Language and power

In this work, language is viewed first and foremost as a form of cultural practice and as an inevitable site of ideological contestation involving asymmetrical power relations between groups and individuals. This is one of the major premises upon which this study is based, wherein power signifies the capacity to act in a way that involves the consent, acquiescence or resistance of others (see Barnes 1988; Hindess 1996). I am therefore not interested here in language as a structural system. Structural information – phonological, grammatical or lexical – will be given when it is necessary to contextualize a point of linguistic structure, and only in so far as this relates to the issue of language and society, which is the main focus of this research.

From an instrumentalist point of view, language is a means of communication. In this role, language links the members of a speech community to each other in the present. But it also serves to link these speakers to their history, endowing them with a sense of identity whose roots are located in the past. And it is this past, mythical or real, that animates the cultural practices and ideological concerns that drive the members of the community towards an imagined future. Language always stands at the crossroads of (social) time, linking the past with the present, and linking these two with the future.