Language is the prime means of communication without which human society ceases to exist. It enables individuals to conventionally assign linguistic signs, together with paralinguistic ones, to signify objects, concepts, and all things in order to reflect reality and exchange meaning. But apart from such innocent usage, a critical view reveals how the common-sensical use of language to talk or write about things, whether people, events, social phenomena, etc. is largely determined by ideological thoughts, presumptions, and conventions – those of discourse. Language becomes a site for power exercise; it becomes a tool for disseminating ideologies, constructing realities (instead of reflecting them), affecting perceptions, and subsequently influencing social practices.

Possessing power means having the ability to mold the cognition of individuals and control their behavior. Such control can be carried out overtly through physical, coercive force using repressive state apparatus; i.e., government, courts, law enforcement agencies, etc., but it can also be exercised subtly by manufacturing consent for such power using ideological state apparatus; i.e., education, religion, and more importantly, mass media institutions; as a result, individuals willingly and happily agree to enter a system in which power is exercised over them. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony reveals this hidden form of power by illustrating how the ideas, norms, beliefs and values of a dominant group within society is propagated in such a way that it becomes naturalized as common sense for most members of that society. Based on this, People can be driven to hold certain beliefs or take certain actions by persuading (not convincing) them to think that they want to hold such beliefs and take such actions — that such beliefs are the natural ways of making sense of the world; and that such actions are the obvious ways of acting.

Language has power because it plays a key role in the promotion of ideologies and their eventual “evolution” into common sense. Individuals do not use language in a random, unpredicted way; rather, the way they speak to each other, about each other, and about other “things” is, except in rare cases, predetermined by social conventions set by discourse (in its Foucauldian definition). This discourse, and thus conventions of language use, is not randomly chosen; it is predetermined by certain ideologies. And once such discourse is established as the natural, common-sensical way of language use, its corresponding ideologies are acquired, used, and then spread and reproduced in everyday speak and writing.

One of the major potencies of discourse is that it frames how people perceive themselves, other groups of people, social issues, values, political events, and so many other things and, thus, shapes these people’s attitudes towards these things and subsequently influences how they deal with them. To illustrate this with an example, if the issue of abortion is widely discussed in society as “the crime of killing an unborn child” using a language saturated with heavy words and pejorative connotations, it is likely that members of that society hold, and are driven to hold, negative attitudes towards abortion. As their thinking and daily discussion about the issue draw from the same order of discourse, their opinions, judgments, and feelings about abortion indicate a strong refusal of what they label as a “serious crime”. If, on the other hand, the same issue was discussed through a discourse saturated with clinical language that define abortion as “a choice of terminating pregnancy”, then attitudes towards abortion suddenly start to change. Due to the position of abortion in a certain ideology, the adopted discourse to discuss the issue constructs what meaning people give to what issues and guide their social practices. Given the above, access to discourse evidently grants control over how people make sense not just of social issues, but of their entire experience in the world around them.

While it is possible to gain it through few other ways, access to discourse in present-day society is primarily achieved through controlling mass media institutions because of the one-sidedness and wide-reaching effects of the latter. Given its role as a significant source of information and knowledge, mass media producers, since they possess sole-producing rights, have the ability to decide how people, ideas, topics, events, etc. are described and represented. Such representation, when carried out in a systematic, “predictably similar ways” first frames how the people and events are perceived and judged; and second, sets the conventions of how they are to be talked about, written about, and, once again, represented; Put differently, once something has been represented in a particular way, it becomes more difficult to talk ‘around’, or ‘outside’, that representation (Thornborrow, 1999, p. 50). These representations consequently guide how the people, ideas, topics, events, etc. are dealt with by audience.

The problem with representations is that they are heavily affected by media discourse which is often – if not always – employed to achieve political ends and ideological functions. Instead of objective mirroring of reality, the portrayal of almost anything in media is carried out from a particular ideological perspective which ends up constructing and propagating new realities that are infused with such ideologies. Mass media go about this representation by deciding what should be represented, and how they are to be represented. Concerning the first, the more emphasis mass media place on certain events, for instance, the more significance audiences attribute to such events. Taking the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as an example, Israeli forces can kill as many Palestinians as they want, as long as media do not cover the event, no one seems to care. By contrast, once few Israeli soldiers are murdered, and the event hits the headlines of most news outlets, people start talking about terrorism and human rights. The degree of seriousness of events, and even crimes, is vastly determined by the degree of importance mass media institutions give to these events.

Besides the overrepresentation and underrepresentation of topics and events, media discourse also determines the conventions for “appropriate” language use when these topics – or anything else – is represented. Mass media producers do this by intentionally highlighting and lowlighting certain aspects of what is being represented to control people’s attention and lead them to follow a particular line of interpretation upon decoding media messages. Returning to the prior example, even if mainstream media broadcast the news of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians civilians, strategic syntactic structures are employed to report the event with no reference to responsibility. Headlines can be something like “Arabian People Killed Today in Gaza”, employing a passive voice to remove the subject who carried out the act of killing; removing the number of victims, usually when the number is high; and sometimes without even mentioning the citizenship of the victims.

Furthermore, style, register, tone and lexical choices can also affect how things are represented. In the former example, the very act of including the word “Israeli” in the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” facilitates the construction of an Israeli state in the minds of readers. Examples of lexical choices include replacing struggle by conflict; forced expulsions by evictions; from their homes by from their neighbourhoods; the use of pronouns; etc. Scrutinizing media coverage of one event reveals meticulous linguistic strategies and rhetorical devices such as euphemisms, dysphemisms, hyperboles, cacophony, misleading analogies and the like, in addition to non-linguistic strategies such as photojournalism employed by reporters to distort facts and events in order to mould the cognition and perception of audience. The result in this case is anti-Palestinian bias.

Aside from geopolitical events, media representation is also affected by power relations of those who represent and those who are represented. These can be the whites vs. the blacks; the non-Muslims vs. the Muslims; the capitalist class and the working class; the West vs. the East; and even males vs. females. A plethora of research from media studies and cultural studies has been dedicated to demonstrate the stereotypical bias in their representation within movies, documentaries, advertisements, news and other media, which not only gives rise to racism and ethnic discrimination –examples of social practice- against those represented, but also moulds their identity – they start to perceive themselves in the way they are represented.

The establishment of a certain discourse as the dominant, common-sensical discourse of language use is, as Fairclough (1989) asserts, the result of power struggle. Postcolonial discourse, for instance, having criticized the European monopoly of discourse, showed how colonial discourse was largely affected by colonial ideology – that of the superiority of the west and of the civilizing mission. Postcolonial studies deconstructed colonial ethnographies, novels, narratives and other texts to shed light on the effects of such discourse on the minds and behavior of individuals of the colonizing countries as well as the subjects of the countries that have been colonized. Similarly, Marxist discourse aims to deconstruct the discourse disseminated by the dominant group in society; feminist discourse stands against the “patriarchal” representations of gender; and postmodern discourse, in general, criticizes modern discourse.

Focusing on its effects on social practices, besides the aforementioned promotion of racism and discrimination, discourse determines how language is used even in daily interactions and interpersonal communication. This can vary from the language variety used to communicate to the accent, style, register, tone, and words people chose based on the social situation and power relations between. No language is inherently better than the other; nonetheless, varying degrees of prestige are ascribed to certain language varieties and accents based on how these languages are represented in the dominant discourse. A person speaking French in Morocco, for instance, is not looked at the same way as a person speaking Moroccan Arabic. In the words of Bourdieu, the French speaker has high cultural capital than all other speakers; so, when an individual intentionally choses to converse through French, he or she seeks to exercise power, either consciously or unconsciously, over his/ her interlocutor. It is then up to the other interlocutor to either acquiescence to this exercise of power or stand against such exercise of power by employing French himself/herself, or by simply realizing that power is, in fact, in the relations, not somewhere else. The individual can accordingly “step outside the entire system” and, again, exercise power just by remaining silent. Either way, the individual’s behavior and social practice is determined by discourse; he/she either acts according to discourse or against it.

The exercise of power through discourse is also carried out through the speech acts adopted by people during daily interactions; the appropriateness of such speech acts is determined by the degree of social power participants have over each other. A straightforward speech act such as making a request varies based on who is making the request to whom. Whether men to men; men to women or women to men; whether rich to poor or vice versa; whether adults to children or vice versa; whether teachers to students or vice versa; etc. Generally speaking, the ones with high social power –high economic, social, cultural, or symbolic capital- often use direct commands while the less powerful are obliged –through habits and conventions- to employ indirect speech acts.

Clearly, the social conventions that govern language use in representation and daily interactions as well as the beliefs, attitudes, opinions, actions and habits of individuals within society are, to a large extent, shaped by ideology and power relations. Since discourse reflects these verbal and non-verbal practices, adopting a post-structural critical discourse analysis perspective when dealing with language, results in more insight into the intricate relationship between discourse, power and language and more understanding into the true place of language in human society and culture.

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 Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power.London: Longman.

Thornborrow, J. (1999). Language and themedia. In Thomas, L., & Wareing, S. (Eds.) Language,society and power: An introduction (p. 50). London: Routledge.

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