The Language War (review)

Robin Lakoff has always shown a prescient sense of the role linguistics, as a discipline, should play in the general life of society. In an address to the LSA Summer Linguistic Institute in 1974, she warned her audience that linguistics could become marginalized if it did not address issues of importance to society in general and education in particular. A year later, her Language and woman’s place began the discussion of language and gender roles, something linguists had noticed up to that point without remarking on the political implications. That book remains a seminal force in the discussion of language and society.

L’s latest book, I hope, will be as influential as was Lakoff 1975, for it gives linguistics a role in understanding current history, bringing our discipline very much out of the ivory tower. Writing for a general audience, L analyzes several public events of the 90s—the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, the ‘PC’ debate in the media, the fortunes of both President and Mrs. Clinton, the arrest and trial of O. J. Simpson, and the Ebonics controversy touched off by the Oakland, CA, school board in 1991. In the US, most people who follow the news have followed these stories—so what can a linguist tell us about them?

L’s introduction (happily titled ‘What am I doing here?’) addresses the issue of whether the contents of the book can indeed be called ‘linguistics’ and in so doing opens a needed discussion of where linguists’ turf boundaries truly lie as we begin another century. Perhaps half of this book will not be accepted as within the discipline by those linguists who ‘confine their analyses to the safe havens of relatively small and concrete linguistic artifacts: the sound, the word, the sentence’ (8). But in doing so, L argues, we ignore larger issues of meaning and the ways we use narrative to construct reality.

Ch. 1, ‘Language: The power we love to hate’, lists fourteen public events of the past decade—the PC fight, the Hill/Thomas hearings, David Mamet’s play Oleana, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role as first lady, the Bobbit affair, the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding skating and fighting confrontation, the O. J. Simpson arrest and trial, Clinton’s adultery, sexual misconduct in the military, Ebonics, the ‘English Only’ movement, the death of Princess Diana, and the ‘Cambridge Nanny’ case—and asks why they receive what appears to be undue public attention, in the form of newspaper space and TV talk time. Aren’t all of these issues finally about language? And isn’t language nothing more than air? [L does not cite Falstaff here.] But it is more indeed, and L invokes speech act theories, especially the notion of performative verbs, as rebuttal. Yet Austin’s (1962) theory of speech acts only hints at the true power of language, for we use it in fact to make meaning and to construct reality. And the ability to do that construction is the key to power.

We saw an example of this power when Ronald Reagan, after seeming to publicly endorse Jesse Helms’s suggestion that Martin Luther King was a Communist, contacted Dr. King’s widow. She interpreted what the president said as an apology, but the White House called it nothing more than an explanation. It is this control over words, too, which creates so much emotion in critics of (merely) descriptive dictionaries.

Ch. 2, ‘The neutrality of the status quo’, describes the ways in which those in power render themselves invisible or, in linguistic terms, unmarked. Until recently, words inflected for feminine gender in English were marked while their masculine equivalents were neutral or normal. Thus, English does not have sentences like *the tigress is an endangered species, and he, rather than she, has been treated as the ‘universal’ third person singular personal pronoun. Although L does not discuss regional dialects, they offer another power example. What was once simply a regional dialect...