The Promise
Why is peace linguistics (PL) still largely unknown and unheard
of within the field of applied linguistics? The answer to this question
relates to the politics of language education and the role of applied
linguistics in helping to address some of the key contextual political
and socioeconomic factors affecting the teaching and learning of
languages. For example, it is possible that, in response to the hateful,
hurtful, and harmful rhetoric emanating from the current government of
the United States, the field of PL could help us better understand and
alleviate some of the damage being done.
There are very few people in the TESOL field who have connected
English language teaching (ELT) with the teaching and learning of
second/foreign languages for the purposes of peacebuilding or
peacemaking. One of those is Francisco Gomes de Matos, a professor
emeritus of linguistics at the Federal University of Pernambuco in
Brazil, who dates the first formal mention of PL back to 1977 (Gomes de
Matos, 2014). However, in the 40+ years since then, very few applied
linguists have even come across the term, much less read about it, and
until very recently, nobody appears to have carried out, published, or
presented any PL research. According to Friedrich (2007):
Crystal (1999 and 2003) has defined Peace Linguistics as more
of a concept than a discipline: “A term reflecting the climate of
opinion which emerged during the 1990s among many linguists and language
teachers, in which linguistic principles, methods, findings and
applications were seen as a means of promoting peace and human rights at
the global level.” (p. 76)
Unfortunately, the reference to “many linguists and language
teachers” does not appear to have been the case. Indeed, none of the
many linguists and language teachers whom I have asked about PL, in more
than a dozen countries over the last 2 years, have heard of PL. One
reason for that may be the lack of linguistics as an integral part of
what has been called PL, in terms of phonetics and phonology, morphology
and syntax, and semantics and pragmatics.
In January and February 2017, I was invited to teach what
appears to be the first course of its kind, titled Peace Linguistics, at
Brigham Young University-Hawaii (BYU-H), as a key part of the
University’s vision is to “assist individuals…in their efforts to
influence the establishment of peace internationally”
(https://about.byuh.edu/mission). Also, the course was offered by the
English Language Teaching and Learning Department at BYU-H, rather than
as part of the University’s Intercultural Peacebuilding program. Despite
the desire to focus on language and linguistics, finding suitable
materials around which to build the class proved formidable, as there
are myriad materials on linguistics but none designed for a PL
course.
After an extensive search for books, papers, course syllabi,
curriculum documents—anything related to the teaching and learning of
PL—we chose for the core course text a book by one of the few other
people who have connected ELT with peacebuilding and peacemaking,
Rebecca Oxford. Known for her work on learning styles, in more recent
years, she has turned her attention to what she refers to as “peace
language,” which she recently defined as “concerned with understanding
and transforming communication to promote peace within ourselves, with
others, and with our environment.” (Oxford, Gregersen, & Matilde
Olivero, in press).
One of the distinctions between Oxford, Gregersen, and Matilde
Olivero’s (in press) “peace language approach” and PL is that the former
begins with a focus on intrapersonal communication, in terms of being
at peace with our selves. However, PL focuses on interpersonal
communication, especially the spoken and written texts produced by some
of the world’s most powerful people, as their messages have the
potential to make peace—or to start wars.
The Anticlimax
The anticlimax referred to here describes the sense of exciting
possibilities when I first came across the idea of PL, followed by the
disappointment when I found that, apart from Gomes de Matos (2014) and
Oxford (2013), and maybe one or two others from many years ago, and in
spite of Crystal’s 1999 prediction (Friedrich, 2007), there was still no
field of PL, and not one in sight.
Having established that PL as a field did not yet exist, I set
about trying to find out what PL was. After reviewing 20 years of
published articles in the Journal of Peace Education and in the International Journal of Peace
Studies, I found fewer than 10 articles in 400 that were
focused on language, and none that focused on linguistics (Curtis,
2017). That was perhaps a reflection of the publish-or-perish pressures
of the academic, university system which may have contributed to the
creation of unconnected silos of academic knowledge, in which large
amounts of work are being published in one field, but without that work
being connected to other fields.
Perhaps as a result of those silos, the thousands of published
papers in the fields of peace education/studies do not appear to have
been connected to the tens of thousands of papers published in the
fields of applied linguistics. But could academic, institutional
“siloization” fully account for this missing link? There had to be more;
another powerful factor in the nonexistence of PL as a field appears to
have been, as previously noted, the lack of “L” in PL—in other words,
the lack of linguistics. That, of course, raises the question of what we
mean by linguistics, which is a question that has been discussed over
many years by many groups, including the members of TESOL’s Applied
Linguistics Interest Section.
The homepage of the Linguistic Society of America website
provides a clear and concise definition: “Linguistics, in a nutshell, is
the scientific study of language,” which is reiterated in their
tagline: “Advancing the scientific study of language,” although it is
important to note that there are many different theories of linguistics.
As a senior science officer, working in hospitals in England in the
1980s, I was a product of many years of training in the classical,
Western scientific method, complete with its highly problematic notions
regarding objectivity. Therefore, in my work (Curtis, 2018), I have
slightly redefined linguistics as the systematic
study of language, by which I mean, in a nutshell, identifying
language-related points of interest, seeing the patterns made by those
points, and drawing on the traditional linguistic tools of phonetics and
phonology, morphology and syntax, and semantics and pragmatics.
The presence or absence of those kinds of tools brings us to
Gomes de Matos, whose work has been very important, over many years, in
connecting ELT with peacebuilding and peace making. That said, there
appears to have been little or no linguistics (i.e., systematic language
study) within his use of the term peace linguistics.
However, Gomes de Matos has given a great deal of useful advice to
language teachers, to help them and their learners to be more aware of
and more peaceful in their language use. In that sense, his work may be
closer to the idea of “peaceful language use,” while Oxford’s work on
peace language is “concerned with understanding and transforming
communication to promote peace within ourselves, with others, and with
our environment” (Oxford, Gregersen, & Matilde Olivero, in
press). Those two bodies of work have made important connections between
language teaching/learning and peacebuilding/making. However, PL, as I
define it, uses in-depth language analyses to deconstruct the language
used by people in positions of power, such as the president of the
United States, to peel away the surface layers, so that the deeper,
underlying meanings of their words can be laid bare.
The Resurrection
By resurrection here, I am using the
lower-case, nonreligious, non-Christian meaning of the word related to
bringing something back into use. After teaching the pilot PL course at
BYU-H in January and February of 2017, I was invited back to coteach the
course in January and February of 2018, with Dr. Nancy Tarawhiti, who
will be the professor teaching the course from 2019 onwards. As a result
of those two experiences (Curtis, 2017, 2018) and the research needed
to teach a course that appears not to have been taught anywhere else
before, a special issue of the TESL Reporter will be
published (online and freely available) in November/December of 2018,
titled “From Peace Language to Peace Linguistics,” and a new book, the
first to be titled Peace Linguistics, will be
published by the University of Michigan Press in the Spring of 2019.
Based on that teaching and research in PL, this is the current
definition that I have developed and am using:
Peace linguistics (PL) is an area of applied linguistics, based
on systematic analyses of the ways in which language is used to
communicate/create conflict and to communicate/create peace. PL is
interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as peace studies/peace
education and conflict resolution/transformation, bringing those
together with fields such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse
analysis, including text/genre analysis.
It is my firm belief that PL will begin to be more recognized and to grow rapidly in the next few years.
References
BYU-Hawaii. Mission and Vision. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://about.byuh.edu/mission
Curtis, A. (2017). Back from the battlefield: Resurrecting
peace linguistics. TESL Reporter, 50(1), 20–34. Retrieved from http://tesol.byuh.edu/sites/tesol.byuh.edu/files/TESOLReporter50-1_article2.pdf
Curtis, A. (2018). Introducing and defining peace linguistics. The Word, 27(3), 11–13. Retrieved
from http://www.hawaiitesol.wildapricot.org/resources/Documents/Word/2018%20May.pdf
Friedrich, P. (2007). English for peace: Toward a framework of
peace sociolinguistics. World Englishes, 26(1), 72–83.
Gomes de Matos, F. (2014). Peace linguistics for language
teachers. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística
Teórica e Aplicada, 30(2), 415–424. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-44502014000200415
Oxford, R. L. (2013). The language of peace:
Communicating to create harmony. Charlotte, NC: Information
Age Publishing.
Oxford, R. L., Gregersen, T., & Matilde Olivero, M. (in
press). Peacebuilding: Fostering the language of peace in TESOL. TESL Reporter.
Andy Curtis received his MA in applied linguistics
and his PhD in international education from the University of York,
England. From 2015–2016, he served as the 50th President of TESOL
International Association. |