Role of Language in History

Language plays a vital role in history as what is being communicated is driven by the purpose of manipulating inaccurate historical information for a countries or individual's own prosperous gain. This establishes one sided perspectives of valuable notions like religion that could lead to cultural divisions. As evident in the article written by David M Perry in February 2015 titled 'Conservatives want to rewrite the history of the Crusades for modern political ends', Barack Obama expresses how America as a nation needs humility and must recognise their "fallibility" by studying the past in order to understand why "things, happen and the we must try to do better- and not just the one written by the "victors". To justify, Obama believes that "violence in the name of religion is a global problem and is bad". Although this ideology may not seem controversial, such directive statement surely did spark controversy between conservative Christian believers that perceive it as an "attack on Christianity" as they argue that the Crusaders were in fact justifiable actions against Muslim unlike Obama whom perceives it as a "mistake to believe in Christian exceptionalism". Undoubtedly, the role of language in history portrays how they come to play to reinforce ignorant and bias perspectives in order embrace hegemonic power.

The way that language of certain historical events are presented in history text books predominately influences the way that the reader understands those events. For example, the history of Crusades and the deadly killing of non-Christian civilian population would probably be taught differently in Crusade than other countries. This is because the manipulation of language causes historical events either to be incomplete or even biased. Furthermore, this would lead to controversy/lack of accuracy in historical factual information. There is not doubt that language hinders the interpretation of historical events that actually occurred by denying historical information through the use of an assertive tone that creates an influential mood. Not to forget that language is the key to conserving the destructive effects of certain historical events. Although

I've reflecting on the contextual significance of a languages role in history and concluded my thoughts with the following knowledge questions:

1- To what extent can we trust historical knowledge based on emotional bias?

2- To what extent does the manipulation of historical events stimulate phenomalism?

3- To what extent does confirmation bias influence the way we perceive history?

4- To what extent does emotive meaning provoke the need to alter history?

5- How can language develop uncertainty coherence in history?