Lect. Wafa’ Abbas Sahan (Ph.D)

Language is not an innocent collection of expressions and patterns; rather it is a vehicle for resounding the ideologies of its users.  This ideation is reflected by Fairclough, a linguist, and one of the founders of critical analysis of discourse. Drawing on this theory of language, making choices to formulate structures of discourse to encode ideologies is highly influenced by the way individuals perceive the world. As an instance, poets and diary writers who experienced war directly reflected their world perception of war as a subject matter rather than love and passion. Moreover, through a minute textual analysis, it is obvious that they utilize language as a means to pass their disastrous world view (Sahan & Khalil, 2022).

This perspective of language mechanism collides against the hypothesis of Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) who posit that our world perception is determined by the language we speak. Several textual analyses have been conducted resulting to the conclusion that language users operate language as a means by means of which their world view is mirrored and transcribed. Accordingly, there are variations in textual morphological, lexical, and syntactic selections among users with different religious or cultural background speaking one language.