Language As Vehicle Of Power

Many of us might think we are capable of having complete understanding of the world. But this is fallacious assumption. As a matter of fact, we do not precisely understand what is around us and how our surrounding affects us. Even if we claim we do, that is a mistaken argument. This article aims to explore how language can be used for communication and how it can also be abused for manipulation. We begin to make sense of the world the moment we learn a language. But our understanding of the world is not full. It is only partial because the language we use is only a representation of the partial physical world.

 Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), considered as the father of modern linguistics, states that the relation between the physical world and the word that represents it is arbitrary. The arbitrary relation, as he explains, is a subjective meaning assigned to the word that represents the object. It seems a valid argument because we can see no natural connection between the word and object. To illustrate the point, the word tree we use in our conversation and the object tree in the forest look quite different. There is no essential treeness in the word tree. The qualities that make a tree are only our ways of understanding the tree. Even the onomatopoeic words do not reflect the objects in true sense. In this sense, words are only symbols of what we want to mean by certain words. Symbolic representation is only partial.

Arbitrary relationship

This notion of arbitrary relationship between the word and the object had already been envisioned by William Shakespeare in his play Romeo and Juliet (1597).  Juliet’s words “What's in a name? That which we call a rose/ by any other name would smell as sweet” suggests that there is no essential quality of the object contained in the word. What Shakespeare meant is the names of things do not affect what they really are. In Shakespearean sense also, words represent the physical world only partially. In addition to the cognitive relation of language with the physical world, there is a close connection between language and culture it carries. Our mother tongue represents our cultural understanding of the physical world. The fact that there are more than 6000 languages in the world suggests that there are almost equal number of cultures. 

But the assumption of language-culture equation also fails when we closely observe their relationship. Language and culture are not intrinsically associated despite their representational connection. It means totally unrelated languages share in one culture and closely related languages, even a single language, belong to distinct cultural spheres.  The essence of this argument is that different words mean different things in different languages; not every word in every language has a one-to-one exact translation in a different language. A common language cannot indefinitely represent a common culture when the physical determinants of the culture are no longer the same throughout the globe. 

In a systematic study of non-European languages, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) observed that where a non-European language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages. One of his examples was the supposedly large number of words for European understanding of “snow” in the multiple words for Inuit understanding of the same thing. Another example is the Hopi language's words for “water” one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water. These simple but intriguing examples of polysemy suggest anomalous relationship between language and culture. It is thus easy to understand how language represents culture only partially.

Whether cognitive faculty of human mind or cultural understanding of human beings affects the heterogeneity of languages is still a matter of debate and further study. Yet there can be no denying that cultures are many and so are the languages. It seems at this juncture, therefore, human thinking and community cultures both affect the use and abuse of language to some extent.

Despite all else language is the window to see the world around us. It is through language that we can do many things in the world: we can understand what is happening around us; we can learn various things of the universe that are unknown to us; we can communicate our experiences; we can express our views about the world. There is no escape to language because it is ubiquitous. It is found everywhere, in speech, in writing, in sign language, or simply in our minds as we dream, remember a conversation, or quickly think out a problem. 

Vehicle of power

But the use of language is not limited to communicating ideas and experiences. Just as it is used for this purpose, it is also used as a vehicle of power, a means by which the powerful people can control the powerless people. Language itself does not have intrinsic power to control people but it has the interested character so the manipulative speakers can use this nature of language to serve their interests. This has happened since generations and still it is very likely happen to the end of time because there can be manipulative users of language out of several types of people living in the society. More specifically, there are two types – innocent people who tend to take things for granted and manipulative people who have the capacity to mislead the innocent people by using manipulative linguistic strategies. 

It is thus essential to develop skills to understand the manipulative forms of language and the strategies of manipulative speakers. Only those people who have learnt critical thinking skills can understand how manipulative speakers can deliver make-believe speech to serve their interests. These skills can be developed by training the mind as well as going out to see how the innocent people are being deceived. Only critical thinking skills can help us know whether what a particular speaker’s language is useful or harmful to us. The use of language is good but its abuse is bad.

(The author is the chairman of Molung Foundation. bhupadhamala@gmail.com)