Strong and weak language styles from a cosmological point of view

Abstract

This study entitled “Powerful and Powerless Language from a Sociolinguistics Perspective” aims to identify linguistic and non-linguistic criteria of powerful and powerless speech styles and to find methods of a suitable theoretical and practical framework for sociolinguistics research in Kurdish. The importance of the study is that: (a) it explains how to distinguish between strong and weak styles, which are related to both the concepts of “power language” (element, age, social status) and “language of power” (It covers all abilities of an individual in drafting and organizing expressions effectively and attractively), (b) According to the researcher’s knowledge, this method has not been implemented in Kurdish to distinguish between powerful and powerless styles of language. The research consists of two parts. The first part is devoted to introducing the concept of individual power in language, also the source of this power and its impact on persuading recipients is intensively discussed. The second part examines the linguistic strategies that are the main tools of contemporary research, on the one hand, these strategies appear as criteria for distinguishing and identifying strong and weak styles of language (all Kurdish language researchers rely on them). The study has also proved that these strategies alone cannot succeed criteria, unless the dimensions of environment, element, age and social status of speaker and recipient are taken into account.