Dear Vishnu Patil,

Based on the systemic view of language theory, the fundamentalist views are slices of world realities adopted by those who constitute a particular speech community with normative values which are different from other extant speech communities within the same national boundary. The instances they choose to address others consist of features which classify them as fundamentalists. To identify a fundamentalist, therefore, one needs to analyze the clausal structures comprising their speech using a functionalist prespectivization such as the one suggested by Halliday (2003). His book titled On Language and Linguistics can be really helpful. Wish you lots of luck with your research.

Best regards,

R. Biria

It does not.

If I have understood correctly, it sounds like your question is about how language shapes a person's worldview. This is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also called "linguistic determinism". It has been pretty thoroughly debunked; see John McWhorter's book The Language Hoax for an introduction to this issue.

Hello Vishnu,

Can you tell me how fundamentalist is defined?

Zach

Dear Vishnu Patil,

Based on the systemic view of language theory, the fundamentalist views are slices of world realities adopted by those who constitute a particular speech community with normative values which are different from other extant speech communities within the same national boundary. The instances they choose to address others consist of features which classify them as fundamentalists. To identify a fundamentalist, therefore, one needs to analyze the clausal structures comprising their speech using a functionalist prespectivization such as the one suggested by Halliday (2003). His book titled On Language and Linguistics can be really helpful. Wish you lots of luck with your research.

Best regards,

R. Biria

Stephen -- Linguistic determinism may have been "debunked" to the extent that its claims that language DETERMINES thought are no longer regarded as true. Nevertheless, there is good evidence that language influences thought patterns.

For example, in English, there are many metaphors describing polar opposites, but few expressing the grey area in between.

Seeing the world in black and white, right vs. wrong, good vs bad terms is a characteristic of a conservative mindset, the extreme version of which can be seen as fundamentalism.  Since the English language either promotes or reinforces this mindset, I think it is fair to say that the language is influencing the worldview.

This is why less educated people tend to be more conservative.  They have not been required to come to grips with the complexity resulting from advanced study of a subject.

This is precisely the kind of claim that is untenable. First of all, "in English there are many metaphors describing polar opposites, but few expressing the grey area in between" is an empirical claim and I am not sure if it is accurate---in that very sentence you used a metaphor for the 'grey area in between' ("grey area" itself is a metaphor). I wouldn't buy that claim without seeing some corpus data to support it. And even if it were true, the claim that this aspect of English is somehow correlated with something about the thought patterns of English speakers is quite unlikely. First of all keep in mind that there are many different English-speaking "cultures" and I doubt that they all have a similar worldview. Secondly you can very likely find other languages that have the same metaphor pattern as English (if the pattern you claimed even does exist) but with different thought patterns in the associated culture, and you can very likely find languages that do not have this linguistic pattern but that have similar thought patterns in the associated culture. Finally, even if such a correlation does exist (which is extremely unlikely; again I recommend John McWhorter's book, it contains many examples of how claims very similar to this one are easily disproven), that does not mean that language has influenced thought rather than the other way around (you could just as easily say that in a culture where people are more likely to see things in terms of absolutes, they have developed more metaphors that reflect that).

tl;dr: anyone who's interested in this topic, read the McWhorter book.

Hello everyone. Thanks for your contributions.

Hello Zach

I define fundamentalism as a strict belief in anything; I consider it a process that has fortification of extremist and rigid ideas.

मनुष्य की मूल प्रवृत्ति, स्वभाव भाषा को नरम भी बनाता है और गरम भी। जैसे कोई आदमी प्यार से कडवी गाली दें तो वह गाली गाली नहीं लगती परंतु उसी जगह पर कोई आदमी गुस्से से सहज बात भी कहे तो वह गाली न होकर भी गाली लगती है। अर्थात् कहनेवाला आदमी कौनसे घटना, प्रसंग और उद्देश्यों के साथ भाषा में विचारों को भर (लोड करना) रहा है उस पर निर्भर है कि वह भाषा कैसी असरदार बनती है। कट्टरपंथियों की भाषा का असर भाषण देनेवाली व्यक्ति पर जितना निर्भर है उतना ही सुननेवाले श्रोताओं पर भी निर्भर करता है। समझ लिजिए कि आपको कोई संमोहित करने की कोशिश कर रहा है और आप अपने मत, विचार और भावनाओं को नियंत्रित करने में सक्षम है तो आपको संमोहित करना किसी के लिए भी संभव नहीं है परंतु आपको कोई मत नहीं, विचार नहीं और भावनाओं पर नियंत्रण नहीं तो ऐसे लोगों का संमोहित होना सौ फिसदी तय है। कट्टरपथियों की भाषा भी ऐसे ही लोगों पर असर करती है। इन लोगों के संपर्क में आनेवाले कमजोर लोग इन्हें देवता मानने लगते हैं और इनके आदेशों का हुबहू पालन करने लगते हैं। धार्मिक कट्टरवाद इस मायने में बहुत घातक होता है और यह इंसानी जिंदगी को तथा दुनिया को धोका पैदा करता है।

I am not clear whether your question addresses the possbility that language itself, ie a given core language, supports fundamentalism, or whether fundamentalism can be detected in given usages or patterns within a language. As for the former, I think others have addressed. The latter is interesting because it is amenable to empirical analysis. For instance I know there is a pattern to political popular posts that makes the ideology easy to detect without reading very much of the content. Certainly there are the trigger words and phrases. There are also orthographic conventions and logic. So ideas are encapsulated in key phrases, not examined but used as if the person understood the implications of what they are saying. The same is true of religious comments, where scripture is cited and certain key terms that the average person doesn't use, are employed. The question of knowing the rigidity of the beliefs from the language is likely amenable either to a semantic or a quantitative analysis: what words, what stock phrases, and how many times those are deployed.

I am not sure I fully understand the question. But Michael Marek's reference to English and fundamentalism seems nonsense, frankly. I don't know what a fundamentalist is, but I am sure that for every one such person who speaks English I could find a hundred or a thousand English-speakers who could not be defined as such.   Anyone out there who knows Arabic or Hebrew perhaps could adduce evidence about fundamentalism if there is something in those languages that is relevant to the issue.