Language and Power

Sik Hung Ng, Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China and Fei Deng, School of
Foreign Studies, South China Agricultural University

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.436
Published online: 22 August 2017

Summary
Five dynamic language–power relationships in communication have emerged from
critical language studies, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and the social
psychology of language and communication. Two of them stem from preexisting powers
behind language that it reveals and reflects, thereby transferring the extralinguistic
powers to the communication context. Such powers exist at both the micro and macro
levels. At the micro level, the power behind language is a speaker’s possession of a
weapon, money, high social status, or other attractive personal qualities—by revealing
them in convincing language, the speaker influences the hearer. At the macro level, the
power behind language is the collective power (ethnolinguistic vitality) of the
communities that speak the language. The dominance of English as a global language
and international lingua franca, for example, has less to do with its linguistic quality and
more to do with the ethnolinguistic vitality of English-speakers worldwide that it reflects.
The other three language–power relationships refer to the powers of language that are
based on a language’s communicative versatility and its broad range of cognitive,
communicative, social, and identity functions in meaning-making, social interaction, and
language policies. Such language powers include, first, the power of language to
maintain existing dominance in legal, sexist, racist, and ageist discourses that favor
particular groups of language users over others. Another language power is its immense
impact on national unity and discord. The third language power is its ability to create
influence through single words (e.g., metaphors), oratories, conversations and narratives
in political campaigns, emergence of leaders, terrorist narratives, and so forth.

Keywords: power behind language, power of language, intergroup communication, World

Englishes, oratorical power, conversational power, leader emergence, al-Qaeda narrative, social
identity approach

Subjects: Intergroup Communication

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Introduction

Language Is for Communication and Power

Language is a natural human system of conventionalized symbols that have understood
meanings. Through it humans express and communicate their private thoughts and feelings as
well as enact various social functions. The social functions include co-constructing social
reality between and among individuals, performing and coordinating social actions such as
conversing, arguing, cheating, and telling people what they should or should not do. Language
is also a public marker of ethnolinguistic, national, or religious identity, so strong that people
are willing to go to war for its defense, just as they would defend other markers of social
identity, such as their national flag. These cognitive, communicative, social, and identity
functions make language a fundamental medium of human communication. Language is also a
versatile communication medium, often and widely used in tandem with music, pictures, and
actions to amplify its power. Silence, too, adds to the force of speech when it is used
strategically to speak louder than words. The wide range of language functions and its
versatility combine to make language powerful. Even so, this is only one part of what is in fact
a dynamic relationship between language and power. The other part is that there is
preexisting power behind language which it reveals and reflects, thereby transferring
extralinguistic power to the communication context. It is thus important to delineate the
language–power relationships and their implications for human communication.

This chapter provides a systematic account of the dynamic interrelationships between

language and power, not comprehensively for lack of space, but sufficiently focused so as to
align with the intergroup communication theme of the present volume. The term “intergroup
communication” will be used herein to refer to an intergroup perspective on communication,
which stresses intergroup processes underlying communication and is not restricted to any
particular form of intergroup communication such as interethnic or intergender
communication, important though they are. It echoes the pioneering attempts to develop an
intergroup perspective on the social psychology of language and communication behavior
made by pioneers drawn from communication, social psychology, and cognate fields (see
Harwood et al., 2005). This intergroup perspective has fostered the development of intergroup
communication as a discipline distinct from and complementing the discipline of interpersonal
communication. One of its insights is that apparently interpersonal communication is in fact
dynamically intergroup (Dragojevic & Giles, 2014). For this and other reasons, an intergroup
perspective on language and communication behavior has proved surprisingly useful in
revealing intergroup processes in health communication (Jones & Watson, 2012), media
communication (Harwood & Roy, 2005), and communication in a variety of organizational
contexts (Giles, 2012).

The major theoretical foundation that has underpinned the intergroup perspective is social
identity theory (Tajfel, 1982), which continues to service the field as a metatheory (Abrams &
Hogg, 2004) alongside relatively more specialized theories such as ethnolinguistic identity
theory (Harwood et al., 1994), communication accommodation theory (Palomares et al., 2016),
and self-categorization theory applied to intergroup communication (Reid et al., 2005).
Against this backdrop, this chapter will be less concerned with any particular social category
of intergroup communication or variant of social identity theory, and more with developing a

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conceptual framework of looking at the language–power relationships and their implications
for understanding intergroup communication. Readers interested in an intra- or interpersonal
perspective may refer to the volume edited by Holtgraves (2014a).

Conceptual Approaches to Power

Bertrand Russell, logician cum philosopher and social activist, published a relatively little-
known book on power when World War II was looming large in Europe (Russell, 2004). In it he
asserted the fundamental importance of the concept of power in the social sciences and
likened its importance to the concept of energy in the physical sciences. But unlike physical
2
energy, which can be defined in a formula (e.g., E=MC ), social power has defied any such
definition. This state of affairs is not unexpected because the very nature of (social) power is
elusive. Foucault (1979, p. 92) has put it this way: “Power is everywhere, not because it
embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” This view is not beyond
criticism but it does highlight the elusiveness of power. Power is also a value-laden concept
meaning different things to different people. To functional theorists and power-wielders,
power is “power to,” a responsibility to unite people and do good for all. To conflict theorists
and those who are dominated, power is “power over,” which corrupts and is a source of social
conflict rather than integration (Lenski, 1966; Sassenberg et al., 2014). These entrenched
views surface in management–labor negotiations and political debates between government
and opposition. Management and government would try to frame the negotiation in terms of
“power to,” whereas labor and opposition would try to frame the same in “power over” in a
clash of power discourses. The two discourses also interchange when the same speakers
reverse their power relations: While in opposition, politicians adhere to “power over”
rhetorics, once in government, they talk “power to.” And vice versa.

The elusive and value-laden nature of power has led to a plurality of theoretical and
conceptual approaches. Five approaches that are particularly pertinent to the language–
power relationships will be discussed, and briefly so because of space limitation. One
approach views power in terms of structural dominance in society by groups who own and/or
control the economy, the government, and other social institutions. Another approach views
power as the production of intended effects by overcoming resistance that arises from
objective conflict of interests or from psychological reactance to being coerced, manipulated,
or unfairly treated. A complementary approach, represented by Kurt Lewin’s field theory,
takes the view that power is not the actual production of effects but the potential for doing
this. It looks behind power to find out the sources or bases of this potential, which may stem
from the power-wielders’ access to the means of punishment, reward, and information, as well
as from their perceived expertise and legitimacy (Raven, 2008). A fourth approach views
power in terms of the balance of control/dependence in the ongoing social exchange between
two actors that takes place either in the absence or presence of third parties. It provides a
structural account of power-balancing mechanisms in social networking (Emerson, 1962), and
forms the basis for combining with symbolic interaction theory, which brings in subjective
factors such as shared social cognition and affects for the analysis of power in interpersonal
and intergroup negotiation (Stolte, 1987). The fifth, social identity approach digs behind the
social exchange account, which has started from control/dependence as a given but has left it
unexplained, to propose a three-process model of power emergence (Turner, 2005). According

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to this model, it is psychological group formation and associated group-based social identity
that produce influence; influence then cumulates to form the basis of power, which in turn
leads to the control of resources.

Common to the five approaches above is the recognition that power is dynamic in its usage
and can transform from one form of power to another. Lukes (2005) has attempted to
articulate three different forms or faces of power called “dimensions.” The first, behavioral
dimension of power refers to decision-making power that is manifest in the open contest for
dominance in situations of objective conflict of interests. Non-decision-making power, the
second dimension, is power behind the scene. It involves the mobilization of organizational
bias (e.g., agenda fixing) to keep conflict of interests from surfacing to become public issues
and to deprive oppositions of a communication platform to raise their voices, thereby limiting
the scope of decision-making to only “safe” issues that would not challenge the interests of
the power-wielder. The third dimension is ideological and works by socializing people’s needs
and values so that they want the wants and do the things wanted by the power-wielders,
willingly as their own. Conflict of interests, opposition, and resistance would be absent from
this form of power, not because they have been maneuvered out of the contest as in the case
of non-decision-making power, but because the people who are subject to power are no longer
aware of any conflict of interest in the power relationship, which may otherwise ferment
opposition and resistance. Power in this form can be exercised without the application of
coercion or reward, and without arousing perceived manipulation or conflict of interests.

Language–Power Relationships
As indicated in the chapter title, discussion will focus on the language–power relationships,
and not on language alone or power alone, in intergroup communication. It draws from all the
five approaches to power and can be grouped for discussion under the power behind language
and the power of language. In the former, language is viewed as having no power of its own
and yet can produce influence and control by revealing the power behind the speaker.
Language also reflects the collective/historical power of the language community that uses it.
In the case of modern English, its preeminent status as a global language and international
lingua franca has shaped the communication between native and nonnative English speakers
because of the power of the English-speaking world that it reflects, rather than because of its
linguistic superiority. In both cases, language provides a widely used conventional means to
transfer extralinguistic power to the communication context. Research on the power of
language takes the view that language has power of its own. This power allows a language to
maintain the power behind it, unite or divide a nation, and create influence.

In Figure 1 we have grouped the five language–power relationships into five boxes. Note that
the boundary between any two boxes is not meant to be rigid but permeable. For example, by
revealing the power behind a message (box 1), a message can create influence (box 5). As
another example, language does not passively reflect the power of the language community
that uses it (box 2), but also, through its spread to other language communities, generates
power to maintain its preeminence among languages (box 3). This expansive process of
language power can be seen in the rise of English to global language status. A similar
expansive process also applies to a particular language style that first reflects the power of
the language subcommunity who uses the style, and then, through its common acceptance

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and usage by other subcommunities in the country, maintains the power of the subcommunity
concerned. A prime example of this type of expansive process is linguistic sexism, which
reflects preexisting male dominance in society and then, through its common usage by both
sexes, contributes to the maintenance of male dominance. Other examples are linguistic
racism and the language style of the legal profession, each of which, like linguistic sexism and
the preeminence of the English language worldwide, has considerable impact on individuals
and society at large.

Space precludes a full discussion of all five language–power relationships. Instead, some of
them will warrant only a brief mention, whereas others will be presented in greater detail.
The complexity of the language–power relations and their cross-disciplinary ramifications will
be evident in the multiple sets of interrelated literatures that we cite from. These include the
social psychology of language and communication, critical language studies (Fairclough,
1989), sociolinguistics (Kachru, 1992), and conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974).

Figure 1. Power behind language and power of language.

Power Behind Language

Language Reveals Power

When negotiating with police, a gang may issue the threatening message, “Meet our
demands, or we will shoot the hostages!” The threatening message may succeed in coercing
the police to submit; its power, however, is more apparent than real because it is based on the
guns gangsters posses. The message merely reveals the power of a weapon in their
possession. Apart from revealing power, the gangsters may also cheat. As long as the message
comes across as credible and convincing enough to arouse overwhelming fear, it would allow

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them to get away with their demands without actually possessing any weapon. In this case,
language is used to produce an intended effect despite resistance by deceptively revealing a
nonexisting power base and planting it in the mind of the message recipient. The literature on
linguistic deception illustrates the widespread deceptive use of language-reveals-power to
produce intended effects despite resistance (Robinson, 1996).

Language Reflects Power

Ethnolinguistic Vitality
The language that a person uses reflects the language community’s power. A useful way to
think about a language community’s linguistic power is through the ethnolinguistic vitality
model (Bourhis et al., 1981; Harwood et al., 1994). Language communities in a country vary in
absolute size overall and, just as important, a relative numeric concentration in particular
regions. Francophone Canadians, though fewer than Anglophone Canadians overall, are
concentrated in Quebec to give them the power of numbers there. Similarly, ethnic minorities
in mainland China have considerable power of numbers in those autonomous regions where
they are concentrated, such as Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Collectively, these factors
form the demographic base of the language community’s ethnolinguistic vitality, an index of
the community’s relative linguistic dominance. Another base of ethnolinguistic vitality is
institutional representations of the language community in government, legislatures,
education, religion, the media, and so forth, which afford its members institutional leadership,
influence, and control. Such institutional representation is often reinforced by a language
policy that installs the language as the nation’s sole official language. The third base of
ethnolinguistic vitality comprises sociohistorical and cultural status of the language
community inside the nation and internationally. In short, the dominant language of a nation is
one that comes from and reflects the high ethnolinguistic vitality of its language community.

An important finding of ethnolinguistic vitality research is that it is perceived vitality, and not
so much its objective demographic-institutional-cultural strengths, that influences language
behavior in interpersonal and intergroup contexts. Interestingly, the visibility and salience of
languages shown on public and commercial signs, referred to as the “linguistic landscape,”
serve important informational and symbolic functions as a marker of their relative vitality,
which in turn affects the use of in-group language in institutional settings (Cenoz & Gorter,
2006; Landry & Bourhis, 1997).

World Englishes and Lingua Franca English

Another field of research on the power behind and reflected in language is “World Englishes.”
At the height of the British Empire English spread on the back of the Industrial Revolution
and through large-scale migrations of Britons to the “New World,” which has since become
the core of an “inner circle” of traditional native English-speaking nations now led by the
United States (Kachru, 1992). The emergent wealth and power of these nations has
maintained English despite the decline of the British Empire after World War II. In the post-
War era, English has become internationalized with the support of an “outer circle” nations
and, later, through its spread to “expanding circle” nations. Outer circle nations are made up

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mostly of former British colonies such as India, Pakistan, and Nigeria. In compliance with
colonial language policies that institutionalized English as the new colonial national language,
a sizeable proportion of the colonial populations has learned and continued using English over
generations, thereby vastly increasing the number of English speakers over and above those
in the inner circle nations. The expanding circle encompasses nations where English has
played no historical government roles, but which are keen to appropriate English as the
preeminent foreign language for local purposes such as national development,
internationalization of higher education, and participation in globalization (e.g., China,
Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Egypt, Israel, and continental Europe).

English is becoming a global language with official or special status in at least 75 countries
(British Council, n.d.). It is also the language choice in international organizations and
companies, as well as academia, and is commonly used in trade, international mass media,
and entertainment, and over the Internet as the main source of information. English native
speakers can now follow the worldwide English language track to find jobs overseas without
having to learn the local language and may instead enjoy a competitive language advantage
where the job requires English proficiency. This situation is a far cry from the colonial era
when similar advantages had to come under political patronage. Alongside English native
speakers who work overseas benefitting from the preeminence of English over other
languages, a new phenomenon of outsourcing international call centers away from the United
Kingdom and the United States has emerged (Friginal, 2007). Callers can find the information
or help they need from people stationed in remote places such as India or the Philippines
where English has penetrated.

As English spreads worldwide, it has also become the major international lingua franca,
serving some 800 million multilinguals in Asia alone, and numerous others elsewhere (Bolton,
2008). The practical importance of this phenomenon and its impact on English vocabulary,
grammar, and accent have led to the emergence of a new field of research called “English as a
lingua franca” (Brosch, 2015). The twin developments of World Englishes and lingua franca
English raise interesting and important research questions. A vast area of research lies in
waiting.

Several lines of research suggest themselves from an intergroup communication perspective.

How communicatively effective are English native speakers who are international civil
servants in organizations such as the UN and WTO, where they habitually speak as if they
were addressing their fellow natives without accommodating to the international audience?
Another line of research is lingua franca English communication between two English
nonnative speakers. Their common use of English signals a joint willingness of linguistic
accommodation, motivated more by communication efficiency of getting messages across and
less by concerns of their respective ethnolinguistic identities. An intergroup communication
perspective, however, would sensitize researchers to social identity processes and
nonaccommodation behaviors underneath lingua franca communication. For example, two
nationals from two different countries, X and Y, communicating with each other in English are
accommodating on the language level; at the same time they may, according to
communication accommodation theory, use their respective X English and Y English for
asserting their ethnolinguistic distinctiveness whilst maintaining a surface appearance of
accommodation. There are other possibilities. According to a survey of attitudes toward
English accents, attachment to “standard” native speaker models remains strong among

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nonnative English speakers in many countries (Jenkins, 2009). This suggests that our
hypothetical X and Y may, in addition to asserting their respective Englishes, try to
outperform one another in speaking with overcorrect standard English accents, not so much
because they want to assert their respective ethnolinguistic identities, but because they want
to project a common in-group identity for positive social comparison—“We are all English-
speakers but I am a better one than you!”

Many countries in the expanding circle nations are keen to appropriate English for local
purposes, encouraging their students and especially their educational elites to learn English
as a foreign language. A prime example is the Learn-English Movement in China. It has
affected generations of students and teachers over the past 30 years and consumed a vast
amount of resources. The results are mixed. Even more disturbing, discontents and
backlashes have emerged from anti-English Chinese motivated to protect the vitality and
cultural values of the Chinese language (Sun et al., 2016). The power behind and reflected in
modern English has widespread and far-reaching consequences in need of more systematic
research.

Power of Language

Language Maintains Existing Dominance

Language maintains and reproduces existing dominance in three different ways represented
respectively by the ascent of English, linguistic sexism, and legal language style. For reasons
already noted, English has become a global language, an international lingua franca, and an
indispensable medium for nonnative English speaking countries to participate in the
globalized world. Phillipson (2009) referred to this phenomenon as “linguistic imperialism.” It
is ironic that as the spread of English has increased the extent of multilingualism of non-
English-speaking nations, English native speakers in the inner circle of nations have largely
remained English-only. This puts pressure on the rest of the world to accommodate them in
English, the widespread use of which maintains its preeminence among languages.

A language evolves and changes to adapt to socially accepted word meanings, grammatical
rules, accents, and other manners of speaking. What is acceptable or unacceptable reflects
common usage and hence the numerical influence of users, but also the elites’ particular
language preferences and communication styles. Research on linguistic sexism has shown, for
example, a man-made language such as English (there are many others) is imbued with sexist
words and grammatical rules that reflect historical male dominance in society. Its uncritical
usage routinely by both sexes in daily life has in turn naturalized male dominance and
associated sexist inequalities (Spender, 1998). Similar other examples are racist (Reisigl &
Wodak, 2005) and ageist (Ryan et al., 1995) language styles.

Professional languages are made by and for particular professions such as the legal profession
(Danet, 1980; Mertz et al., 2016; O’Barr, 1982). The legal language is used not only among
members of the profession, but also with the general public, who may know each and every
word in a legal document but are still unable to decipher its meaning. Through its language,
the legal profession maintains its professional dominance with the complicity of the general
public, who submits to the use of the language and accedes to the profession’s authority in
interpreting its meanings in matters relating to their legal rights and obligations.

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Communication between lawyers and their “clients” is not only problematic, but the public’s
continual dependence on the legal language contributes to the maintenance of the dominance
of the profession.

Language Unites and Divides a Nation

A nation of many peoples who, despite their diverse cultural and ethnic background, all speak
in the same tongue and write in the same script would reap the benefit of the unifying power
of a common language. The power of the language to unite peoples would be stronger if it has
become part of their common national identity and contributed to its vitality and psychological
distinctiveness. Such power has often been seized upon by national leaders and intellectuals
to unify their countries and serve other nationalistic purposes (Patten, 2006). In China, for
example, Emperor Qin Shi Huang standardized the Chinese script (hanzi) as an important part
of the reforms to unify the country after he had defeated the other states and brought the
Warring States Period (475–221 BC) to an end. A similar reform of language standardization
was set in motion soon after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty (AD 1644–1911), by
simplifying some of the hanzi and promoting Putonghua as the national standard oral
language. In the postcolonial part of the world, language is often used to service nationalism
by restoring the official status of their indigenous language as the national language whilst
retaining the colonial language or, in more radical cases of decolonization, relegating the
latter to nonofficial status. Yet language is a two-edged sword: It can also divide a nation. The
tension can be seen in competing claims to official-language status made by minority
language communities, protest over maintenance of minority languages, language rights at
schools and in courts of law, bilingual education, and outright language wars (Calvet, 1998;
DeVotta, 2004).

Language Creates Influence

In this section we discuss the power of language to create influence through single words and
more complex linguistic structures ranging from oratories and conversations to narratives/
stories.

Power of Single Words

Learning a language empowers humans to master an elaborate system of conventions and the
associations between words and their sounds on the one hand, and on the other hand,
categories of objects and relations to which they refer. After mastering the referential
meanings of words, a person can mentally access the objects and relations simply by hearing
or reading the words. Apart from their referential meanings, words also have connotative
meanings with their own social-cognitive consequences. Together, these social-cognitive
functions underpin the power of single words that has been extensively studied in metaphors,
which is a huge research area that crosses disciplinary boundaries and probes into the inner
workings of the brain (Benedek et al., 2014; Landau et al., 2014; Marshal et al., 2007). The
power of single words extends beyond metaphors. It can be seen in misleading words in
leading questions (Loftus, 1975), concessive connectives that reverse expectations from real-
world knowledge (Xiang & Kuperberg, 2014), verbs that attribute implicit causality to either

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verb subject or object (Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013), “uncertainty terms” that hedge
potentially face-threatening messages (Holtgraves, 2014b), and abstract words that signal
power (Wakslak et al., 2014).

The literature on the power of single words has rarely been applied to intergroup
communication, with the exception of research arising from the linguistic category model
(e.g., Semin & Fiedler, 1991). The model distinguishes among descriptive action verbs (e.g.,
“hits”), interpretative action verbs (e.g., “hurts”) and state verbs (e.g., “hates”), which
increase in abstraction in that order. Sentences made up of abstract verbs convey more
information about the protagonist, imply greater temporal and cross-situational stability, and
are more difficult to disconfirm. The use of abstract language to represent a particular
behavior will attribute the behavior to the protagonist rather than the situation and the
resulting image of the protagonist will persist despite disconfirming information, whereas the
use of concrete language will attribute the same behavior more to the situation and the
resulting image of the protagonist will be easier to change. According to the linguistic
intergroup bias model (Maass, 1999), abstract language will be used to represent positive in-
group and negative out-group behaviors, whereas concrete language will be used to represent
negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. The combined effects of the differential
use of abstract and concrete language would, first, lead to biased attribution (explanation) of
behavior privileging the in-group over the out-group, and second, perpetuate the prejudiced
intergroup stereotypes. More recent research has shown that linguistic intergroup bias varies
with the power differential between groups—it is stronger in high and low power groups than
in equal power groups (Rubini et al., 2007).

Oratorical Power
A charismatic speaker may, by the sheer force of oratory, buoy up people’s hopes, convert
their hearts from hatred to forgiveness, or embolden them to take up arms for a cause. One
may recall moving speeches (in English) such as Susan B. Anthony’s “On Women’s Right to
Vote,” Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India,”
or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” The speech may be delivered face-to-face to an
audience, or broadcast over the media. The discussion below focuses on face-to-face oratories
in political meetings.

Oratorical power may be measured in terms of money donated or pledged to the speaker’s
cause, or, in a religious sermon, the number of converts made. Not much research has been
reported on these topics. Another measurement approach is to count the frequency of online
audience responses that a speech has generated, usually but not exclusively in the form of
applause. Audience applause can be measured fairly objectively in terms of frequency, length,
or loudness, and collected nonobtrusively from a public recording of the meeting. Audience
applause affords researchers the opportunity to explore communicative and social
psychological processes that underpin some aspects of the power of rhetorical formats. Note,
however, that not all incidences of audience applause are valid measures of the power of
rhetoric. A valid incidence should be one that is invited by the speaker and synchronized with
the flow of the speech, occurring at the appropriate time and place as indicated by the
rhetorical format. Thus, an uninvited incidence of applause would not count, nor is one that is
invited but has occurred “out of place” (too soon or too late). Furthermore, not all valid

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incidences are theoretically informative to the same degree. An isolated applause from just a
handful of the audience, though valid and in the right place, has relatively little theoretical
import for understanding the power of rhetoric compared to one that is made by many acting
in unison as a group. When the latter occurs, it would be a clear indication of the power of
rhetorically formulated speech. Such positive audience response constitutes the most direct
and immediate means by which an audience can display its collective support for the speaker,
something which they would not otherwise show to a speech of less power. To influence and
orchestrate hundreds and thousands of people in the audience to precisely coordinate their
response to applaud (and cheer) together as a group at the right time and place is no mean
feat. Such a feat also influences the wider society through broadcast on television and other
news and social media. The combined effect could be enormous there and then, and its
downstream influence far-reaching, crossing country boarders and inspiring generations to
come.

To accomplish the feat, an orator has to excite the audience to applaud, build up the
excitement to a crescendo, and simultaneously cue the audience to synchronize their outburst
of stored-up applause with the ongoing speech. Rhetorical formats that aid the orator to
accomplish the dual functions include contrast, list, puzzle solution, headline-punchline,
position-taking, and pursuit (Heritage & Greatbatch, 1986). To illustrate, we cite the contrast
and list formats.

A contrast, or antithesis, is made up of binary schemata such as “too much” and “too little.”
Heritage and Greatbatch (1986, p. 123) reported the following example:

Governments will argue that resources are not available to help disabled people. The
fact is that too much is spent on the munitions of war, and too little is spent on the
munitions of peace [italics added]. As the audience is familiar with the binary schema
of “too much” and “too little” they can habitually match the second half of the contrast
against the first half. This decoding process reinforces message comprehension and
helps them to correctly anticipate and applaud at the completion point of the contrast.
In the example quoted above, the speaker micropaused for 0.2 seconds after the
second word “spent,” at which point the audience began to applaud in anticipation of
the completion point of the contrast, and applauded more excitedly upon hearing “. . .
on the munitions of peace.” The applause continued and lasted for 9.2 long seconds.

A list is usually made up of a series of three parallel words, phrases or clauses. “Government
of the people, by the people, for the people” is a fine example, as is Obama’s “It’s been a long
time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining
moment, change has come to America!” (italics added) The three parts in the list echo one
another, step up the argument and its corresponding excitement in the audience as they move
from one part to the next. The third part projects a completion point to cue the audience to
get themselves ready to display their support via applause, cheers, and so forth. In a real
conversation this juncture is called a “transition-relevance place,” at which point a
conversational partner (hearer) may take up a turn to speak. A skilful orator will micropause
at that juncture to create a conversational space for the audience to take up their turn in
applauding and cheering as a group.

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As illustrated by the two examples above, speaker and audience collaborate to transform an
otherwise monological speech into a quasiconversation, turning a passive audience into an
active supportive “conversational” partner who, by their synchronized responses, reduces the
psychological separation from the speaker and emboldens the latter’s self-confidence.
Through such enjoyable and emotional participation collectively, an audience made up of
formerly unconnected individuals with no strong common group identity may henceforth
begin to feel “we are all one.” According to social identity theory and related theories (van
Zomeren et al., 2008), the emergent group identity, politicized in the process, will in turn
provide a social psychological base for collective social action. This process of identity making
in the audience is further strengthened by the speaker’s frequent use of “we” as a first
person, plural personal pronoun.

Conversational Power
A conversation is a speech exchange system in which the length and order of speaking turns
have not been preassigned but require coordination on an utterance-by-utterance basis
between two or more individuals. It differs from other speech exchange systems in which
speaking turns have been preassigned and/or monitored by a third party, for example, job
interviews and debate contests. Turn-taking, because of its centrality to conversations and the
important theoretical issues that it raises for social coordination and implicit conversational
conventions, has been the subject of extensive research and theorizing (Goodwin & Heritage,
1990; Grice, 1975; Sacks et al., 1974). Success at turn-taking is a key part of the
conversational process leading to influence. A person who cannot do this is in no position to
influence others in and through conversations, which are probably the most common and
ubiquitous form of human social interaction. Below we discuss studies of conversational
power based on conversational turns and applied to leader emergence in group and
intergroup settings. These studies, as they unfold, link conversation analysis with social
identity theory and expectation states theory (Berger et al., 1974).

A conversational turn in hand allows the speaker to influence others in two important ways.
First, through current-speaker-selects-next the speaker can influence who will speak next and,
indirectly, increases the probability that he or she will regain the turn after the next. A
common method for selecting the next speaker is through tag questions. The current speaker
(A) may direct a tag question such as “Ya know?” or “Don’t you agree?” to a particular hearer
(B), which carries the illocutionary force of selecting the addressee to be the next speaker
and, simultaneously, restraining others from self-selecting. The A1B1 sequence of exchange
has been found to have a high probability of extending into A1B1A2 in the next round of
exchange, followed by its continuation in the form of A1B1A2B2. For example, in a six-member
group, the A1B1→A1B1A2 sequence of exchange has more than 50% chance of extending to
the A1B1A2B2 sequence, which is well above chance level, considering that there are four
other hearers who could intrude at either the A2 or B2 slot of turn (Stasser & Taylor, 1991).
Thus speakership not only offers the current speaker the power to select the next speaker
twice, but also to indirectly regain a turn.

Second, a turn in hand provides the speaker with an opportunity to exercise topic control. He
or she can exercise non-decision-making power by changing an unfavorable or embarrassing
topic to a safer one, thereby silencing or preventing it from reaching the “floor.” Conversely,

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he or she can exercise decision-making power by continuing or raising a topic that is
favorable to self. Or the speaker can move on to talk about an innocuous topic to ease tension
in the group.

Bales (1950) has studied leader emergence in groups made up of unacquainted individuals in
situations where they have to bid or compete for speaking turns. Results show that individuals
who talk the most have a much better chance of becoming leaders. Depending on the social
orientations of their talk, they would be recognized as a task or relational leader. Subsequent
research on leader emergence has shown that an even better behavioral predictor than
volume of talk is the number of speaking turns. An obvious reason for this is that the volume
of talk depends on the number of turns—it usually accumulates across turns, rather than
being the result of a single extraordinary long turn of talk. Another reason is that more turns
afford the speaker more opportunities to realize the powers of turns that have been explicated
above. Group members who become leaders are the ones who can penetrate the complex, on-
line conversational system to obtain a disproportionately large number of speaking turns by
perfect timing at “transition-relevance places” to self-select as the next speaker or,
paradoxical as it may seem, constructive interruptions (Ng et al., 1995).

More recent research has extended the experimental study of group leadership to intergroup
contexts, where members belonging to two groups who hold opposing stances on a social or
political issue interact within and also between groups. The results showed, first, that
speaking turns remain important in leader emergence, but the intergroup context now
generates social identity and self-categorization processes that selectively privilege particular
forms of speech. What potential leaders say, and not only how many speaking turns they have
gained, becomes crucial in conveying to group members that they are prototypical members
of their group. Prototypical communication is enacted by adopting an accent, choosing code
words, and speaking in a tone that characterize the in-group; above all, it is enacted through
the content of utterances to represent or exemplify the in-group position. Such prototypical
utterances that are directed successfully at the out-group correlate strongly with leader
emergence (Reid & Ng, 2000). These out-group-directed prototypical utterances project an in-
group identity that is psychologically distinctive from the out-group for in-group members to
feel proud of and to rally together when debating with the out-group.

Building on these experimental results Reid and Ng (2003) developed a social identity theory
of leadership to account for the emergence and maintenance of intergroup leadership,
grounding it in case studies of the intergroup communication strategies that brought Ariel
Sharon and John Howard to power in Israel and Australia, respectively. In a later
development, the social identity account was fused with expectation states theory to explain
how group processes collectively shape the behavior of in-group members to augment the
prototypical communication behavior of the emergent leader (Reid & Ng, 2006). Specifically,
when conversational influence gained through prototypical utterances culminates to form an
incipient power hierarchy, group members develop expectations of who is and will be leading
the group. Acting on these tacit expectations they collectively coordinate the behavior of each
other to conform with the expectations by granting incipient leaders more speaking turns and
supporting them with positive audience responses. In this way, group members collectively
amplify the influence of incipient leaders and jointly propel them to leadership roles (see also
Correll & Ridgeway, 2006). In short, the emergence of intergroup leaders is a joint process of

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what they do individually and what group members do collectively, enabled by speaking turns
and mediated by social identity and expectation states processes. In a similar vein, Hogg (
2014) has developed a social identity account of leadership in intergroup settings.

Narrative Power
Narratives and stories are closely related and are sometimes used interchangeably. However,
it is useful to distinguish a narrative from a story and from other related terms such as
discourse and frames. A story is a sequence of related events in the past recounted for
rhetorical or ideological purposes, whereas a narrative is a coherent system of interrelated
and sequentially organized stories formed by incorporating new stories and relating them to
others so as to provide an ongoing basis for interpreting events, envisioning an ideal future,
and motivating and justifying collective actions (Halverson et al., 2011). The temporal
dimension and sense of movement in a narrative also distinguish it from discourse and frames.
According to Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle (2013), discourses are the raw material of
communication that actors plot into a narrative, and frames are the acts of selecting and
highlighting some events or issues to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and
solution. Both discourse and frame lack the temporal and causal transformation of a narrative.

Pitching narratives at the suprastory level and stressing their temporal and transformational
movements allows researchers to take a structurally more systemic and temporally more
expansive view than traditional research on propaganda wars between nations, religions, or
political systems (Halverson et al., 2011; Miskimmon et al., 2013). Schmid (2014) has provided
an analysis of al-Qaeda’s “compelling narrative that authorizes its strategy, justifies its violent
tactics, propagates its ideology and wins new recruits.” According to this analysis, the chief
message of the narrative is “the West is at war with Islam,” a strategic communication that is
fundamentally intergroup in both structure and content. The intergroup structure of al-Qaeda
narrative includes the rhetorical constructions that there are a group grievance inflicted on
Muslims by a Zionist–Christian alliance, a vision of the good society (under the Caliphate and
sharia), and a path from grievance to the realization of the vision led by al-Qaeda in a violent
jihad to eradicate Western influence in the Muslim world. The al-Qaeda narrative draws
support not only from traditional Arab and Muslim cultural narratives interpreted to justify its
unorthodox means (such as attacks against women and children), but also from pre-existing
anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism propagated by some Arab governments, Soviet Cold War
propaganda, anti-Western sermons by Muslim clerics, and the Israeli government’s treatment
of Palestinians. It is deeply embedded in culture and history, and has reached out to numerous
Muslims who have emigrated to the West.

The intergroup content of al-Qaeda narrative was shown in a computer-aided content analysis
of 18 representative transcripts of propaganda speeches released between 2006–2011 by al-
Qaeda leaders, totaling over 66,000 words (Cohen et al., 2016). As part of the study, an
“Ideology Extraction using Linguistic Extremization” (IELEX) categorization scheme was
developed for mapping the content of the corpus, which revealed 19 IELEX rhetorical
categories referring to either the out-group/enemy or the in-group/enemy victims. The out-
group/enemy was represented by four categories such as “The enemy is extremely negative
(bloodthirsty, vengeful, brainwashed, etc.)”; whereas the in-group/enemy victims were
represented by more categories such as “we are entirely innocent/good/virtuous.” The content

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of polarized intergroup stereotypes, demonizing “them” and glorifying “us,” echoes other
similar findings (Smith et al., 2008), as well as the general finding of intergroup stereotyping
in social psychology (Yzerbyt, 2016).

The success of the al-Qaeda narrative has alarmed various international agencies, individual
governments, think tanks, and religious groups to spend huge sums of money on developing
counternarratives that are, according to Schmid (2014), largely feeble. The so-called “global
war on terror” has failed in its effort to construct effective counternarratives although al-
Qaeda’s finance, personnel, and infrastructure have been much weakened. Ironically, it has
developed into a narrative of its own, not so much for countering external extremism, but for
promoting and justifying internal nationalistic extremist policies and influencing national
elections. This reactive coradicalization phenomenon is spreading (Mink, 2015; Pratt, 2015;
Reicher & Haslam, 2016).

Discussion and Future Directions

This chapter provides a systematic framework for understanding five language–power

relationships, namely, language reveals power, reflects power, maintains existing dominance,
unites and divides a nation, and creates influence. The first two relationships are derived from
the power behind language and the last three from the power of language. Collectively they
provide a relatively comprehensible framework for understanding the relationships between
language and power, and not simply for understanding language alone or power alone
separated from one another. The language–power relationships are dynamically interrelated,
one influencing the other, and each can draw from an array of the cognitive, communicative,
social, and identity functions of language. The framework is applicable to both interpersonal
and intergroup contexts of communication, although for present purposes the latter has been
highlighted. Among the substantive issues discussed in this chapter, English as a global
language, oratorical and narrative power, and intergroup leadership stand out as particularly
important for political and theoretical reasons.

In closing, we note some of the gaps that need to be filled and directions for further research.
When discussing the powers of language to maintain and reflect existing dominance, we have
omitted the countervailing power of language to resist or subvert existing dominance and,
importantly, to create social change for the collective good. Furthermore, in this age of
globalization and its discontents, English as a global language will increasingly be resented
for its excessive unaccommodating power despite tangible lingua franca English benefits, and
challenged by the expanding ethnolinguistic vitality of peoples who speak Arabic, Chinese, or
Spanish. Internet communication is no longer predominantly in English, but is rapidly
diversifying to become the modern Tower of Babel. And yet we have barely scratched the
surface of these issues. Other glaring gaps include the omission of media discourse and recent
developments in Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (Loring, 2016), as well as the lack
of reference to languages other than English that may cast one or more of the language–
power relationships in a different light.

One of the main themes of this chapter—that the diverse language–power relationships are
dynamically interrelated—clearly points to the need for greater theoretical fertilization across
cognate disciplines. Our discussion of the three powers of language (boxes 3–5 in Figure 1)
clearly points in this direction, most notably in the case of the powers of language to create

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influence through single words, oratories, conversations, and narratives, but much more
needs to be done. The social identity approach will continue to serve as a meta theory of
intergroup communication. To the extent that intergroup communication takes place in an
existing power relation and that the changes that it seeks are not simply a more positive or
psychologically distinctive social identity but greater group power and a more powerful social
identity, the social identity approach has to incorporate power in its application to intergroup
communication.

Further Reading
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Billig, M. (1991). Ideology and opinions: Studies in rhetorical psychology. Newbury Park, CA:
SAGE.

Crystal, D. (2012). English as a global language, 2d ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press.

Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness. New York: John Wiley.

Holtgraves, T. M. (2010). Social psychology and language: Words, utterances, and conversations.
In S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., pp. 1386–
1422). New York: John Wiley.

Mumby, D. K. (Ed.). (1993). Narrative and social control: Critical perspectives (Vol. 21). Newbury
Park, CA: SAGE.

Ng, S. H., & Bradac, J. J. (1993). Power in language: Verbal communication and social influence.
Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/
10.4135/9781412994088.n202 <http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412994088.n202>.

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