Language and manipulation

Soviet propaganda in Moscow in 1983

Language has an influence on the person you are. We have seen it in my last week’s blog. However, the influence of language doesn’t occur only at the individual level but also on the group level and on the level of nations. No wonder that language is often used to manipulate groups if not whole peoples. Some political orators are very skilled in using language for manipulating the will of the people and make them do what they like. Often this has ruined the country. Here I want to discuss two ways of manipulating collectivities such as states with the help of language. Again, I have made use of Viorica Marian’s The Power of Language (esp. chapter 7).
In all countries of the world, words are used for influencing if not manipulating the way people think. I still remember that when the first people from Southern Europe, North Africa and Turkey arrived in the Netherlands in the 1960s, looking for work, they were called guest workers. Soon, however, the authorities thought that it was better to call them immigrants, a word that after a few years already was replaced by allochthones. Now, many years later immigrants officially are called newcomers. Sometimes special words are used for special categories like knowledge immigrants. These word switches were often used in order to avoid the pejorative meanings that the old words had got by replacing them by more neutral if not positive words. This is a good reason, of course, but it is manipulation, anyway.
The person who has best described how, especially in a negative way, language can be used for manipulation is George Orwell (see his 1984). Orwell called this substitution of old words by new words and old word meanings by new meanings “Newspeak”. For instance, take the word “free”. The word is not removed from the vocabulary, but in Newspeak it is used to communicate only the absence of something, for instance “The dog is free from lice”. That it once referred also to “politically free” or “intellectually free” is removed from the vocabulary. Because quite recently yet I wrote several blogs about this kind of manipulation (see for example here and here), I’ll give no further explanation.
Newspeak and language manipulation are often manners for oppressing people and making them obey the will of the leaders. A related phenomenon is discouraging the use of a certain language if not completely forbidding its use in order to promote and shape the national identity of a country. It happens both in dictatorships and in democracies. I don't think it goes too far to say that language is the soul of a people. Therefore, by suppressing the use of a certain minority language one can try to suppress the identity of the group of the speakers of this language. By forcing them to speak the national language, the authorities can try to make this minority accept the national identity, if not immediately then in the long run. As Marian says it (pp. 133-4): “[D]omination through language cuts to the heart of a nation and its people precisely because language and mind are so closely connected. To forbid not only certain words but entire languages is to forbid a certain way of thinking and of being in the world.” An example of the promotion of the majority language for the national unity and identity is the russification of the Soviet Union, when the country yet existed. In Turkey Kurdish, the language of the Kurdish people in the east of the country, had been forbidden till 1991 for use in public, since it was considered an expression of separatism and a provocation of the unity of Turkey. Especially since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (which occurred in fact already in 2014), in Ukraine Ukrainian is promoted as the national language at the cost of Russian, which had been the major language when the country was a part of the Soviet Union and yet long thereafter.
However, when authorities in a country try to suppress a minority language, they often forget that language suppression can lead to resistance and national division. This can be seen in many countries, for instance in Turkey but also in Spain, where the Catalan language had been forbidden from 1939 till 1975. Even books in Catalan were then destroyed. This ban on Catalan has been an important factor contributing to the wish of Catalonia to become independent of Spain. Also in Belgium we see that the restriction of the rights of the Dutch language speakers till the 1960s has led to an independence movement in Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of the country) and, in the end, to the federalization of the state as a provisional (?) solution.