The Language Police

Language Policing and the Cycle of ‘Say This, Do Not Say That’

Sabir Zhakaw

Language, as a mechanism, process, and dimension of human growth and development, has from ancient times been the most powerful developmental mechanism in humanity’s global development and in the spheres of localism¹ and community formation. It remains active and continuous. It has provided the powerful impetus of civilization through science, art, and society.

With the rise and development of writing, language, according to its components, structure, form, processes, dimensions, contexts, acoustic mechanism, sound system, word formation, lexicology, the speaker’s mental structures, and the full structural sphere of language, established two domains for itself: ordinary social speech and social writing. This made possible a rule-governed, legal, and structural movement from language as an internal system toward language as a powerful mechanism of writing. Two active domains, orthography and grammar, then emerged as representatives of preservation and written record.

With the emergence of these two domains, language lost part of its natural and spontaneous essence as a scientific principle and rule. This opened the way for dominant, totalizing, and colonial languages to use grammar as a powerful weapon for capturing and colonizing the minds of poets, writers, intellectuals, thinkers, activists, and others. Wherever this system prevails systematically, it determines the laws and course of writing according to the dominant preference.

This situation caused language to be treated as a defensive weapon against linguistic imperialism², colonialism³, and totalitarianism⁴. It created an arena in which powerful systems for enslaving individuals, including chauvinism, racism, and fascism within nationalism and ultranationalism, became active and in which voices rose against domination. In Kurdish, for example, this sensitivity and opposition appears when environmental languages such as Laki, Hawrami, Kalhori, and Kurmanji confront the dominance of the central sphere, including ‘Mukriyanism’ and ‘Sulaymaniyahism’. This becomes a reason for those languages to identify themselves separately.

From the perspectives of patholinguistics⁵, psycholinguistics⁶, and linguistic pathology, some people appear in a condition described through psychopathic⁷ and pathognomonic⁸ tendencies. A member of the dominant language community continually waits here and there like a language police officer⁹ or linguistic gatekeeper¹⁰, ready to attack a writer or user of that dominant language. Believing themselves to be language guardians¹¹, they define rules and laws for it.

From descriptive linguistics and the linguistics of identification, such people wait like police for someone to publish an article. Regardless of whether they understand its subject, they immediately act like guards at a police checkpoint and intervene. This creates the prescriptive cycle of ‘say this, do not say that’, ‘correct, incorrect’, and ‘write this, do not write that’, bringing the writer and language user before a regime of correction and punishment.

According to data and observations within linguistic pathology, people exposed to attacks by language police become fixated on, or alienated by, orthography and grammar; processes of orthographic and grammatical obsession are produced. Yet these language police possess neither complete scientific knowledge of the language nor the ability to identify all its processes and dimensions. They have only an elementary knowledge of grammar and orthography and no scientific awareness of language. Because they do not understand the subject scientifically, they are unaware of the damage their actions inflict on language.