Hedayat Soltanzadeh - February 23, 2013
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| Hedayat Sultanzadeh |
“And the Lord said: ‘Behold! They are one people, and they all speak one language…now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Let us go down, and there confound their language so that they will not understand one another's speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there upon the face of all the earth: and they ceased building the city. Therefore, the name of it was called Babel because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth, and from there did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” [2]
Curiously, the Hebrew God lacked linguistic knowledge, for the diversity of languages that emerged as humans spread across different parts of the world ultimately enhanced human capacity and made them stronger than ever.
According to the account in the Bible, God created Adam and entrusted him with the task of naming the plants and animals of creation. By scattering Adam’s descendants across the world, God essentially created thousands of new “Adams,” who now, instead of naming the plants and animals of the Garden of Eden, had to name all the plants and animals in the world. This act took them beyond the limited scope of the Garden of Eden. Here, it seems as if control over creation slips from God’s hands, for with the naming of all things in the world in countless different languages, humanity creates cultures so diverse that they exceed God’s initial vision in the creation and the limited world of the Garden of Eden. In place of a single world, thousands of new worlds emerge, and humanity displays a power greater than the deity who intended to curtail it. In this vast world, where everything is named differently in each language, no one speaks a language inherently more significant or prominent than another. All people necessarily communicate in a language to connect with one another, and all languages share a common grammatical foundation consisting of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and so on, which all languages in the world have in common. This is the universal structure of all languages. Their differences lie only in vocabulary and in the naming of animals, plants, and later in mental creations like philosophy, art, and science. Language is merely the means of preserving and transmitting these, and this diversity of vocabulary has no inherent connection to the universal structure of language. Moreover, no language in the world is entirely pure, as all languages have borrowed words from others! However, it should be remembered that linguists’ treatment of all languages as equal emphasizes only the technical aspects of language, not the position a language holds in relation to others or the value assigned to one language over another.
Nevertheless, the Hebrew God, unlike the Greek god, inadvertently pointed to something more significant than the myth of fire and Prometheus: language is the core of power and the center of various forms of political and social struggles. Within language, class, gender, national, and racial conflicts are encoded and employed in society. In its abstract form, this center of power enables humans to establish reciprocal social relationships. This is merely the simple aspect of language that appears at first glance. Yet, through this social function, class, gender, and racial values are encoded, solidified within society, and later passed down as traditional values to future generations. The Hebrew God could only perceive a simple part of this most complex social phenomenon.
As soon as language moves from its abstract, conceptual realm into the concrete social context, it not only becomes a vessel for expressing all complex social relations but also, as a material and ideological force, actively participates in the reproduction of those very social relations. One of language's fundamental roles is to organize dominant relationships and continuously reproduce power relations within each specific society. No power relationship in society is possible without the use of established value codes in language, as well as its constant coding and recoding. Language is a virtual formation parallel to the economic, social, and political formations and even takes longer to lose outdated social codes. The social communicative function of language is just its visible role. Alongside this social function, language organizes symbolic value that represents real power. This real power may be class-based, racial, gendered, national, or sometimes a combination of all, embedded in the symbolic value that social groups ascribe to it. [4] This issue becomes even more pronounced when a particular language is given different symbolic values in relation to other languages. In this way, languages lose their technical equality and instead transform into unequal symbolic values. The model of a language’s symbolic value is rooted in its symbolic dominance and, by extension, the symbolic dominance of its speakers. Therefore, language ideology is not only about language itself but also represents an ideology of identity, unequal power, and even the perceived racial superiority of one social group over another. As Raymond Williams notes, “Defining language, explicitly or implicitly, means defining the status of people in the world.” [5]
Not only the various forms of language but also social institutions like the nation-state, the education system, law, and modes of conflict resolution are based on the use of ideologized language. Even within a single social group that speaks one language, the symbolic value of different dialects is not equal, and different symbolic values are assigned to the social groups and classes that speak these dialects. When someone speaks, through the value codes embedded in language and transferred to our memory, we instantly form a value judgment about that individual, categorizing them into a higher or lower social position. Similarly, we ascribe the same higher or lower symbolic value to the social group or class to which they belong. It is through this symbolic valuation that the language of society’s elites attains higher status and becomes the standard form of language.
During the formation of the nation-state in Europe, among the various dialects of English, French, and Spanish, only one was recognized as the standard language—and that language or dialect was the one spoken by the elite ruling class in the center. At that time, only a small minority spoke this particular dialect or version of English, French, or whatever language became official. The standardization of the language of these elites effectively legitimized their hegemony and political power.
Rosina Lippi-Green writes that in America, the ideology of the standard language extends to the point of discrimination against all dialects that differ from the standard, especially those dialects associated with racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities. The ultimate aim of this ideology is to suppress linguistic diversity and promote linguistic homogenization based on a spoken language that is abstractly modeled and formalized in written form as the standard. [6]
For a language to achieve superior symbolic value over other languages, it requires ideological manipulation and inversion. This ideological manipulation occurs through the inversion of symbolic value, meaning that a social group that speaks a particular language must arbitrarily elevate their own language and culture—formalizing their language through political power—while devaluing, deeming unofficial, or even prohibiting other languages. This process is always carried out through political power. Therefore, behind every ideological discourse on language lies the power dynamics of one social group dominating and subordinating other social groups, making language discourse fundamentally a discourse on power.
When this discourse occurs in a multilingual and multiethnic society where only one language holds official status, it signifies the recognition of the identity of the social group (ethnic or national, however it may be named) that speaks that language, while denying the identity, culture, and language of other social groups, with an intent to eliminate and invalidate them.
Given that cultures and languages are not abstract, floating phenomena, but are backed by human groups, these human groups in a multilingual society represent ethnic units. [7]
For every person, their mother tongue is the sweetest language in the world, as it allows the fullest expression of their emotional world. However, when it is said that "Persian is like sugar" in a multilingual society, the intent is not simply to state that Persian is the mother tongue of every Persian speaker, and therefore, the sweetest language to them. This could be true for any language. Instead, it assigns a higher symbolic value to Persian in comparison with other languages spoken in the country, implicitly granting a higher social value to the Persian-speaking social group. Positioned as the “sweetest,” this notion injects the idea into society that other languages do not hold equal worth with Persian and, therefore, should be eliminated. This symbolic valuation carries a heavy ideological, political, and social burden, reflected in the political policies of governments in Iran over the past eight decades, as well as in the attitudes of writers toward other languages.
With Persian’s official status, Persian-speaking elites immediately find themselves in a privileged position compared to other languages. The political structure of the state, from the executive branch to the legislative, judiciary, administrative institutions, military, and educational systems, all operate in the official language, Persian. It is clear that not all people speak this language, and thus, many are unable to have significant roles in the country's administration. Only a small minority of elites from other language groups are able to be absorbed into the ruling political power. Consequently, it can be observed that the balance of power shifts by making one language official while others become unofficial or even prohibited. This is only part of the reality. Therefore, behind the official and unofficial status of languages, even within different dialects of a single language, lies a political power that sustains itself through the elites of its own social group and, to a lesser degree, through elites absorbed from other social groups into the system.
When linguistic nationalism is linked to national identity and a bureaucratic nation-state faces a multilingual population, it begins to exhibit monolingual tendencies, opening a new arena of social conflicts and tensions. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, at the core of linguistic nationalism lies not the issue of communication between people, but issues of power, social status, politics, and ideology; thus, language can become a symbol of the power and position of the ruling group. [9]
The model of symbolic value superiority of a language or dialect, pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu, is based on the idea that the dominated group must collaborate in this ideological inversion, in which the dominant language is given a higher value and the subordinate languages are assigned lower value. This means that social groups who speak subordinated languages attribute a higher symbolic value to the official and standardized language and assign less value to their own languages. This process, according to Max Weber, is termed "ideological domestication," because hegemony entails not only domination but also an effort to incorporate society as a whole into its ideology. That is, the dominant group does not merely exercise power but seeks to secure the consent or acceptance of subordinate groups by forming alliances with their elites and, through them, garnering their compliance. The concept of symbolic valuation in language and culture can be considered an extension of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony in the cultural sphere, and to some extent, an extension of Marx's ideas about the ruling ideology in society, though applied to areas that Marx and Gramsci did not analyze in depth. According to Bourdieu, the authoritarian nature of legitimizing the dominant language and culture contributes to reproducing existing power relations. In liberal democratic societies, it may be easy for public opinion to accept the discrimination that arises from elevating the dominant language and devaluing subordinated languages, even if ethnic discrimination implicit within it is less readily accepted.
Bourdieu writes that "we must be able to uncover areas where power is less visible, as symbolic power is the hidden power that is only possible with the cooperation of those who do not realize they are subject to it—or who, in fact, exercise this symbolic power against themselves."
Although symbolic power plays an ideological pacifying role over subordinated languages, it is through the agency of visible power, or the state, that the necessary space is created for ideological power concerning language and culture. It is through political power that media, educational systems, and language academies are created for one language, while the growth of subordinated languages is forcibly restricted. Thought and culture are transmitted to future generations through written language, and they nurture thinkers and intellectuals. Intellectual production, like material production, needs consumers; without the ability to draw from its social base, it cannot develop and thrive. This is possible only when a language has formal education, media, a language academy, and the political power to support it. For this reason, the hegemony of a language cannot be sustained without political backing. English did not displace Gaelic from Ireland purely due to its symbolic value; it had the political and military support of England behind it. On December 12, 1946, the destruction of Azerbaijani Turkish schoolbooks and newspapers in Tabriz was carried out by the Shah’s military and its affiliates—not due to the symbolic value of Persian. Although government force cannot equate to culture and language, making a language official or banning it is a process that gives the issue of language a political nature, making it primarily a matter of power. For this reason, the issue of official versus unofficial languages is primarily a political one, with the state power structure at its core.
References:
Plato. Collected Works of Plato. Translated by Mohammad Hassan Lotfi Tabrizi. Vol. 1, p. 83.
The Bible, Book of Genesis, Chapter 11, Verses 6 and 7.
Everett, Daniel. Language: The Cultural Tool. Profile Books Ltd., London, 2012, Introduction.
Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. Routledge, London, 1980.
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. Language and Gender. Cambridge University Press, UK, 2003.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. pp. 320-321. Quoted in: Woolard, Kathryn A., and Bambi B. Schieffelin. "Language Ideology." Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 23, 1994, pp. 55-82.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. 2nd ed., Routledge, New York, 2012, Chapters 2 and 3.
Barth, Fredrik. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Available at: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic228815.files/Week_2/Barth%20Introduction%20Ethnic%20Groups%20and%20Boundaries%20.pdf
Heller, Monica. "Language Choice, Social Institutions, and Symbolic Domination." Quoted in: Blackledge, Adrian. Monolingual Ideologies in Multilingual States: Hegemony and Justice in Western Liberal Democracies, University of Birmingham.
Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Polity Press, UK, 1997, p. 164.
Link to the original text in Farsi: https://rahkargar.com/?p=173