Across the English-speaking world there is a liberal orthodoxy which opposes the use of standard English in schools and in society at large. But does this truly protect the underprivileged, or has it inflicted lasting educational damage on a generation of children? Is Steven Pinker, best-selling author of The Language Instinct, right to claim that all languages and dialects are equal? Professor John Honey refutes the arguments that for the past three decades have been put forward against standard English, and shows how apparently egalitarian notions of 'Black English' and other dialects can effectively limit access to standard English and hence power for disadvantaged or minority groups. He discusses the charge that the worldwide teaching of English amounts to 'linguistic imperialism', and examines whether British English will inevitably lose out to American.

The contributors to Language and Power approach the subject from different academic and cultural perspectives. Some focus on the link between whole languages and power structures; others consider styles and varieties of language in conjunction with the distribution of power. A single over-riding theme runs through these fascinating essays: that of language serving as a major means of expressing, manipulating, and sometimes even transforming power relations in every society. `...wide ranging in context and approach.' -- Lore and Language, Vol 4 No 1

Essential study guides for the future linguist. Language and Power is an introduction to how English is used to influence, persuade and position us within hierarchies. It is suitable for students at advanced level and beyond. Written with input from the Cambridge English Corpus, it looks at the linguistic techniques in situations where language is used to exert influence, exploring how contexts affect the language we use. Short activities help explain analysis methods, guiding students through major modern issues and concepts. It summarises key concerns and modern findings, while providing inspiration for language investigations and non-examined assessments (NEAs) with research suggestions.

Religion, Language and Power shows that the language of ‘religion’ is far from neutral, and that the packaging and naming of what English speakers call ‘religious’ groups or identities is imbued with the play of power. Religious Studies has all too often served to amplify voices from other centers of power, whether scripturalist or otherwise normative and dominant. This book’s de-centering of English classifications goes beyond the remit of most postcolonial studies in that it explores the classifications used in a range of languages — including Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek and English — to achieve a comparative survey of the roles of language and power in the making of ‘religion’ . In contextualizing these uses of language, the ten contributors explore how labels are either imposed or emerge interactively through discursive struggles between dominant and marginal groups. In dealing with the interplay of religion, language and power, there is no other book with the breadth of this volume.

Language is a tool used to express thoughts, to hide thoughts or to hide lack of thoughts. It is often a means of domination. The question is who has the power to define the world around us. This book demonstrates how language is being manipulated to form the minds of listeners or readers. Innocent words may be used to conceal a reality which people would have reacted to had the phenomena been described in a straightforward manner. The nice and innocent concept "cost sharing", which leads our thoughts to communal sharing and solidarity, may actually imply privatization. The false belief that the best way to learn a foreign language is to have it as a language of instruction actually becomes a strategy for stupidification of African pupils. In this book 33 independent experts from 16 countries in the North and the South show how language may be used to legitimize war-making, promote Northern interests in the field of development and retain colonial speech as languages of instruction, languages of the courts and in politics. The book has been edited by two Norwegians: Birgit Brock-Utne is a professor at the University of Oslo and a consultant in education and development. From 1987 until 1992 she was a professor at the University of Dar es Salaam. Gunnar Garbo, author and journalist and former member of the Norwegian Parliament, was the Norwegian Ambassador to Tanzania from 1987 to 1992.

Legal practitioners, linguists, anthropologists, philosophers and others have all explored fundamental challenges presented by language in formulating, interpreting and applying laws. Building on centuries of interaction between legal practice and jurisprudence, the modern field of 'law and language', or 'forensic linguistics', brings insights in linguistics and related fields to bear on topics including legal drafting and translation, statutory interpretation, expert evidence on language use and dynamics of courtroom interaction. This volume presents an interlocking series of research studies engaged with different legal jurisdictions and socio-political contexts as well as with the more abstract notion of 'law'. Together the chapters, written by international leaders in their fields, highlight recent directions in research and investigate in particular how law expresses yet also conceals power relations in its crafted use of words and in the gaps and silence between those words.

The topic of Language and Ideology has increasingly gained importance in the linguistic sciences. The general aim of critical linguistics is the exploration of the mechanisms of power which establish inequality, through the systematic analysis of political discourse (written or oral). This reader contains papers on a variety of topics, all related to each other through explicit discussions on the notion of ideology from an interdisciplinary approach with illustrative analyses of texts from the media, newspapers, schoolbooks, pamphlets, talkshows, speeches concerning language policy in Nazi-Germany, in Italofascism, and also policies prevalent nowadays. Among the interesting subjects studied are the jargon of the student movement of 1968, speeches of politicians, racist and sexist discourse, and the language of the green movement. Because of the enormous influence of the media nowadays, the explicit analysis of the mechanisms of “manipulation”, “suggestion”, and “persuasion” inherent in language or about language behaviour and strategies of discourse are of social relevance and of interest to all scholars of social sciences, to readers in all educational institutions, to analysts of political discourse, and to critical readers at large.