Powerful and powerless language 101

What is powerful and powerless language and how powerless language doesn't necessarily make you a powerless speaker.

Power dynamics are everywhere, in almost every interaction. The ability to influence and control is a fundamental part of human relations.

Language plays a crucial role in how these power relations are established and different people or groups interact with each other. How they use language for the most part determines how power is distributed between speakers.

There are many linguists that dove into this phenomenon, trying to define how language influences power dynamics and vice versa.

Although a lot of research still needs to be done on what part language plays in comparison to other social factors, it is commonly accepted that there is such a thing as powerful language and powerless language.

Understanding this theory will help you spot different speaking styles and allows you to leverage these yourself during conversations to tip the power dynamics of a social interaction in your favour.

Linguistic power play

Zooming in on the relationship between verbal communication and social influence, linguistics described two different speech styles: either power or powerless.

Powerful language is straightforward, fluent and doesn’t use any (or many) powerless markers.?

As opposed to the powerful variant, powerless language is characterised by a lot of these markers, such as:

• Hedges, softening your claim through language by using verbs such as seem, tend, appear to be, adverbs such as sometimes, usually, probably, likely and overall general vague language such as kind of, sort of, feels like.
• Hesitations, um.. I mean.
• Intensifiers, adverbs that strengthen the meaning of other expressions, such as extremely, rather, totally and unusually.?
• Tag questions, basically statements packaged in a question format: It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? You haven’t seen my phone, haven’t you? But also expressions such as? Huh?, You know? and Don’t you think?
• Disclaimers like Well, I haven’t really thought about it.

The speech style you choose can influence your perception in a conversation. Using powerless language can make you come across less credible, less persuasive and less in control.?

Even though you can come across as such, using powerless language doesn’t necessarily make you a powerless speaker.

At I/RISE we believe that being a powerful speaker means understanding your role in the conversation and knowing how to use language, both powerful as well as powerless markers, as a tool to achieve your goals.

Situation-specific speech styles

Not only do we believe that these different speech styles aren’t mutually exclusive and can be mixed by one speaker, there are many linguists that dedicated their research to this topic too.

William O’Barr and Bowman Atkins, who studied powerless language in the institutional context of a court of law, proved that language differences are situation-specific, relying on who has the authority and power in a conversation.

Amanda Wilson, who did research on powerful and powerless speech styles in employment mock interviews, concluded that powerless speech varied across questions and individual interviewees and that every single one of them used some amount of powerless features.

She argued that speakers therefore should not be strictly labelled as using a consistently powerful or powerless speech style.

In other words, using different speech styles doesn’t define you as a speaker.

Strategic superpower?

At I/RISE we dive into behavioural linguistics, the science-based use of language to persuade, and look at how you can apply this knowledge to be successful in business.

Having looked into the relationship between power and language, we can now say: being a powerful speaker does not depend on whether you sometimes apply a powerless speech style.

Instead, being a powerful speaker means understanding your role in the conversation and knowing how you can use language tools, strategically, to achieve your goals.

Using powerless language can sometimes be a great way to establish a sense of trust first before you move on to different techniques.?

We are currently developing our I/RISE methodology and as part of this project we are defining Language Types.

Rather than labelling people as powerful or powerless speakers, we are looking at all their characteristics and how they can use their archetype’s strengths in business.?

We will share more on what this means exactly and how you can contribute.

Stay tuned!