This may seem like stating the obvious, however the beauty and bain of our words are that they are simultaneously affected by the society in which we live while also being a product of it.

If this is the case, then it makes sense that we would want to understand how this works and what this means for us.

Furthermore, if we found out that we had the tools in our hands to improve our society, what better way forward than to take action.

This is what Critical Discourse Analysis (aka CDA) is all about.

According to Norman Fairclough, a major proponent of this particular branch of Critical Studies and Discourse Analysis, language can both affect society but also be affected by society and its rules.

Knowing this is already a first step, being conscious about the effect of language on the world we live in, but also about how society can affect the way we use language.

This may seem obvious to some of you, but viewing language and society as intertwined goes against what the famous proponents of modern linguistics such as Chomsky put forward as theory. His ‘formalist’ approach was to try to study language as separate from society, suggesting that every human being had innate meta-language.

Instead of studying language as separate from society, certain linguists preferred to talk about sociolinguistics. In this way, they wanted to make sure that linguistics and society were studied side by side, rather than separately.

The view of Fairclough and a number of other scholars is that language is not only created by human beings living in society, but also that this way of social organisation affects the way we use language.

But Fairclough draws on three important sources of study in the field of sociology to transform CDA into an active branch of linguistics – the theory of ideology, the work of Michel Foucault and the work of Jürgen Habermas.

To cut a long story short, and since I’m trying to make this piece as accessible as possible, Fairclough sees language as a playground for ideology, both one in which power struggles come to play, but also one which is used in power struggles.

So two of the most important concepts in CDA are power and ideology.

There are two main ways in which power is achieved, through coercion and through consent. The latter is what concerns us here, i.e. how language is used to sustain power relations. The means by which this is achieved is ideology. Even though it may seem strange, ideology is most effective when it appears as common-sense.

So to come back full-circle, by studying the way in which we use language, CDA, not only describes language use, but interprets the way in which it is used and perceived (the social effect) and explains how language affects society and vice versa. Finally, it seeks action within society as a result of the findings, a way to tackle inequality.

By achieving clarity about how we use our language, we become self-aware. And by increasing our self-awareness, we are able to make choices about our behaviour – either to maintain our current path, or to change.

We cannot change inequality in our society without awareness, and in order to be aware, we need to analyse our behaviour. The strange part of linguistic analysis is the unconscious effect we may have on our own analysis. No researcher can claim to be fully unbiased, because the very vehicle (s)he uses to convey this interpretation is the site for power struggle.