Start Date: 8/12/2026 4:00 PM EDT
End Date: 8/12/2026 5:00 PM EDT
Organization Name:
Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
Contact:
Weaponizing Language: Legislative, Judicial, and Linguistic Trickery
Wednesday, August 12, 2026, 4:00-5:00 PM ET
Speaker: Ila Nagar, Professor and Acting Chair, Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University
This webinar will examine how language becomes a site for creating legislative action against minorities within majoritarian nationalism. With the help of four case studies from South Asia, I will trace ways in which state institutions, legal frameworks, and public discourse mobilize language as an instrument for defining citizenship, belonging, and national identity. Through an analysis of legislative debates, policy documents, judicial decisions, and media rhetoric, I will argue that specific types of language use – what I collectively call linguistic trickery, that is, using language in ways that complicate or add to the meanings of an utterance – can lead to substantive legislative actions and judicial outcomes in the lives of people whom those in power, the language users, are intending to sideline. I will provide a discursive history of matters that have been a source of conflict between social groups in South Asia and highlight the potent relationship between language and politics showing that language is used as a weapon against citizens. The four case studies I discuss have histories in courts and legislative bodies and these histories are written in linguistic trickery. Offering novel ways of understanding why and how the “winners” claimed victories on these legislative and judicial matters that impact the lives of minority citizens, I hope to provide key insights for researchers and students in sociolinguistics, as well as South Asia studies, gender studies and South Asian politics and culture. I hope to invite broad reflection on the relationship between language and democracy and on how state power operates through seemingly ordinary linguistic practices.
