WORLDVIEWS

Few scholars would argue with the idea that words and worldviews are intertwined and that language and thought are related. But when we speak of language, what do we mean? Are we thinking of the language system, or the particular style or type of language used? Most sociologists, political analysts and philosophers are concerned with the ideological content of concepts. Theodor Adorno (1991a, 1991b, 1989), Raymond Williams (1983), Michel Foucault (2004), George Lakoff (1996) and Andrew Goatly (2007) are but a few of those who remind us that words are not innocent and that political systems, reigning ideologies and competing world-conceptions seek to shape and delimit the content we attribute to words like ‘citizen’, ‘individual’, ‘state’ and ‘nation’. Even those concepts we cannot help feeling belong to the personal world, the private world of intimacy, which should (so we would like to believe) remain untouched and aloof from the political sphere – concepts like ‘love’, ‘the family’, ‘the body’ and ‘purity’ – are taken over and integrated into the worldview of a dominant conceptual paradigm.

Writers such as Adorno, Williams and Foucault are working within the framework of the social sciences, and therefore tend to consider the individual as the ‘product’ of social systems. Language, or what such writers often call ‘discourse’, is considered as a means of social pressure: depending upon the level of coercion, such writers will speak of socialisation, indoctrination, propaganda and manipulation.