2 - Representing speech communities

Summary

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

(Morrison 1994: 15)

Irrespective of when nations are formed, their emergence as a speech community and their establishment and enforcement of a national language occur as acts of sacrifice, loss and gain. This chapter considers the question of what frames and characterizes speech communities that come together as the result of domination, mutual endeavor, personal ties and collective identities. The importance of this analysis is at the heart of Toni Morrison's 1993 Lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature (published the following year). While all social actors belong to speech communities, every interaction is not based on membership in one community or another. Speech communities are not organized around linguistic facts but around people who want to share their opinions, identities, thoughts and solidarities, and generally communicate with their evolving social world. Although many people operate within multiple speech communities, they do so in order to participate in the “mutual exchange of words and ideas” and to represent their identity(ies) as full social actors. Speech communities may develop as the result of force and political contact where language ideology is promoted and imposed by those in power.