While we know that language change can occur at varying speeds and that there are numerous and diverse reasons for language change, many changes actually have political roots or explanations. We also know that a large proportion of language change has come from human migration, including the use of a language by non-native speakers, complete with both the influences of the syntactic, phonetic and morphological rules of the migrants’ native tongue and their cultural contributions.
For example, the massive migration of Irish people to the United States, which made many contributions to English slang, has been attributed to British colonization of Ireland and its policies of land tenancy which perpetuated poverty, thus exacerbating the devastating Great Famine in the mid-19th century.
The huge numbers of Italians migrating to Argentina, which stamped its linguistic mark in Argentine intonation and slang, has been partly explained by the immigration policies of Argentina and the political turmoil existing on the Italian peninsula.
Besides language changes that migration promotes, it’s often politics that engenders language change in more instantaneous ways, due to the public debates that are incited concerning changing social and economic realities. Increasing environmental policies, both private and public, and environmental awareness in the last few decades has resulted in a number of new phrases and words such as-
eco-friendly;
tree hugger;
green washing;
carbon footprint;
eco-terrorism;
locavore;
green collar jobs, and so on.
It’s also expanded the meaning and use of other phrases and words such as –
sustainability;
gas guzzler;
hybrid;
organic; and
capture.
In the same manner we’ve seen the liberation of women and their struggle for gender equality bringing forth some important language changes, particularly with the use of ‘he/she’ and ‘his/her’ instead of the use of masculine pronouns for gender inclusive or gender neutral subjects; plus, the gender neutralization of professional words like congressperson, spokesperson, and so on.
Sometimes insignificant or random political phenomena leads to important language changes: for example, in this year’s US presidential election we saw ‘average Bob’ or the ‘common citizen’ being replaced by ‘Bob the plumber’ - this was solely due to one of the many candidate-voter conversations.
When it comes to selections for ‘Word of the Year’ it’s very easy to see the rapid politically-rooted language changes, particularly lexical changes such as the semantic modification, invention, and popularization of words. For example, the American Dialect Society has chosen –
2001: 9/11
2002: weapons of mass destruction
2004: red state/blue state/purple state
2007: subprime
2008: The choice by Merriam-Webster was bailout.
Most of these language changes that can and have occurred cause little concern when it comes to translation. However, there are definitely some politically rooted language changes that do create problems when translating: one example might be – how would you translate ‘purple state’ into a language that’s spoken in a country that has a Unitarian multi-party political system?
