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INTRODUCTION
How and why has English changed over time? From Old English till Modern English. The Old English (OE) period can be regarded as starting around AD 450, with the arrival of West Germanic settlers (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) in southern Britain. They brought with them dialects closely related to the continental language varieties which would produce modern German, Dutch and Frisian.
OE, also called Anglo-Saxon, was not heavily influenced by the Celtic languages spoken by the native inhabitants of the British Isles, borrowing only a few words (e.g. brock, tor) associated with local wildlife and geography (but many place and river names e.g. Dover, Avon). However, Latin, introduced to Britain by the Romans, and reinforced in its influence by the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity during the 7th century, had a significant impact, providing both vocabulary (e.g. master, mass, school) and the basis for the writing system. OE was mostly written using the Latin alphabet, supplemented by a few Germanic runic letters to represent sounds not found in Latin.
Norse influence may also have contributed to an important grammatical change, which mainly occurred in English between the 11th and 14th centuries, and which marked the transition to Middle English (ME) (conventionally dated c.1100-1500). OE had indicated many grammatical categories and relationships by attaching inflections (endings) to word roots, in a similar way to Latin or German. Another important feature of the early ME period was the influence of Norman (and later, central) French, following the Norman conquest of 1066.
Modern English (ModE) can be regarded externally as starting with the introduction of printing. Caxton’s selection of an East Midlands/London variety of English for the first printed books at the end of the 15th century contributed to the development of a standardized variety of the language, with fixed spelling and punctuation conventions and accepted vocabulary and grammatical forms. The vocabulary of English was consciously elaborated as it came to be used for an increasing variety of purposes, including translations of classical works rediscovered in the Renaissance, a burgeoning creative literature, and the description of new scientific activities. Thousands of words were borrowed from Latin and Greek in this period e.g. education, metamorphosis, critic, conscious.
An internal feature which characterized the movement towards ModE was the Great Vowel Shift – an important series of linked pronunciation changes which mainly took place between the 15th and 17th centuries.
In the present day, English is used in many parts of the world, as a first, second or foreign language, having been carried from its country of origin by former colonial and imperial activity, the slave trade, and recently, economic, cultural and educational prestige.
It continues to change at all linguistic levels, in both standard and non-standard varieties, in response to external influences (e.g. modern communications technologies; contact with other world languages) and pressures internal to the language system (e.g. the continuing impulse towards an efficient, symmetrical sound-system; the avoidance of grammatical ambiguity).
We need not fear or resisting such changes, though many people do, since the processes of operating now are comparable to those which have operated throughout the observable and reconstructable history of English, and indeed of all other languages.
What is that “political correctness”? Political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct), commonly abbreviated to PC, is a term that, in modern usage, is used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended not to offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. In the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive.
The term had only scattered usage before the early 1990s, usually as an ironic self-description, but entered more mainstream usage in the United States when it was the subject of a series of articles in The New York Times. The phrase was widely used in the debate about Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, and gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990), and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education, in which he condemned what he saw as liberal efforts to advance self-victimization, multiculturalism through language, affirmative action, and changes to the content of school and university curricula.
Commentators on the left have said that conservatives pushed the term in order to divert attention from more substantive matters of discrimination and as part of a broader culture war against liberalism. They also argue that conservatives have their own forms of political correctness, which are generally ignored by conservative commenters.
Nowadays the whole world is obsessed with Political Correctness. It is the result of the language planning movement that started in the US in the 1980s aiming at eliminating sexist, racist, and pejorative terms from the English language, often referred to as the Politically correct (PC) reform movement. Since then it has grown into an influential movement not only in the USA but in European countries like Germany, France, Portugal, Spain as well as the UK. In addition, it has become an important part of the ideology and practice of the language in these cultures.
Political correctness (PC) norms are highly controversial and have been a subject to political and philosophical debates for decades. Yet, surprisingly little empirical research has been conducted to understand whether they have any impact at all and how they affect media, British press, in particular. This paper is intended as an investigation of the use of politically correct English language in British press and its perception of the PC phenomenon.
In the 1970s, the American New Left began using the term "politically correct." In the essay The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), Toni Cade Bambara said that "a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist, too." Thereafter, the term was often used as self-critical satire. Debra L. Shultz said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts." As such, PC is a popular usage in the comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, which then was followed by the term ideologically sound, in the comic strips of Bart Dickon. In her essay "Toward a feminist Revolution" (1992) Ellen Willis said: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term 'political correctness', it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality.”
Critics, including Camille Paglia and James Atlas, have pointed to Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind as the likely beginning of the modern debate — about what was soon named "political correctness" — in American higher education. Professor of English literary and cultural studies at CMU Jeffrey J. Williams wrote that the "assault on...political correctness that simmered through the Reagan years, gained bestseller with Bloom's Closing of the American Mind." According to Z.F. Gamson, "Bloom's Closing of the American Mind...attacked the faculty for 'political correctness'." Prof. of Social Work at CSU Tony Platt goes further and says the "campaign against 'political correctness'" was launched by the book in 1987.
After 1991, its use as a pejorative phrase became widespread amongst conservatives in the US. It became a key term encapsulating conservative concerns about the left in culture and political debate more broadly, as well as in academia. Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the term "thought police" in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage, but it was Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991) which "captured the press's imagination."
Herbert Kohl, in 1992, commented that a number of neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former Communist Party members, and, as a result, familiar with the Marxist use of the phrase. He argued that in doing so, they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic."
During the 1990s, conservative and right-wing politicians, think-tanks, and speakers adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideological enemies – especially in the context of the Culture Wars about language and the content of public-school curricula.
In the late 1980s, the rules of political correctness (PC) began to be applied to a broad range of issues—such as race, age, sexual orientation, abilities. As people became sensitive to bias on the basis of race, gender, age, and sexual orientation, they tried to minimize the negative impact of language that reflected these biases. The tendency toward “deracialization” in English provided new names for nationalities and ethnic groups. The words Negro, colored, and Afro-American were replaced by African American; Oriental or Asiatic became Asian or more specific designations such as Pacific Islander, Chinese American, Korean. Indian, a term that refers to people who live in or come from India, was differentiated from terms used for the native peoples of North America such as American Indian, Native American, or more specific terms like Chinook or Hopi.
Changing attitudes about aging made people aware of words that reinforce stereotypes (decrepit, senile) and the need to avoid mentioning age unless it’s relevant. Terms like elderly, aged, old, and geriatric were replaced by older person, senior citizens or seniors (Zabotkina 1989). New non-pejorative terms began to be used to name people with disabilities or illnesses. Blind people were called visually challenged; the deaf were called people with hearing impairments. The terms challenged, differently abled and special were coined to describe people with clinical diagnoses or mental disabilities. Today these words and word combinations are preferred by some people, but they are often ridiculed and are best avoided (Zabotkina 1989).
The Political Correctness movement is an intellectual effort to use language to allow and encourage social progress. It has suffered from a great deal of ridicule and scorn, and it has also been confused by many. Politically correct changes are also occurring in languages other than English as a reflection of growing tolerance, inclusion, and other changes in modern societies. The movement for political correctness has both supporters and critics. This makes it a good topic for discussions, debates, and other exercises in critical thinking skills.
The subject of research is the politically correct expressions used in English political discourse, and the most common instances for usage of them.
The object of the research is the use of politically correct English language.
The aims of the present paper are:
to examine theoretical approaches and background of PC language, as well as investigate the phenomenon of political correctness
to identify and analyze the politically correct expressions used in today's English language
According to the aims of the present research the following tasks can be marked out:
to describe the political correctness
to examine its functioning in language
Novelty. The relevance of the research topic is that today, since we all live in the globalized world demanding to understand some significant facts even if they are skillfully hidden, it is really important to comprehend the language that is used by both politicians and newspapers.
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