Who are we?

When someone uses the personal pronoun “I” it’s clear who is meant with the person it refers to. The word can only mean the one who utters the word. But how about “we”? What does a person mean when he or she uses this word? It’s clear that “we” involves the speaker, but it refers also to others. Does the speaker mean “you and I” and maybe also some or all others present? Often the context makes this clear. However, this can be problematic if you are speaking in a cultural context different from yours, especially if the context is also a different language context. This is illustrated in an anecdote I came across in a book titled The philosophy of grammar, written about hundred years ago by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen: A missionary, who tries to convert people to Christianity somewhere in Africa tells the people present: “We are all of us sinners, and we all need conversion”. When you – having a good knowledge of English and maybe even being a native speaker of English – read this sentence, you’ll probably understand these words as: “We all who are present here together are sinners and we all need to be converted”. However, not so the public of the missionary. They understood the sentence as: “I, the missionary who is speaking to you, and all the people that I represent are sinners and need to be converted.” You can fill in “that I represent” how you like, such as “the British”, if he was a British missionary, “all whites”, since the missionary was a white man and his public was black, or what you think it must be. But you may not fill in “I and all of us who are here together in this space”, for what the missionary didn’t know or realize is that the language spoken by his public has two words for “we”. One “we” (let me call it “we1”) refers to I and you and the persons around here, and the other we (“we2”) refers to I and my group (whatever it is). Since the missionary used the we2 (by mistake or by ignorance), his public will not have got the idea that they were sinners and needed to be converted. “Why does this man make such a fuss?” is what they may have thought.

In order to separate these two types of “we” Jespersen distinguished an inclusive and an exclusive we. The inclusive we is what I just called we1. It means I and you and you and you ... all here present, in contrast to “they” who don’t belong to us. For instance, you have been shopping with your partner and you are tired. “Let’s go home”, you say then to your partner. The exclusive we is what I called we2, so I and the group I represent or belong to, in contrast to you. For instance, “We cannot accept this proposal”, the spokeswoman says in the parliament, meaning herself and the fraction she represents, even if the other members of her fraction are not in the room. Some languages have different words for the inclusive and exclusive we (like the language of the public of the missionary), while other languages use the same word for both meanings, like English and Dutch. If you think that a simple “we” is too vague in a certain situation, you can specify it with an addition like “we philosophers”, “we in this room”, etc.

If there is only one word for we1 and we2, the context often makes clear what is meant, as said. Nevertheless, the absence of this distinction in a language is sometimes confusing or the difference between both meanings is difficult to disentangle. In discussions “we” is often used ambiguously, although the speakers may not realize it. This is especially so in discussions with a political content. Politicians often give the impression to use the inclusive we (we1) in their speeches, saying that they want to do what we actually all wish and what is good for “us”. But don’t they actually mean what is good only for those who think like them or even only for their own clique? The rhetoric and propaganda of the former communist states are clear instances. And that’s what the demonstrators wanted to denounce when they walked through the streets of Leipzig in 1989 and shouted “We are the people”. Here the “we” in the slogan had an inclusive meaning referring to all people in the former German Democratic Republic, instead of only to the political leaders of this state (who had given it an exclusive meaning). But 20 years later the slogan got another meaning when it was adopted by rightwing groups. It’s no longer used to unmask a corrupt regime but now it stands for a certain rightwing political idea. With this also the “we” in the “We are the people” turned from an inclusive we into an exclusive we. The “we” represents now only the followers of this political idea. Look around, listen and see what politicians and other people say and do. Instead of using “we” to include people it is often used to exclude them.

Sources

- Otto Jespersen, The philosophy of grammar, on https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.282299/page/n190    

- Vincent Descombes, Les embarras de l’identité. Paris: Gallimard, 2013; esp. pp. 221-224.