In week 3 and 4, the class examines the philosophical ideas of human
nature, and the languages of human society, seeking to answer the theme “What
makes human bad”. Among the classmates, the answer to the theme varies
depending on how individuals possess the knowledge through experience and
critical thinking and how the individuals approach the theme in different
disciplines. For this week’s post, I want to focus on the area of linguistics
and describe how the excerpt from an
Introduction to Language and Society written by Martin Montgomery widened
my views on the anti-language.
I had a mere true belief that profanity is a bad language. What I mean
by bad language is that there are languages that are wrong in our society. However,
I found that Montgomery rejected my belief in his book an introduction to Language and Society. On chapter 5, the
anti-language is defined as the languages spoken by the subcultures who has
antagonistic relationship with society and created by relexicalization.
Relexicalization refers to the process of making new words to replace the word
that means the same. One of the major anti-language is the hip hop language.
Hip hop language seems to create solidarity especially among black community and
it had been pushed out from the main stream society. The emotional attachment
in hip hop language may be one of the motivations that create the social
identity among groups, but what makes the hip hop different from other
languages is the use of profanity. I do not agree that people should use
profanity for any reason or circumstances, but the hip hop language seems to
use profanity to express their anger and resistance towards society who pushed
them out. And I partially agree that there are no other words which can replace
the profanity to express their feelings.
Work Cited
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