At War With Words (review)

This book, co-edited by a sociolinguist and a political scientist, is important for anyone with an interest in the language of politics and the politics of language. As Michael Billig states clearly in the preface (‘Language as forms of death’), the major theme of this volume is that ‘the words of war are central to the activity of war’ (xv). On the one hand, language plays a vital role before, during, and after wars. On the other, wars can affect the status of national language. These two important assumptions, as pointed out by Mirjana N. Dedaić in the introduction (‘A peace of word’), guarantee the unity and coherence of this well-researched and interesting book.

This volume contains two thematic sections. Section 1, ‘War discourse’, contains seven papers. Kathryn Ruud does a qualitative analysis of the discourse of conservative political talk radio, focusing on the tactics of polarization used in the construction of group identity. Suzanne Wong Scollon defends the view that ideologies underlie the ordering of discourse and that the same utterance can be interpreted differently. In fact, interpreting is never neutral or objective; objectivity is a sheer myth. Paul A. Chilton adopts a cognitive discourse-analytical approach and demonstrates that ‘Justification of war is a form of political action that takes place most massively through language’ (95). Robert E. Tucker and Theodore O. Prosise deal with the inability of ordinary language to represent the destructive power of weaponry. Kweku Osam addresses the discursive strategies of political resistance and competition, investigating various discourse structures (including thematic structures, local semantics, style, and rhetorical features) designed for the achievement of specific political purposes. The last two chapters discuss how the Second World War is represented by mass media and by members of society in Austria. Alexander Pollak elaborates on six major discursive strategies employed to represent the events of the Second World War with ‘a certain color and shape’ (183). Gertraud Benke and Ruth Wodak examine how members of different generations react to Austria’s Nazi past.

Section 2, ‘Language wars’, features six papers on how political power and cultural hegemony impact on language. The countries or regions investigated include Croatia (Keith Langston and Anita Petistantić), Okinawa (Rumiko Shinzato), Palau (Kazuko Matsumoto and David Britain), Cyprus (Marilena Karyolemou), Northern Ireland (Renée Dickason), and the United States (Mark Allen Peterson). From these case studies, we can see that national language is often manipulated as a symbolic power. In point of fact, it is often the case that political power and hegemony largely influence, dominate, or even decide the status of a national language. In the conclusion, ‘Word peace’, Daniel N. Nelson points out, among other things, that ‘The struggle for identity lies at the nexus of war and peace’ (457). The book concludes with a name index and a subject index.

Drawing on a variety of theories, methodologies, and multiple sources of data within various linguistic, political, social, and cross-cultural contexts, this collection of papers looks into how political ideology manipulates war discourse and language policy. This volume provides some new empirical data for research in political linguistics, compellingly showing that both linguists and political scientists can learn from each other and contribute to the understanding and interpretation of language that is an essential part of human life. In this sense, this book should be of interest to a wide audience.

In sum, this volume shows that the study of political discourse, like other lines of inquiry, can and should be approached from different angles, and theoretical or methodological orthodoxy is of little benefit to a deeper or more accurate picture of the relationship between political ideology and language use. Finally...