Abusive Language Impairs Political Culture

Many of us may not have seriously thought about the relationship between language and politics: how politics influences language and how language shapes political discourse. Ignoring this simple fact, we expect that good governance can be established by the individual efforts of a charismatic leader. But this is only partially true. For good governance, we need to cultivate a political culture that promotes politeness in language that shapes positive thought and behaviour. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language” argued that politics corrupted the English language. 

 In his view, political language is built to "make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". Nothing can be a stronger claim than this about political thought and behaviour. Orwell further argued that our civilisation is decadent, and our language must inevitably share in the general collapse. It suggests that the decline of a language must ultimately have political causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. 

Linguistic determinism

Beyond the arguments put forward in his 1946 essay, he wrote a novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, to argue that totalitarian politics would obliterate Oldspeak (conventional language) and design Newspeak (alternative forms of language) to control democratic thought, which would reduce the language to thinking only in totalitarian terms. This argument also leads to the understanding that politics abuses language. But there are contrary arguments about the language-politics relationship. In contrast to the popular assumption that language only reflects our thought, it nevertheless has immense power to influence our way of thinking. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf hypothesised that language determines our thought (linguistic determinism). In a weaker argument, they also stated that language influences how we think (linguistic relativity).