LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RECONCILIATION

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role language has in social reconciliation, making the point that it is perhaps the most crucial element in the process. Language can create reality, as early linguists like Saussure has shown us, often naturalizing ideology-filled cultural constructs, so that words are often misrecognized as being neutral.  This paper shows how language affects the progress towards war and the possibility of violence itself. It uses the example of gender to show how a quieter, more systemic violence that can be unleashed towards a group of people through language use. The modern world uses language very effectively to get people in agreement or to mobilize them towards a goal desired by a powerful few. For this, language works not as a means for clear communication, but as something that can be used as a smokescreen to obfuscate issues, something that will be clarified in this paper by using an example from Sinhala literature.  The conclusions drawn in this paper are that words and their use play a crucial role in life and in social processes and dynamics, and that it is very important that people realize this if we are to move towards any kind of long-lasting social reconciliation.