Multilingualism is an ever-present feature in political contexts around the world, including multilingual states and international organizations. Increasingly, consequential political decisions are negotiated between politicians who do not share a common native language. Nils Ringe uses the European Union to investigate how politicians’ reliance on shared foreign languages and translation services affects politics and policy-making. Ringe's research illustrates how multilingualism is an inherent and consequential feature of EU politics—that it depoliticizes policy-making by reducing its political nature and potential for conflict. An atmosphere with both foreign language use and a reliance on translation leads to communication that is simple, utilitarian, neutralized, and involves commonly shared phrases and expressions. Policymakers tend to disregard politically charged language and they are constrained in their ability to use vague or ambiguous language to gloss over disagreements by the need for consistency across languages.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Politics and the English Language, the second in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell takes aim at the language used in politics, which, he says, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. In an age where the language used in politics is constantly under the microscope, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is just as relevant today, and gives the reader a vital understanding of the tactics at play. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

From post-truth politics to “no-platforming” on university campuses, the English language has been both a potent weapon and a crucial battlefield for our divided politics. In this important and wide-ranging intervention, Thomas Docherty explores the politics of the English language, its implication in the dynamics of political power and the spaces it offers for dissent and resistance. From the authorised English of the King James Bible to the colonial project of University English Studies, this book develops a powerful history for contemporary debates about propaganda, free speech and truth-telling in our politics. Taking examples from the US, UK and beyond - from debates about the Second Amendment and free-speech on campus, to the Iraq War and the Grenfell Tower fire - this book is a powerful and polemical return to Orwell's observation that a degraded political language is intimately connected to an equally degraded political culture.

Important aspects of the history of language in the United States remain shrouded in myth and legend. The notion of "one nation, one language" is part of the idealized history of the United States, although in its short history it has probably been host to more bilingual people than any other country in the world. Language is more than a means of communication. It brings into play an entire range of experiences and attitudes toward life. Furthermore, language is a potent symbolic issue because it links power and political claims of ownership with psychological demands for group worth. How people belonging to different language and cultural communities live together in the same political community and how political and structural tensions arise to divide them along language lines, are questions addressed in The Politics of Language. This book analyzes the historical background and recent controversy over language in the United States and compares it to two official multilingual societies: Canada and Switzerland. It's accessibility as a survey of this topic makes it ideal for courses in linguistics, political science, and sociology.

This study is the second of two I have done concerning how language is used to persuade others to believe things and to do things. The first, published by Aca demic Press, was The Language of Television Advertising, and was concerned with how advertisers use language in their efforts to sell products and services and how consumers could be expected to understand it. In this study, the focus is on how politicians use language to win elections and get others to accept their policies and programs and on how journalists report the suasive efforts of politicans. I combine an interest in the language of political reporting with an interest in the language of politics for a number of reasons. First, much of the suasive rhetoric of politicians is filtered through the minds of political journalists before it reaches the citizenry, and we can be reasonably sure that this rhetoric does not come out the way it went in. Second, the press plays a significant role in deter mining the nation's political agenda through its choices of what issues will be presented to the public, how these issues will be presented, and which voices will be heard speaking out on these issues. Third, political reporting can be suasive in effect, if not in intent, and it will be useful, I think, to understand how this is so.

Dominance, identity and resistance are key themes in this examination of language in global, virtual and local settings. It focuses on world languages, linguistic rights and minority protection. Case studies explore the social strategies employed by migrants speaking non-indigenous tongues and the effect of religion in sensitive political contexts.

Following the move by Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party Kuomingtang (KMT) to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s, and Chiang’s subsequent lifelong vow to reclaim the mainland, "China " has occupied—if not monopolized—the gaze of Taiwan, where its projected images are reflected. Whether mirror image, shadow, or ideal contrast, China has been, and will continue to be, a key reference point in Taiwan's convoluted effort to find its identity. Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan traces the intertwined paths of five sets of names Taiwan has used to name China since the KMT came to Taiwan in 1949: the derogatory "Communist bandits"; the ideologically focused "Chinese Communists"; the seemingly neutral geographical designators "mainland" and "opposite shore/both shores"; and the ethnic and national label "China," with the official designation, "People's Republic of China." In doing so, it explores how Taiwanese identities are constituted and reconstituted in the shifting and switching of names for China; in the application of these names to alternative domains of Taiwanese life; in the waning or waxing of names following tides of history and polity; and in the increasingly contested meaning of names. Through textual analyses of historical archives and other mediated texts and artifacts, the chapters chart Taiwan's identity negotiation over the past half century and critically evaluate key interconnections between language and politics. This unique book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Taiwan studies, Chinese politics, communication studies and linguistics.

This edited book makes a significant contribution to the relatively under-explored field of multilingualism and politics, approaching the topic from two key perspectives: multilingualism in politics, and the politics of multilingualism. Through the lens of case studies from around the world, the authors in this volume combine theoretical and empirical insights to examine the inter-relation between multilingualism and politics in different spheres and contexts, including minority language policy, national identity, the translation of political debates and discourse, and the use of multiple, often competing languages in educational settings. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of politics, sociology, sociolinguistics, language policy, and translation and interpreting studies.

Talk is a central activity in social life. But how is ordinary talk organized? How do people coordinate their talk in interaction? And what is the role of talk in wider social processes? Conversation Analysis has developed over the past forty years as a key method for studying social interaction and language use. Its unique perspective and systematic methods make it attractive to an interdisciplinary audience. In this second edition of their highly acclaimed introduction, Ian Hutchby and Robin Wooffitt offer a wide-ranging and accessible overview of key issues in the field. The second edition has been substantially revised to incorporate recent developments, including an entirely new final chapter exploring the contribution of Conversation Analysis to key issues in social science. The book provides a grounding in the theory and methods of Conversation Analysis, and demonstrates its procedures by analyzing a variety of concrete examples. Written in a lively and engaging style, Conversation Analysis has become indispensable reading for students and researchers in sociology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, social psychology, communication studies and anthropology.