Language and Politic

Group 61. Risqi Sugiarti (2201410006)

2. Niken Larasati Wening (2201410009)3. Mazidatur Rizqiyah (220141004. Fatimah (22014105. Lilik Suryani (220141

Beginnings: The Politics of LinguisticCorrectness and Persuasion

POLITIC POLIS CITY

The study of language and politics is aimed at

understanding the role of linguistic

communication in the functioning of social units,

and how this role shapes language itself.

Beginnings: The Politics of LinguisticCorrectness and Persuasion

• The city as an organized social unit depends on linguistic

communication for its functioning, and urban life places

functional demands on language that are substantially

different from those in a sparsely populated rural setting.

• Politics is the art, and language the medium,

• They position themselves to get what they need, and

what they want.

Beginnings: The Politics of LinguisticCorrectness and Persuasion

• The example of Transactional conversation

between Crispin and John. John said “Bring to

me” Crispin replay “Bring it to me”.

• The use of “standard” forms of language in politic

will make the audience more persuasive , when it

comes to convincing and this persuasiveness may

well carry on throughout the life.

• The “correction” in question is of a usage over which

native speakers disagree, both across and within

dialects.

• “Bring me it” is acceptable to many but not all

speakers;

“Bring it me” is likewise semi-acceptable, but only in

parts of England. “Bring them them” is fine for me in

spoken usage, though not in writing, and most

native speakers seem to reject it in either mode.

• Interpreting language use in this way is a

political act.

• It determines who stands where in the

social hierarchy, who is entrusted with

power and responsibility

• In modern times, particularly in the climate of

twentieth-century ideas about the unconscious mind

and the possibility of thought control, it has come to

be classified under the still more loaded rubric of

“propaganda.”

• In the twentieth century, the understanding of

language and politics was shaped by an ongoing

conflict and tension between structuralism (and later

“poststructuralism”)

Ernest Renan (1882 p,26)

A national is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things

that are actually one make up this soul, this spiritual

principle. One on the past, the other in the present.

One is the common ownership of a rich legacy of

memories; the other is the present day agreement,

the desire to live together, the will to continue

validiting the heritage that has been inherited jointly.

It is in this sense that powerful “ideologies of

language” may be said to condition language

choice, from the level selecting a national

language down to what one will speak, and how,

in a given conversational situation.

• Phillipson (1992) has very influentially promulgated

the idea that the spread of English is being brought

about through “ English Linguistic Inperalism” as set

of practicies through which the dominance of English

is asserted and maintained by the establishment and

continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural

inequalities between English and other languages”.

• One of the most powerful tools of linguicism

according to phillipson is laguage teaching and

multilingual education. “linguicism

occurs...........if there is a policy of supporting

several languages, but if priority is given in

teacher training, curriculum development, and

school timetables to one language” (1992, p.47)

• The other most important applied linguist

working in the area of “linguistic human rights” ,

it regularly asserts that “languages are today

being killed and linguistic diversity is

disappearing at a much faster pace than before

in human history” (Skutnabb-Kangas,2000).

• The most significant development in opposition

has been the concept of “linguistic

hybridity”(Pennycook,1998). Hybridity denies

that spread of English wipes out other language

and culture, providing evidence instead of how

resilient adaptive language and cultures are to

intermingling.

Politics in Discourse (Approaches in the Marxist Line)

• In the English-speaking world, the connection between language

and politics was first brought to general attention in a 1946 article

by George Orwell

• The linguistic “bad habits” consist of strings of words that form

well-worn patterns, coercing their users to think in certain ways.

• The detachment of language from observable reality is what

makes it possible for a political party to maintain orthodoxy

among its followers, and in the most extreme cases, to dupe those

it wishes to enslave

• In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Newspeak is English

re-engineered through massive vocabulary reduction and shifts

of meaning

• The aim of Newspeak is “to make all other modes of thought

impossible.” For instance, according to the Party, 2 + 2 = 5.

• There are 3 slogan >> “WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS

SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”

• Propaganda can only be combated by rational analysis and

argument.

• In the nineteenth century, the ideology of Standard English was

part of a wider ruling-class project to extend its hegemony over

a growing working class and to meet the demands of mass

education on its own terms.

• With Standard English and education: indoctrinating all

working-class children to speak and write like the ruling class

would represent the latter’s ultimate triumph over the former.

• In continental Europe, significant contributions to a

Marxist account of language would be made by Ferrucio

Rossi-Landi (1921–85) and Michel Pêcheux

• the most important turn in the Marxist line has been that

of someone who is clearly post-Marxist, Jürgen Habermas

• Habermas has remained in the Marxist line, where the

politics of language use is real, and its analysis trivial in

so far as it is abstracted away from this reality.

Structuralist

Saussure (1920)

Lévi-Strauss 1955

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897– 1941)

Alan S. C. Ross (1907–80)

Michel Foucault (1926–84)

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002)

Structuralist Person who concern in

structuralism. a system of ideas used in the study of language, literature, art, anthropology and sociology, which emphasizes the importance of the basic structures and relationships of that particular subject

In the 1920s the mainstream of

linguistics shifted from the historical enquiry of the nineteenth century

to the “structuralist” analysis of language

systems at a given point in time, following

the inspiration of Saussure

It was not therefore congenial to a political understanding of

language, and the linguists who occasionally touched upon the subject, such as Benjamin Lee

Whorf (1897– 1941) and Alan S. C. Ross (1907–80), did so in

popular writings rather than in articles for linguistics journals.

It was not therefore congenial to a political

understanding of language, and the

linguists who occasionally touched upon the subject,

such as Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897– 1941) and

Alan S. C. Ross (1907–80), did so in popular writings rather than in articles for

linguistics journals.

In France, this was the period in which structuralism ascended from a linguistic method to a general intellectual paradigm, propelled by the great success of Lévi-Strauss (1955) (see Joseph, 2001). The two French structuralists who would have the most profound and lasting impact on language and politics, Michel Foucault (1926–84) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), would seem on the surface to have as much in common with the post-Marxist line represented by Habermas as with linguistic structuralism. There are indeed important points in common with Habermas, especially in Bourdieu’s case.

 

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