Thiong’o waxes eloquent on it in his Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of
Language in African Literature,
Gauri Viswanathan points out the pitpalls
of the voluntary cultural assimilation perpetrated on the colonized under the
guise of language, in her Masks of Conquest!
Ismail Talib, John McLeod, Elleke Boehmer
among a host of other critics have explicated this nexus between language and
power as connected with one’s history, politics, culture and thereby one’s
identity itself.
In this regard, yet another impactful
read that speaks to this unholy nexus between language and power happens to be
from the legendary Pierre Bourdieu!
In this powerful read titled, Language
and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu puts forth the proposition that, linguistic
utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation
between a “linguistic market” and a “linguistic habitus.”
Bourdieu critiques the linguistic
theories of Saussure and Chomsky and the theory of speech-acts elaborated by
Austin, and argues that, language should be viewed not only as a means of
communication but also as a medium of power through which individuals pursue
their own interests and display their practical competence.
Bourdieu’s critique of social
institutions are very impactful, and they help us see through the various
layers of power embedded in each aspect of our ‘culture’!
To Bourdieu, the major role of the
education system is cultural reproduction. This is the reproduction of the culture
of the dominant classes. These groups have the power to impose meanings and to
impose them as legitimate. They are able to define their own culture as worthy
of being sought and possessed and to establish it as the basis for knowledge in
the education system. However, there is no way of showing that they are any
better or worse than other subcultures in society.
The wonderful introduction to the book by
John B Thompson is a treat in itself. He has divided the book into three parts,
devoting considerable attention to each; viz., Language in Linguistic Exchanges,
Symbolic Power and Political Field!
The introduction is an invaluable source
of guidance to research scholars who are working on language.
So im just giving a few excerpts gleamed
from off the introduction for y’all –
Here goes -
As competent speakers we are aware of the
many ways in which linguistic exchanges can express relations of power.
We are sensitive to the variations in
accent, intonation and vocabulary which reflect different positions in the
social hierarchy.
We are aware that individuals speak with
differing degrees of authority, that words are loaded with unequal weights,
depending on who utters them and how they are said, such that some words
uttered in certain circumstances have a force and a conviction that they would
not have elsewhere.
We are experts in the innumerable and
subtle strategies by which words can be used as instruments of coercion and
constraint, as tools of intimidation and abuse, as signs of politeness, condescension
and contempt.
In short, we are aware that language is an
integral part of social life, with all its ruses and iniquities, and that a
good part of our social life consists of the routine exchange of linguistic
expressions in the day-to-day flow of social interaction.
It is much easier, however, to observe in
a general way that language and social life are inextricably linked than it is
to develop this observation in a rigorous and compelling way. The contemporary intellectual
disciplines which are particularly concerned with language have been
illuminating in this regard, but they have also suffered from a number of
shortcomings.
In some branches of linguistics, literary
criticism and philosophy, for instance, there is a tendency to think of the
social character of language in a rather abstract way, as if it amounted to
little more than the fact that language is, as Saussure once put it, a
collective 'treasure' shared by all members of a community.
What is missing from such perspectives is
an account of the concrete. complicated ways in which linguistic practices and
products are caught up in, and moulded by, the forms of power and inequality
which are pervasive features of societies as they actually exist.
Sociologists and sociolinguists have been
more concerned with the interplay between linguistic practices and concrete forms
of social life; but in their work there is a tendency - though this is by no
means without exception - to become preoccupied with the empirical details of
variations in accent or usage , in a way that is largely divorced from broader
theoretical and explanatory concerns. When social theorists have turned their
attention to language they have not neglected these broader concerns, but all
too often they have run roughshod over the specific properties of language and
language use in the interests of developing some general theory of social
action or the social world.
One of the merits of the work of the
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is that it avoids to a large extent the
shortcomings which characterize some of the sociological and social-theoretical
writing on language, while at the same time offering an original sociological perspective
on linguistic phenomena which has nothing to do with abstract conceptions of
social life. In a series of articles originally published in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, Bourdieu developed a trenchant critique of formal and structural
linguistics, arguing that these disciplinary frameworks take for granted but
fail to grasp the specific social and political conditions of language
formation and use.
He also began the task of elaborating an
original, innovative approach to linguistic phenomena, an approach that aims to
be both theoretically informed and sensitive to empirical detail. The theory that
informs Bourdieu's approach is a general theory of practice which he has worked
out in the course of a long and prolific career, spanning more than thirty
years and twenty volumes of research and reflection.
Armed with the key concepts of this
theory, Bourdieu sheds fresh light on a range of issues concerned with language
and language use. He portrays everyday linguistic exchanges as situated encounters
between agents endowed with socially structured resources and competencies, in
such a way that every linguistic interaction, however personal and insignificant
it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses
and helps to reproduce.
As Bourdieu shows, the members of the
upper classes had everything to gain from the policy of linguistic unification
which accompanied the French Revolution. This policy, which was part of Condillac's
theory of the purification of thought through the purification of language,
would give the upper classes a de facto monopoly of political power.
By promoting the official language to the
status of the national language - that is, the official language of the
emerging nation-state - the policy of linguistic unification would favour those
who already possessed the official language as part of their linguistic competence,
while those who knew only a local dialect would become part of a political and
linguistic unit in which their traditional competence was subordinate and
devalued.
The subsequent normalization and
inculcation of the official language. and its legitimation as the official
language of the nation-state, was not just a matter of political policy: it was
a gradual process that depended on a vanity of other factors, such as the
development of the educational system and the formation of a unified labour
market.
The production of grammar books.
dictionaries and a corpus of texts exemplifying correct usage is only the most
obvious manifestation of this gradual process of normalization. Perhaps more
importantly, with the establishment of a system of educational qualifications
possessing a standardized value independent of regional variations, and with
the unification of a labour market in which administrative positions depended
on educational qualifications, the school came to be seen as a principal means
of access to the labour market, especially in areas where industrialization was
weak.
Thus, by the combined effect of various
institutions and social processes, people speaking local dialects were induced,
as Bourdieu puts it, 'to collaborate in the destruction of their instruments of
expression'.
For more, do read it from the book. It's quite lovely a read!
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