The Changing Constant of our Lives

In response to Question 2.

“Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell.

Why has George Orwell found the need to say that political language is different than any other language we speak? Do we really speak differently according to the people around us, where we are, what time it is, and what we are talking about?

Yes, we do.

Just like reading, listening, watching, hearing, language is a way of knowing. It may seem obvious, but without language, we wouldn’t be able to share our information and what we know. We see language as a constant in our lives, yet language is anything but constant. Both in the historical context and in our daily lives, the language we use always changes.

Historical linguistics is the branch of linguistics which deals with the change of language over centuries, but what interests us here is the change of language in one, short day of our mundane lives. We speak differently to the bus driver when we ask him where the next stop is, we speak differently with our best friends, differently with our “friends”, and differently with our teachers or bosses. When I am speaking with my best friend about music, she both understands what I’m saying in the musical context without me having to explain it, because she is also a musician, and she understands what I’m trying to say, for example when I say “that thing we did with the thing in that place”, because we spend all our day together and we know each other very well.  If I had said that very same sentence to a stranger, they would think me mad. The set of words specific to a profession is called jargon, like the music vocabulary I used to talk to my musician friend about the use of leitmotifs in the music of Lord of the Rings. The very existence of jargon shows how we change our language according to who we are talking to and where we are talking to them.

Another type of language change we see in our daily lives is called “code switching”; when people switch to an entire other language, not just change their vocabulary. For example, when I can’t say what I must in French class, I switch to English in the middle of the sentence.

Of course, as there is a problem with everything good and nice, and as much as changing our language may provide variety and may liven our conversations, we changing the way we speak create problems for linguists. For example, when linguists want to observe how people from the Çömelek village talk amongst themselves and how the Turkish language used daily has changed in the southern part of Turkey, they need to talk to people and record what they are saying. Only, there is one problem: people tend to be more careful about what they’re saying and how they’re saying it when they are talking to a linguist, so the linguist can never know how the people really speak amongst themselves. This is called the observer’s paradox and shows a problem with language as a way of knowing while language changes constantly.

Language is dynamic; it changes over time, we twist it and manipulate it every time we talk, according to the context, audience and setting of our conversation. Change, in this case, language change, is always good, since people change and the only way people can show what they know, how they know it and tell other people about it, is through the one and only path which us humans take for granted, the changing constant of our lives; language.