hart 2012, 45–48]. Those features do not
generally accompany customary rules (in fact, they generally
do not accompany customary rules).
There is another conclusive objection to the idea that a
law is an assemblage of signs. When a lawmaking authority
does use language to make a law (as when a legislature uses a
lawful process to pass an enactment that is within its powers),
the resulting law is not an assemblage of signs. When I write
you an email message to make a request, the message is an
assemblage of signs, but the request is not an assemblage of
signs; it is something I use the assemblage of signs to make.
The law that results from the use of language in an enactment
is a standard (or standards) whose existence and content are
determined by the legal effect that the law ascribes to that use
of an assemblage of signs.
A law, therefore, is not an assemblage of signs, and law
is not necessarily made by the use of language, and every legal
system has norms that were not made by the use of language.
Laws are not linguistic acts. Laws, you may say, are standards
of behaviour that can be communicated (and some of which are
made) by using language. But even this is controversial among
writers on legal interpretation.
2.2 Language and legal interpretation
What is the relationship between the language that is
used to make legal standards, and the law itself? If the law
provides that a form of words determines the content of a
standard (such as a term of a contract, or a criminal offence, or
a duty of the executor of a will), what is the effect of the use of
the words? The question seems to demand general theories of
the meaning of language and of the interpretation of
42
communicative acts. If there are no general theories to be had,
then there is no general answer to the question. A theory of
meaning and interpretation of legal language would not be very
much less general than a theory of meaning and interpretation
of language.
Legal theorists have tried to construct theories of the
meaning of legal language, and theories of legal interpretation,
based on specific features of law, of legal systems, and of the
use of language in making law. The entries on Interpretation
and Coherence in Legal Reasoning, Constitutionalism [see
section 7, ‘Constitutional Interpretation’], The Nature of Law,
and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy address theories of legal
interpretation. Here I will address features of language that
raise challenges for philosophy of law and for philosophy of
language. Any good account of the meaning and interpretation
of the language used in making law needs to deal with ways in
which its legal effect depends on the context of its use
(addressed in this section). ‘Pragmatic’ effects of language use,
such as context-dependence, have long been the matter of
jurisprudential debate, and recently the use of Gricean and
post-Gricean pragmatics has become a major field of debate
among philosophers of language and philosophers of law
(section 2.3). These pragmatic features of communication raise
insuperable difficulties for any attempt to give a true account of
legal interpretation that is well enough organised to deserve to
be called a ‘theory’. Debates over the pragmatics of legal
language are often premised on the view that the effect of a
lawmaking use of language is that the content of the linguistic
communication in question determines the content of the law.
But even this premise is controversial, and has been denied by
theorists who account for the law as being determined by moral
reasons for conclusions as to what rights, duties, powers, and
liabilities people have, given the facts of legal practice and
history (section 2.4).
As an instance of controversy over the effect of the use
of language in law, consider the case of Garner v Burr [1951]
1 KB 31. The legislature had made it an offence to use a
‘vehicle’ on a road without pneumatic tires. Lawrence Burr
fitted iron wheels to his chicken coop, and pulled it down the
road behind his tractor. Burr was prosecuted under the statute.
The magistrates acquitted him, apparently on the ground that a
chicken coop is not a ‘vehicle’. The appeal court reversed that
decision. The Lord Chief Justice wrote,
The regulations are designed for a variety of reasons,
among them the protection of road surfaces; and, as this vehicle
had ordinary iron tyres, not pneumatic tyres, it was liable to
damage the roads. [The magistrates] have put what is in my
opinion too narrow an interpretation on the word ‘vehicle’ for
the purposes of this Act. It is true that, according to the
dictionary definition, a ‘vehicle’ is primarily to be regarded as
a means of conveyance provided with wheels or runners and
used for the carriage of persons or goods. It is true that the
[magistrates] do not find that anything was carried in the
vehicle at the time; but I think that the Act is clearly aimed at
anything which will run on wheels which is being drawn by a
tractor or another motor vehicle. Accordingly, an offence was
committed here. It follows that [the magistrates] ought to have
found that this poultry shed was a vehicle within the meaning
of s. 1 of the Road Traffic Act of 1930. ([1951] 1 KB 31 at 33)
The magistrates and the appeal court seem to have
disagreed over the effect of two principles: a principle that
statutes should only be read as imposing criminal liability if
they do so unequivocally, and a principle that the purposes for
which Parliament passed the statute should be pursued. Assume
43
that those principles are legal principles, in the sense that a
decision in accordance with the law must respect them. The
apparent tension between the principles might be resolved in
one of the following two ways. We do not have the
magistrates’ reasons, but let’s presume that they resolved the
tension in the first way; the appeal court resolved it in the
second way:
1. by concluding that Parliament’s purposes can be respected
appropriately while still construing the prohibition strictly (so
that it is no offence to pull a chicken coop down the road on
iron wheels, because the chicken coop is not undeniably a
vehicle), or
2. by concluding that Parliament’s purpose is sufficiently clear
that it can be pursued by convicting Mr. Burr, without
jeopardising the principle that criminal liabilities ought to be
clearly spelled out, even if someone might reasonably claim
that a chicken coop on wheels is not a ‘vehicle’.
It may seem that this common sort of disagreement tells
us nothing about language, except perhaps that language is of
no particular importance in law. It may seem that the two
courts did not disagree over any question of language (after all,
everyone involved was competent in English), but only over
whether they ought to give effect to Parliament’s evident
purpose of protecting roads by convicting Mr. Burr, or whether
that would be unfair to him.
One explanation of the decision would be that the
appeal court ignored the word ‘vehicle’, and treated the
pneumatic tires rule as if it applied to anything that moves on
wheels (instead of applying to vehicles, which is what the
legislation said). But the Lord Chief Justice did not explain his
decision that way. He did not hold that, because Parliament
aimed to protect roads from iron wheels, Burr should be
convicted regardless of the meaning of the word ‘vehicle’. He
held that the magistrates ought to have found that the chicken
coop was a vehicle, ‘for the purposes’ of the Road Traffic Act.
Presumably the magistrates, too, considered themselves to be
giving effect to the language of the Act, rather than ignoring (in
the interests of fairness) what Parliament had enacted.
No doubt, legal decision makers sometimes depart from
the language of valid enactments (or wills, or contracts...).
They may do so corruptly, or in the exercise of an equitable
jurisdiction to depart from the law, or because they consider
that justice demands it even if the law accords them no power
to depart from the language. But the magistrates and the appeal
judges evidently saw themselves as giving effect to the
language of the Road Traffic Act in Garner v Burr. And the
sort of disagreement that arose in that case (disagreement over
the legal effect of the use of a word) is so common that we
seem to find a paradox: competent speakers of the English
language share a knowledge of the meaning of the word
‘vehicle’, yet they disagree—apparently sincerely—over the
effect of legislation using the word.
To resolve the apparent paradox, we can say that what
speakers of the English language share, in virtue of their grasp
of the meaning of a word like ‘vehicle’, is an ability to use the
word in a way that depends on the context. The question of
whether a chicken coop on wheels counts as a ‘vehicle’ would
be a different question (and might have a different answer), if
another statute or regulation imposed a tax on ‘vehicles’. The
relevant considerations might be different again if a statute or
regulation required ‘vehicles’ to keep to the left-hand side of
the road. The Lord Chief Justice was right that a dictionary
definition of ‘vehicle’ could not conclude the question of
whether the chicken coop was a vehicle in Garner v Burr,
44
because the purpose of a dictionary definition is to point the
reader to features of the use of the word that can be more-or-
less important in a variety of more-or-less analogical ways in
various contexts.
A definition of ‘vehicle’ as a mode of conveyance
offers the reader one central strand in the use of that word, but
does not tell the reader whether a more-or-less analogical
extension of the word to a chicken coop on wheels is warranted
or unwarranted by the meaning of the word. Another way of
stating this resolution of the apparent paradox is by
distinguishing between the meaning of a word (which the
magistrates and the appeal judges all knew) and the way in
which a communicative act using the word ought to be
understood (over which they disagreed). What the judges and
magistrates in Garner v Burr shared was a knowledge of the
meaning of the word ‘vehicle’, and what they disagreed over
was the effect of the legislature’s use of the word.
2.3 The pragmatics of legal language
The dependence of the effect of legal language on
context is an instance of a general feature of communication,
which some philosophers of language have approached by
distinguishing semantics from pragmatics. The distinction is,
roughly, between the meaning of a word or phrase or other
linguistic expression, and the effect that is to be ascribed to the
use of the expression in a particular way, by a particular user of
the language, in a particular context. The pragmatics of legal
language is a vast field, because the term ‘pragmatics’ could be
used as a heading for much of what modern legal scholars and
theorists have described as grounds for interpretation (and also
as a heading for much that they have described as the theory of
interpretation -since ‘pragmatics’ is a term not only for effects
of communication, but also for the study of those effects). For
example, the work of the judges in Garner v Burr can be
described as an exercise in pragmatic inference. The technical
sound of the word ‘pragmatics’ may suggest that it is a term for
the theoretical study of its object; in fact, the field of study is
what might be inferred from the fact that someone said what
they said in the context in which they said it. No object of
study is less apt for theorising.
This vast field has been much studied over millennia by
lawyers and philosophers, but only recently through the use of
resources that may be borrowed from the 20th-century
development of ‘pragmatics’ as a discipline in linguistics and
the philosophy of language. Much recent work in the
pragmatics of legal language has focused on Gricean and post-
Gricean pragmatics, as a source of insights into the theory of
legal interpretation (see e.g. Marmor 2008, 2014, Soames 2008,
Ekins 2012 (see pp 205-211), Carston 2013, Solum 2013; on
Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, see Pragmatics).
It is controversial whether legal pragmatics is simply a
part of the pragmatics of language use in general (see Dascal
and Wróblewski 1988). It stands to reason that if the
pragmatics of language use depends on the context of an
utterance, the legal context of a lawmaking use of language
will have implications for the meaning conveyed and,
therefore, for the law that is made. Scott Soames has argued
that the question of the relation between the content of the law,
and authoritative sources such as statutes, is ‘an instance of the
more general question of what determines the contents of
ordinary linguistic texts’ (Soames 2008). It is a popular idea
that when a legislature enacts a statute, ‘The content of the
statute is what the lawmakers asserted and committed
45
themselves to, in adopting the statutory language’ (Soames
2008). Speakers can commit themselves to something that they
have not asserted, and can make assertions in contexts that
make it clear that they are not committed to what they have
asserted.
But Andrei Marmor has argued that the pragmatics of
legal language is unique in crucial respects (Marmor 2008),
with pragmatic considerations playing some very significantly
lesser role in law, than in other contexts: ‘In ordinary
conversations, pragmatic enrichment is the norm, not the
exception; in statutory law, it is the exception’ (Marmor 2014,
34). In his view, the Gricean maxims of conversation, derived
from a general principle of cooperation, do not
straightforwardly apply in legislative communication, because
legislative communication is ‘strategic’ rather than cooperative
(Marmor 2014, 45-57). Likewise, Francesca Poggi has argued
that Grice’s theory does not apply to legislation, because of the
‘conflictual behaviour’ of those addressed by legislation (Poggi
2011, 35). As Marmor points out, speakers and listeners in
strategic communication take advantage of uncertainties in
the implicatures to be derived from pragmatic norms of
communication. For present purposes, we can think of an
implicature as a proposition that a person is to be understood to
have conveyed by using language in a particular way, although
it is not expressed by what the person said (see Grice 1975, 43-
4). Speakers may exploit implicatures in order to avoid
asserting what they prefer to implicate, and listeners may
exploit uncertainties concerning implicatures in order to bend
the effect of a communication to their liking. Yet these aspects
of communication are not distinctive to law making. And they
depend on cooperation among participants in the ‘conversation’
in question: some degree of cooperation is necessary in order
for it to make any sense for a speaker to take advantage of an
implicature, or for a listener to treat an uncertain implicature as
a genuine implicature.
What has been called ‘near-side’ pragmatics is a matter
of determining what is said by an utterance; in informal
conversation it involves the use of indexicals and pronominal
figures that are avoided in legislation, and involves the
implications of context for an understanding of the uses of
terms. And ‘far-side’ pragmatics (determining what is
implicated rather than said, and determining what speech acts
are carried out by means of an utterance) can involve figurative
uses of language, sarcasm, innuendos, and other techniques that
lawmakers avoid (for Korta and Perry’s distinction between
‘near-side’ and ‘far-side’ pragmatics, see Pragmatics). There is
some force in Marmor’s claim that pragmatics is different in
law. Legislation systematically avoids many communicative
devices that can be very useful in other contexts of
communication. But those devices are also avoided in a very
wide range of other formalized and technical uses of language
—for example, in most wedding invitations, in Wikipedia, and
in well-written instruction guides for applying for bank account
or a university programme or for operating a rice cooker.
Yet the pragmatic effects of communication are
essential in all those contexts of language use, and are essential
to the legislative use of language. This is true both of ‘near-
side’ and ‘far-side’ pragmatics. The discussion of the decision
in Garner v Burr, above, provides an illustration of the ways in
which the context of a legislative enactment can determine the
reference of terms such as ‘vehicle’, and this determination of
meaning is an aspect of near-side pragmatics. The dispute over
the requirement of pneumatic tires on ‘vehicles’ in Garner v
Burr can be understood as a dispute over the effect of the
context on the content of the regulatory provision; another way
46
of making the same point is to describe it as a dispute over the
implicatures to be drawn from the fact of the enactment of that
provision. This aspect of the pragmatics of legal language is
simply an instance of the pragmatics of the use of language in
general (it would be very easy to formulate a version of the
apparent paradox from Garner v Burr, discussed in section 2.2
above, in a non-legal context).
The role of far-side pragmatics is illustrated by the
master implicature of every legislative act: it is never said in
legislation, but there is always an implicature, that the rights
and duties and powers established by the legislation are to
be legal rights and duties and powers, under the law of the
jurisdiction for which the enactment is made (see Endicott
2014, 55). Very many other more particular lawyers’
presumptions serve as maxims of the pragmatics of lawmaking
(such as the presumption that a new enactment overrides a
contrary previous enactment).
It is worth noting, as well, that the diversity of contexts
of communication (even the diversity of conversations that the
same two people may have, let alone all the diversity of
exchanges that might be called ‘conversations’ by more or less
remote analogy) is so great, that the variations among
pragmatic aspects of ordinary conversations are much wider
and deeper, than any general distinction that can be drawn
between legislative communication as a class, and ordinary
conversations as a class. The use of language in making law is
so closely interwoven with the use of language to exercise
authority in other contexts, and with the use of language in
games, in talk of what is right and wrong, and generally in
communication in families and in organisations of every kind,
that the pragmatics of legal language is best seen as a deeply
integral part of the pragmatics of the use of language in least in principle, to cooperative interpretation of lawmaking
general. acts.
It may seem otherwise, because the persons to whom The problem faced in cases like Garner v Burr is an
laws are addressed can be extraordinarily creative in finding especially vivid reminder of a problem that philosophers of
ways in which they can fit the laws to their own interests, and language have long been more or less aware of (see Aristotle’s
persons in a dispute over the law tend to disagree deeply over discussion of the notion of ‘friendship’ in Eudemian Ethics
the effect of the language that has been used to make law (so VII, 2, 1236a 33). The context-dependence of the meaning of
that it is not at all unusual for each side to end up with a utterances requires an account of linguistic competence that
deeply-felt conviction that the law is so clearly on his or her relates it to other human capacities—capacities to judge the
own side, that no reasonable person could think otherwise). So importance of context and to draw analogies. It would be a
it seems, as Marmor argues, that the use of language to make mistake in the philosophy of language to account for language
law is not part of a cooperative exchange between lawmakers in a way that divorces its mastery from other aspects of reason.
and the persons to whom their communications are addressed.
That connection between the use of language and
For this very reason, of course, every legal system has tribunals
reason is also illustrated by the contentious nature of the use of
for the resolution of disputes; they are always an integral part
language in law. Much work on pragmatics by philosophers of
of the system of governance in a state that is ruled by law,
language has concerned the conditions for understanding an
although they very often have various forms of independence
utterance; judicial disputes over language are a reminder that
from other institutions of the system. The tribunals or courts
those conditions—even though they are conditions of
typically have authority to interpret the language of the law,
intelligibility of communication—lend themselves to
and to determine its effect in particular cases. Unlike the parties
disagreement and to reasoned dispute over how an utterance is
to a dispute, courts are characteristically involved with the
to be understood (see Carston 2013, for discussion of
lawmakers in the enterprise of governance (even where the
controversies over the applications of conversational maxims).
courts are independent), and often have their own lawmaking
The special feature that distinguishes the legal use of language
capacities. Their role in the system is the substratum for a
from ordinary conversation is not that participants in a legal
cooperative principle that has even deeper significance (and
system act strategically while participants in an ordinary
somewhat simpler implications) in the operation of a legal
conversation act cooperatively; the special feature is that legal
system, than Grice’s cooperative principle has in ordinary
systems need institutions and processes for resolution of the
conversation. And, of course, that cooperative role of a court in
disputes about the application of language that arise as a result
the legal system constrains the arguments of parties to a
of its context-dependence, and as a result of other pragmatic
dispute: however strongly they are inclined to twist the
aspects of communication.
language of the law (and however strongly they may feel that
the other side is twisting the language of the law), they need an
argument that will persuade an institution that is committed, at

47

Chapter 7
The Power of History, Language &
Culture
An ignorance of history, of other cultures, and a
lack of critical skills make it easier for others to
manipulate us.
How do the liberal arts cultivate an informed global
citizen? This question is pressing, not only in the context of the
recent rise of illiberal politics at home and abroad, but also
since the economic crash of 2008. Since that date, the numbers
of students in the humanities have declined significantly across
the nation. The liberal arts, especially the humanities, have
increasingly come under attack by politicians and others who
dismiss them as impractical. These critics would seek to train a
48
narrowly-educated generation of technocrats with little
understanding of the world around them. Doing so would be a
huge mistake. Today, more than ever, we need global citizens
with a broad general knowledge of the world and who possess
the requisite critical and analytical skills to separate fact from
fiction. An understanding of two branches of the liberal arts is
particularly useful in this regard: foreign languages and history.
It need hardly be said that speaking a foreign language
and having an understanding of foreign cultures are the first
steps toward being a global citizen. Not only is learning a
foreign language essential, but I would argue that one should
also study a foreign culture in the target language. No
translation, however good, can convey the exact sense of the
original since the meaning of a language’s words depends on
the underlying culture. Communicating in another language
requires the ability to express the ideas and customs of a
culture different from our own, to grasp how it constructs
reality and understands the world. To do this means learning to
think in a different fashion.
Studying cultural differences inevitably leads to an
examination of history. Studying the past allows us to
understand both our present and future, even if it is impossible
to practice preventive history. In the weeks before the election,
the students in my World War II class easily drew parallels
between our own time and the 1930s in France, during which
economic difficulties led to the emergence of xenophobia, anti-
immigrant sentiments, and anti-Semitism. We also talked about
the rise, in the wake of the catastrophic French defeat in World
War II, of Marshal Philippe Pétain, an authoritarian,
charismatic figure who assured the French that he alone could
solve all their problems, infamously declaring that he would
grant the French the “gift of his person.” Instead of “saving
France,” he and his government went on to collaborate with the
Nazis, leading to one of the darkest periods in modern French
history.
Here in the United States, one of the signal lessons of
our recent election has been the importance of historical
thinking and understanding to civic culture. Even a glancing
familiarity with the history of slavery can easily allow one to
dismiss the dubious declaration by then presidential candidate
Donald Trump that African-Americans in this country are
currently worse off than they ever have been. Knowledge is
power. It allows us to dismiss falsehoods, including those
uttered by our leaders.
Studying history, however, does more than just teach
students about the past; it also obliges them to think critically,
to process large amounts of information and make sense of
conflicting analyses. Reading history requires a careful
perusal of documents. In my history classes, students examine
both primary source documents and secondary texts written by
historians, examining them for bias. By analyzing rhetorical
strategies, we ascertain not only which elements are present but
also which notable elements are missing from the text.
Thus, students learn to understand silences in history
and the reasons for them. We see the power of this analysis in
the case of a seminal lecture delivered to Sorbonne students in
1882. In it, French historian Ernest Renan defined the elements
of the French nation as the shared desire to live together, in
opposition to the German ideal of common “blood” and
language. While the lecture, given in the aftermath of the loss
of the Franco-Prussian War, condemned Germany for forcibly
49
annexing the German-dialect speaking provinces of Alsace
and Lorraine, nowhere in the text do the words German or
Germany appear. This lacuna was, in part, a strategy aimed at
diminishing and delegitimizing German power. In his speech,
Renan explicitly rejected a common language as an element of
national identity, in order to better criticize the Germans.
Nevertheless, he tried to have it both ways, neglecting to
mention that at this time, France was itself imposing the French
language in schools in order to eliminate local dialects and
promote national unity.
Such an analysis allows students to understand the
biases that inform Renan’s thinking, to weigh the accuracy of
his claims, and situate his writing within the context of his
time. Students of history also study the biases of historians
themselves, to see how historians create narratives of the past.
That these narratives can conflict does not mean that all truth is
relative or that universal truth does not exist. Some facts are
indisputable—we have documents and eyewitness testimony to
back them up. We know for a fact that at least six million Jews
died in the Holocaust (recent scholarship tells us it was many
more). But in cases where conflicting accounts exist, historians
must weigh evidence from different sources, perusing
documents in archives and elsewhere, as well as the
testimonies of contemporaries to support their hypotheses.
Indeed, historians viewing the same events sometimes come to
different conclusions. But they do so based on their best
understanding of the evidence at hand, after a serious critical
process. Such skills learned in a history class can easily be
applied to our contemporary world. We will not all necessarily
come to the same conclusions, but we can at least examine the
evidence based on a common understanding of how to arrive at
the truth.
 An ignorance of history, of other cultures, and a lack
of critical skills make it easier for others to manipulate us. Far
from being impractical, studying history and foreign languages
and cultures equips students with the tools to become active,
informed and engaged global citizens. While our current
situation seems bleak, I have great confidence in the ability of
students of the liberal arts to shape a better future, one firmly
grounded in a world where there is no such thing as alternative
facts, but the endless search for truth.
Language and Culture
It has been seen that language is much more than the
external expression and communication of internal thoughts
formulated independently of their verbalization. In
demonstrating the inadequacy and inappropriateness of such a
view of language, attention has already been drawn to the ways
in which one’s native language is intimately and in all sorts of
details related to the rest of one’s life in a community and to
smaller groups within that community. This is true of all
peoples and all languages; it is a universal fact about language.
Anthropologists speak of the relations between
language and culture. It is indeed more in accordance with
reality to consider language as a part of culture. Culture is here
being used, as it is throughout this article, in the
anthropological sense, to refer to all aspects of human life
insofar as they are determined or conditioned by membership
in a society. The fact that people eat or drink is not in itself
cultural; it is a biological necessity for the preservation of life.
That they eat particular foods and refrain from eating other
substances, though they may be perfectly edible and
50
nourishing, and that they eat and drink at particular times of
day and in certain places are matters of culture, something
“acquired by man as a member of society,” according to the
classic definition of culture by the English anthropologist Sir
Edward Burnett Tylor. As thus defined and envisaged, culture
covers a very wide area of human life and behaviour, and
language is manifestly a part, probably the most important part,
of it.
Although the faculty of language acquisition and
language use is innate and inherited, and there is legitimate
debate over the extent of this innateness, every individual’s
language is “acquired by man as a member of society,” along
with and at the same time as other aspects of that society’s
culture in which people are brought up. Society and language
are mutually indispensable. Language can have developed only
in a social setting, however this may have been structured, and
human society in any form even remotely resembling what is
known today or is recorded in history could be maintained only
among people utilizing and understanding a language in
common use.
VIOLENCE
AND LANGUAGE:
The signs that hurt
By J.L. LEMKE
CAN SYMBOLIC ACTION do literal violence? Can
speech cause bodily pain? Are we physically safe from hate
speech and cruelty of lovers behind Cartesian firewalls
separating mind from body, meaning from matter? Or do
emotions breach those barriers and make us as vulnerable to
words as to fists? If hypnotic suggestion can produce burn
reactions, amputees feel phantom pains in long-missing limbs,
and stress impairs the immune system, why should we doubt
that pain is as much our response to the meaning of events as to
their physical force?
In his own work, these questions have emerged from an
attempt to reunify the views of the symbolic and material
dimensions of social processes. At Columbia, scholars
interested in such diverse subjects as the sex industry, ethnic
violence in South Africa, and the law of "hate speech" also find
themselves trying to make sense of the effects of symbolic
violence.
Violence is not simply material force: It is the use of
force as a tool for some human purpose, individual or social.
We are social actors and we are bodies vulnerable to pain.
Every society exploits the possibility that our actions can be
controlled by the fact, memory, and anticipation of pain
inflicted by others. We hurt children to make them behave--
sometimes with blows and sometimes with words, but equally
with pain. Theories of child development make it easy to forget
how often parents make children cry and how basic this
violence is to the socializing process. Theories of economic
and ideological domination, likewise, can obscure how the
powerful exploit the powerless through pain. Violence exerts
its social effects as much through what it means as through
what it physically does.
Anne McClintock of Columbia's English and
Comparative Literature Department has explored the
51
transformative re-enactment in sexual relations of many basic
power relationships (between parents and children, teachers
and students, police and citizens, men and women). In each
case, the pain of social control is transmuted into sexual
pleasure, and one's internalization of that control is suspended
by giving another person extraordinary power over one's body
in sadomasochistic rituals. Well-socialized men of high status
and substantial social power reverse their roles, wearing
diapers, being beaten for trivial offenses, putting themselves in
the power of mothers, teachers, judges, and dominant women.
In these scenes, the sight and sound of the whip is as important
as its touch. McClintock vividly displays what historian Michel
Foucault wrote of in Discipline and Punish: the social
regulation of bodies as the foundation of the modern social
order.
We demonize the extremes of violence: spousal and
child abuse, gay-bashing, police brutality, prison rape, hate
crimes, "ethnic cleansing." But each of these exaggerates an
endemic process of violence that maintains the social order.
Most violence is not idiosyncratic: The same kinds of people
do the same kinds of violence to the same kinds of people. A
little violence goes a long way when it takes on a meaning,
when people begin to predict what will be punished. That
meaning enables violence to function as a means of control. No
social order could maintain itself solely by the physical effects
of violence. Violence is always also a warning, a threat of the
possibility of more violence. Violence itself is a language we
all learn to interpret.
Rob Nixon, also of the English department, describes
the symbolic language of ethnic and class violence, particularly
in the struggle between the Inkatha party and the African
National Congress. The axes and spears of "traditional Zulu
manhood" were carried in marches and demonstrations by
Inkatha, but they were more than merely symbolic in clashes
with the disarmed ANC.
How can words and symbolic actions cause pain?
Pain is an active response to its causes, not simply a passive
effect. The meanings of words and deeds always include the
feelings produced when one makes sense of a situation. The
tasteless sexual or racial joke is no joke to a woman who has
been raped, a man who was a victim of a hate crime, or to any
person who feels less safe from pain than someone who can
afford to make these kinds of jokes. We defend our freedom of
speech and action, but we cannot exercise these freedoms
responsibly, or judge whether others do so, if we cannot feel
what hurts whom and how much.
Legal scholars like Columbia Law School's Kent
Greenawalt are trying to find workable legal principles to apply
to hate-speech cases. In Fighting Words: Individuals,
Communities, and Liberties of Speech, Greenawalt tries to
balance the social interest in protecting free speech with the
social and personal harms speech can do. The civil law of torts
recognizes the emotional distress of harassment victims, but
courts have been reluctant to accept the criminalization of
speech on the basis of the damage it can do to its victims.
Greenawalt cites the arguments of Mari Matsuda that "victims
of vicious hate propaganda have experienced physiological
symptoms and emotional distress ranging from fear in the gut,
rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing, nightmares, post-
traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis, and
suicide." The law of hate speech, however, is still based more
52
on the violence it may provoke than on the equally real bodily
harm it can produce.
The violence of blows and the violence of symbolic
acts are not so easily separated. As sociologst Pierre Bourdieu
argues in Language and Symbolic Power, people's dispositions,
from the accents of their dialects to their reactions to symbolic
forms, reflect the physical embodiment of their experiences. If
we are what we feel, research on symbolic violence takes on
special importance for the individuals and the society that this
violence shapes.
Module 8
The Speech Community
This is something which is difficult to define precisely.We
always have to ask what does this term get us?
Chomsky's (formal linguistics) notion of an ideal speech
community: completely homogenous.But we know from our
discussions that this is a lots of variation exists within a group
of speakers. So where do we draw the line between who is in
and who is outside of the Speech Community?
Lots of definitions from various linguists:
Lyons (1970): "All people who use a give language or dialect"
Labov (1972): "Participation in a set of shared norms; these
norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior,
and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which
are invariant in respect to particular levels of usage"
Gumperz (1971): "A social group which may be either
monolingual or multilingual, held together by frequency of
social interaction and set off from the surrounding areas by
weaknesses in the lines of communication"
Lots of models of the speech community and variation in
it.Each focuses on a different level of social organization as the
starting point.Many emphasize the need for shared norms of
language use and potentially frequent interaction among
members. So there seems to be both a linguistic
component and a social component.Assumption is that
members of a speech community share a single grammar:
single set of rules for speaking. Part of this shared grammar
includes shared rules for evaluating (judging, perceiving,
interpreting) language use, which allows one to recognize other
speech community members. (How do you know when
someone "sounds funny" or "has an accent" or "isn't from
around here").
The notion of speech communities focus on a group,
but what about the role of the individual within the larger
Speech Community?
For the individual, a whole set of linguistic resources.
Linguistic repertoire: a person’s (or communities) linguistic
resources. For an individual, depends on social history & social
networks.
Parts of this repertoire include:
Vernacular: the most basic, earliest learned variety of
53
language. It is the least subject to self-monitoring and the least
likely to change over one’s lifetime.
Superposed varieties: later-learned varieties of speech. Used in
more formal settings.
The vernacular comes out in certain circumstances - when
someone is tired, upset, around other speakers of the
vernacular, very informal settings...
Goal of sociolinguistics is to understand this
vernacular. But to do this we must examine speech in natural
settings, not artificial ones. But how do we get at this kind of
speech?
Observer’s paradox: the speech we most want to observe is
unobserved speech. We have to come up with techniques for
overcoming this.
We want to pay attention to the use of the vernacular when
establishing the role of a single person within/outside the
speech community.By looking at extreme, we can define the
core of the group.
*Interlopers - people who move to a new dialect area.How
well do they fit in?Depends on their age, ability,
motivation/desire
*Insiders - people at the very core of the social group.They're
highly integrated, involved in the group, but not necessarily
group leaders.They are the leading force of spreading linguistic
change.
*Outsiders - they are not part of the mainstream, isolated,
considered uncool.Also called 'lames'. Tend to be linguistically
conservative, don't use slang, don't use vernacular -- less 'local'-
sounding.
*Aspirers - social ambitions beyond the "immediate domain"
(the local group).Tend to be more standard.
How do we measure an individual's participation in the social
group/speech community?
1, Social Network Analysis
emphasize the individual's place within a social network to
seek to account for the variability in individual linguistic
behavior rather than large scale characterization of the
community. How do various individuals play a role in
linguistic change - someone with a lot of ties may spread a
change by coming into contact with a lot of people, someone
who has ties outside the community may initiate the change.
This is observing the micro-level social clusters.As a rule, the
stronger a person's network ties to a local group, the stronger
the participation in the local vernacular.
Measuring network ties: density is the number of ties;
multiplexity is the content of the ties
2) Sociometrics
A way to measure multiplexity -- how reciprocal is the
relationship? (Measuring popularity, in a way)
3) Network integration
kinship, work, territory-based activities (teams), social groups,
physical proximity all play a role
4) Acts of identity:A individual creates for himself the
patterns of his linguistic behaviour so as to resemble those of
54
the group or groups which he whises to be identified, and to be
unlike those from whom he wishes to be distinguished.
The social network, sociometric, acts of identity
approaches focus on the behavior of the individual, offering
detailed information on the individuals they investigate,
leading to more depth and accuracy in our understanding of the
larger group.
The speech community approach - looking at all the
members as a whole rather than focusing on any single
individual's behavior - has statistical generalizability from
sampling a broader spectrum of the population.These
approaches complement one another, and both are necessary
and useful.
Examples of sociolinguistic variables that can be
explained (in part) by thinking about speech community
membership, social networks, sociometrics, etc.?
(Examples from film "American Speech")
Martha's Vineyard (Labov) - centralization of the diphthongs
/au/ and /ai/ were strongly correlated with attitudes and
integration of speakers into the local community (as opposed to
the mainland, non-local community).
 Definition and Examples of
Language Contact
By Richard Nordquist
Updated January 20, 2020
Language contact is the social and linguistic
phenomenon by which speakers of different languages (or
different dialects of the same language) interact with one
another, leading to a transfer of linguistic features.
History
"Language contact is a major factor in language
change," notes Stephan Gramley, author or multiple books on
the English language. "Contact with other languages and other
dialectal varieties of one language is a source of
alternative pronunciations, grammatical structures,
and vocabulary." Prolonged language contact generally leads
to bilingualism or multilingualism.
Uriel Weinreich ("Languages in Contact," 1953) and
Einar Haugen ("The Norwegian Language in America," 1953)
are commonly regarded as the pioneers of language-contact
studies. Weinreich was the first to note that those who learn
second languages see linguistic forms from their first and
second languages as equal.
Influences
Language contact often occurs along borders or as a
result of migration. The transfer of words of phrases can be
one-way or two-way. Chinese has influenced Japanese, for
instance, though the reverse has not largely been true. Two-
Chapter 9 way influence is less common and is typically restricted to
specific regions.

55
Pidgins are often developed for trade purposes. These are a few
hundred words that can be spoken between people of different
languages.
Creoles, on the other hand, are full-fledged languages that
result from the blending of more than one language and are
often the first language of a person.
In recent decades the internet has brought many languages in
contact, thus influencing one another.
Still, only a few languages dominate the web, influencing the
others, notes the website Translate Media. English by far
predominates, along with Russian, Korean and German. Even
languages spoken by multiple millions, such as Spanish and
Arabic, have, by comparison, little representation on the
internet. As a result, English words are influencing other
languages worldwide at a far greater rate as a direct result of
internet use.
In France, the English term “cloud computing” has come into
common use despite efforts to get French speakers to adopt
“informatique en nuage.” .
Examples and Observations
"[W]hat counts as language contact? The mere
juxtaposition of two speakers of different languages, or two
texts in different languages, is too trivial to count: unless the
speakers or the texts interact in some way, there can be no
transfer of linguistic features in either direction. Only when
there is some interaction does the possibility of a contact
explanation for synchronic variation or diachronic change
arise. Throughout human history, most language contacts have
56
been face to face, and most often the people involved have a
nontrivial degree of fluency in both languages. There are other
possibilities, especially in the modern world with novel means
of worldwide travel and mass communication: many contacts
now occur through written language only. ...
"[L]anguage contact is the norm, not the exception. We would
have a right to be astonished if we found any language whose
speakers had successfully avoided contacts with all other
languages for periods longer than one or two hundred years."
—Sarah Thomason, "Contact Explanations in Linguistics."
"The Handbook of Language Contact," ed. by Raymond
Hickey. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013
"Minimally, in order to have something that we would
recognize as 'language contact,' people must learn at least some
part of two or more distinct linguistic codes. And, in practice,
'language contact' is really only acknowledged when one code
becomes more similar to another code as a result of that
interaction."
—Danny Law, "Language Contact, Inherited Similarity and
Social Difference." John Benjamins, 2014)
Different Types of Language-Contact Situations
"Language contact is not, of course, a homogeneous
phenomenon. Contact may occur between languages which are
genetically related or unrelated, speakers may have similar or
vastly different social structures, and patterns of
multilingualism may also vary greatly. In some cases the entire
community speaks more than one variety, while in other cases
only a subset of the population is multilingual. Lingualism
and lectalism may vary by age, by ethnicity, by gender, by
social class, by education level, or by one or more of a number
of other factors. In some communities there are few constraints
on the situations in which more than one language can be used,
while in others there is heavy diglossia, and each language is
confined to a particular type of social interaction. ...
"While there a great number of different language contact
situations, a few come up frequently in areas where linguists do
fieldwork.
One is dialect contact, for example between standard
varieties of a language and regional varieties (e.g., in France or
the Arab world). ... "A further type of language contact
involves exogamous communities where more than one
language might be used within the community because its
members come from different areas. ... The converse of such
communities where exogamy leads to multilingualism is an
endoterogenous community which maintains its own language
for the purpose of excluding outsiders. ...
"Finally, fieldworkers particularly often work in endangered
language communities where language shift is in progress."
—Claire Bowern, "Fieldwork in Contact Situations." "The
Handbook of Language Contact," ed. by Raymond Hickey.
Wiley-Blackwell, 2013
The Study of Language Contact
"Manifestations of language contact are found in a great
variety of domains, including language acquisition, language
processing and production, conversation and discourse, social
functions of language and language policy, typology and
language change, and more. ...
"[T]he study of language contact is of value toward an
57
understanding of the inner functions and the inner structure of
'grammar' and the language faculty itself."
—Yaron Matras, "Language Contact." Cambridge University
Press, 2009
"A very naive view of language contact would probably hold
that speakers take bundles of formal and functional
properties, semiotic signs so to speak, from the relevant contact
language and insert them into their own language. To be sure,
this view is much too simplistic and not seriously maintained
any longer. A probably more realistic view held in language
contact research is that whatever kind of material is transferred
in a situation of language contact, this material necessarily
experiences some sort of modification through contact."
—Peter Siemund, "Language Contact: Constraints and
Common Paths of Contact-Induced Language
Change." "Language Contact and Contact Languages," ed.
by Peter Siemund and Noemi Kintana. John Benjamins, 2008
Language Contact and Grammatical
Change
"[T]he transfer of grammatical meanings and structures
across languages is regular, and ... it is shaped by universal
processes of grammatical change. Using data from a wide
range of languages we ... argue that this transfer is essentially
in accordance with principles of grammaticalization, and that
these principles are the same irrespective of whether or not
language contact is involved, and of whether it concerns
unilateral or multilateral transfer. ...
"[W]hen embarking on the work leading to this book we were
assuming that grammatical change taking place as a result of
language contact is fundamentally different from purely
language-internal change. With regard to replication, which is
the central theme of the present work, this assumption turned
out to be unfounded: there is no decisive difference between
the two. Language contact can and frequently does trigger or
influence the development of grammar in a number of ways;
overall, however, the same kind of processes and directionality
can be observed in both. Still, there is reason to assume that
language contact in general and grammatical replication in
particular may accelerate grammatical change . ..."
—Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva, "Language Contact and
Grammatical Change." Cambridge University Press, 2005
Old English and Old Norse
"Contact-induced grammaticalization is part of contact-
induced grammatical change, and in the literature of the latter it
has been repeatedly pointed out that language contact often
brings about loss of grammatical categories. A frequent
example given as illustration of this kind of situation
involves Old English and Old Norse, whereby Old Norse was
brought to the British Isles through the heavy settlement of
Danish Vikings in the Danelaw area during the 9th to 11th
centuries. The result of this language contact is reflected in the
linguistic system of Middle English, one of the characteristics
of which is the absence of grammatical gender. In this
particular language contact situation, there seems to have been
an additional factor leading to the loss, namely, the genetic
closeness and—accordingly—the urge to diminish the
'functional overload' of speakers bilingual in Old English and
Old Norse.
"Thus a 'functional overload' explanation seems to be a
58
plausible way to account for what we observe in Middle
English, that is, after Old English and Old Norse had come into
contact: gender assignment often diverged in Old English and
Old Norse, which would have readily led to the elimination of
it in order to avoid confusion and to lessen the strain of
learning the other contrastive system."
—Tania Kuteva and Bernd Heine, "An Integrative Model of
Grammaticalization." "Grammatical Replication and
Borrowability in Language Contact," ed. by Björn Wiemer,
Bernhard Wälchli, and Björn Hansen. Walter de Gruyter, 2012
Bilingualism is the ability of an individual or the
members of a community to use two languages effectively.
Adjective: bilingual.
Monolingualism refers to the ability to use a
single language. The ability to use multiple languages is known
as multilingualism.
More than half of the world's population is bilingual
or multilingual: "56% of Europeans are bilingual, while 38% of
the population in Great Britain, 35% in Canada, and 17% in the
United States are bilingual," per statistics referenced in
"Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia."
Etymology
From the Latin, "two" + "tongue"
Examples and Observations
Bilingualism as the Norm
According to "The Handbook of Bilingualism," "Bilingualism
—more generally, multilingualism—is a major fact of life in
the world today. To begin with, the world's estimated 5,000
languages are spoken in the world's 200 sovereign states (or 25
languages per state), so that communication among the citizens
of many of the world's countries clearly requires extensive bi-
(if not multi-)lingualism. In fact, [British linquist] David
Crystal (1997) estimates that two-thirds of the world's children
grow up in a bilingual environment. Considering only
bilingualism involving English, the statistics that Crystal has
gathered indicate that, of the approximately 570 million people
worldwide who speak English, over 41 percent or 235 million
are bilingual in English and some other language.... One must
conclude that, far from being exceptional, as many lay people
believe, bilingualism/multilingualism—which, of course, goes
hand in hand with multiculturalism in many cases—is currently
the rule throughout the world and will bec e increasingly so in
the future."
Global Multilingualism
"The political history of the 19th and 20th centuries and
the ideology of 'one state—one nation—one language' have
given rise to the idea that monolingualism has always been the
default or normal case in Europe and more or less a
precondition for political loyalty. Facing this situation, it has
been overlooked that the vast majority of the world's
population—in whatever form or conditions—is multilingual.
This is quite obvious when we look at the linguistic maps of
Africa, Asia or Southern America at any given time,"
according to Kurt Braunmüller and Gisella Ferraresi, editors of
the book, "Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language."
Individual and Societal Bilingualism
Per the "Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual
Education," "Bilingualism exists as a possession of an
individual. It is also possible to talk about bilingualism as a
characteristic of a group or community of people [societal
bilingualism]. Bilinguals and multilinguals are most often
59
located in groups, communities or in a particular region (e.g.
Catalans in Spain).... [C]o-existing languages may be in a
process of rapid change, living in harmony or one rapidly
advancing at the cost of the other, or sometimes in conflict.
Where many language minorities exist, there is often language
shift...."
Foreign Language Instruction in the U.S.
According to language research consultant Ingrid
Pufahl, "For decades, U.S. policymakers, business leaders,
educators, and research organizations have decried our
students’ lack of foreign language skills and called for better
language instruction. Yet, despite these calls for action, we
have fallen further behind the rest of the world in preparing our
students to communicate effectively in languages other than
English.
"I believe the main reason for this disparity is that foreign
languages are treated by our public education system as less
important than math, science, and English. In contrast, E.U.
governments expect their citizens to become fluent in at least
two languages plus their native tongue. . . .
"[F]oreign language instruction in the U.S. is frequently
considered a 'luxury,' a subject taught to college-bound
students, more frequently in affluent than poor school districts,
and readily cut when math or reading test scores drop or budget
cuts loom.”
Chapter 10
Language and Regional Variation
  Every language has a lot of variation, especially
in the way it is spoken.
 If we just look at English, we find widespread
variation in the way it is spoken in different
countries such as Australia, Britain and the
USA. We can also find a range of varieties in
different parts of those countries.
 Linguistic geography
The standard language
 an idealized variety , because it has no specific
region.
 It is widely used in the mass media and is
taught in most schools regardless of the region
 The variety taught to those who want to learn
English as a second language.
 Standard American English, Standard Australian
English, Standard Canadian English
Accent and dialect
 Accent
 Every language-user speaks with an
accent.
60
 The description of aspects of
pronunciation that identify where an
individual speaker is from, regionally or
socially.
 Dialect
 used to describe features of grammar
and vocabulary as well as aspects of
pronunciation.
Dialectology
Dialectology= the study of dialects.
 Each dialect is simply different and
none of them is better than any other.
 Some varieties do become more
prestigious
 The variety that develops as the standard
language has usually been one socially
prestigious dialect, originally connected
with a political or cultural center (e.g.
London for British English and Paris for
French). Yet, there always continue to
be other varieties of a language spoken
in different regions.
Regional dialects
The existence of different regional
dialects is widely recognized and often the
 source of some humor for those living in
different regions.
 Going beyond stereotypes, those
involved in the serious investigation of
regional dialects have devoted a lot of
survey research to the identification of
consistent features of speech found in
one geographical area compared to
another.
Isoglosses and dialect boundaries
 Isogloss:
 It is a line that represents a boundary
between areas with regard to that one
particular linguistic item.
For example:
 that the vast majority of informants in one
area say they carry things home from the
store in a paper bag while the majority in
another area say they use a paper sack,
then it is usually possible to draw a line
across a map separating the two areas, as
shown on the accompanying illustration.
 If a very similar distribution is found for
another two items, such as a preference for
pail to the north and bucket to the south,
then another isogloss, probably overlapping
the first, can be drawn on the map. When a
number of isoglosses come together in this
61
way, a more solid line, indicating a dialect
boundary, can be drawn.
Dialect continuum
 Dialect continuum: one dialect or language
variety merges into another.
 We can view regional variation as existing
along a rather than as having sharp breaks
from one region to the next.
 For Example:
 Avery similar type of continuum can occur
with related languages existing on either
side of a political border. As you travel from
Holland into Germany, you will find
concentrations of Dutch speakers giving
way to areas near the border where ‘Dutch’
may sound more like ‘Deutsch’ because the
Dutch dialects and the German dialects are
less clearly differentiated. Then, as you
travel into Germany, greater concentrations
of distinctly German speakers occur.
Dialect continuum
 Bidialectal: Speaking two dialects
  Speakers who move back and forth across this
border area, using different varieties with some
ease.
 Most of us grow up with some form of
bidialectalism, speaking one dialect ‘in the street’
among family and friends, and having to learn
another dialect ‘in school’
 When we talk about people knowing two distinct
languages, we describe them as bilingual.
Bilingualism
 Bilingualism : In many countries, regional variation
can involve two (or more) quite distinct and
different languages.
For example:
 Canada is an officially bilingual country, with both
French and English as official languages
 Individual bilingualism, however, doesn’t have to
be the result of political dominance by a group
using a different language. It can simply be the
result of having two parents who speak different
languages. However, even in this type of
bilingualism, one language tends eventually to
become the dominant one, with the other in a
subordinate role.
Diglossia
62
 Diglossia: Two distinct varieties of a language exists
in some countries.
 In diglossia, there is a ‘low’ variety, acquired locally
and used for everyday affairs, and a ‘high’ or special
variety, learned in school and used for important
matters.
For Example:
A type of diglossia exists in Arabic speaking
countries where the high variety (Classical Arabic) is
used in formal lectures, serious political events and
especially in religious discussions. The low variety is
the local version of the language, such as Egyptian
Arabic or Lebanese Arabic.
 The low variety is called ‘vernacular’
Language planning
Government, legal and educational organizations in
many countries have to plan which variety or varieties of
the languages spoken in the country are to be used for
official business.
Language planning
For Example:
 In Israel, despite the fact that it was not the
most widely used language among the
population, Hebrew was chosen as the
official government language.
 In India, the choice was Hindi, yet in many
non-Hindispeaking regions, there were riots
against this decision.
  There were ‘National Language Wars’ in the appearance of a body of literary work written in the
Philippines before different groups could standard
agree on the name of the national language 4-Implementation
(Filipino).
‘Implementation’ is largely a matter of government
Language planning attempts to encourage use of the standard
The process of language planning may be seen in a 5-Acceptance
better light when the full series of stages is implemented
over a number of years. ‘Acceptance’ is the final stage when a substantial
majority of the population has come to use the standard
For Example: and to think of it as the national language, playing a part in
not only social, but also national identity.
 The adoption of Swahili as the national
language of Tanzania in East Africa Pidgine
 The educational, legal and government
Pidgine:
systems have gradually introduced Swahili
as the official language.  A pidgin is a variety of a language (e.g.
English) that developed for some practical
The process of developing a national purpose, such as trading, among groups of
language: people who had a lot of contact, but who
did not know each other’s languages.
1- Selection:
 The origin of the term ‘pidgin’ is thought to
The process of ‘selection’ (choosing an official language)
be from a Chinese version of the English
2- Codification word business.
‘Codification’, in which basic grammars, dictionaries and  Had no native speakers
written models are used to establish the standard  For example, in Papua New Guinea, a lot of
variety official business is conducted in Tok Pisin.
 There are believed to be between six and
3-Elaboration
twelve million people still using pidgin
‘Elaboration’ with the standard variety being languages and between ten and seventeen
developed for use in all aspects of social life, and the million using descendants from pidgins
called ‘creoles’.

63
Creole

 When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a

trade or contact language and becomes the
first language of a social community, it is
described as a creole.
 A creole develops as the first language of
the children of pidgin speakers. Thus, unlike
pidgins, creoles have large numbers of
native speakers and are not restricted at all
in their uses.
 Tok Pisin is now a creole.
 For Example
 Hawai’i Creole English
 A French creole is spoken by the majority of
the population in Haiti
 English creoles are used in Jamaica and
Sierra Leone.

64