The Fridays’ Slogans of the Syrian Revolution: An Analysis of Language Functions

Abstract

Slogans are deeply rooted in people’s social lives, in general, and are central to revolutionary movements in particular. Therefore, studying slogans used in each revolution could provide significant insights into the nature of the society in which the revolution occurs and could help linguists better understand the structure and function of a language. This study aims to investigate the Friday slogans raised in the first two years (March 2011–March 2013) of the Syrian Revolution (SR). This period was selected because the two years of the SR were the most intense. During this period, 105 Friday slogans were raised by the Syrian revolutionaries, which were mainly retrieved from www.alarabia.net. Although these slogans can be studied based on their phonological, semantic, or syntactic features, this study is limited to analyzing the linguistic functions. As such, this study is based on the theoretical functional approach developed by Halliday. The findings showed that the slogans raised performed nine language functions: praise, public demands, resentment, national unity, religious supplications, determination, political content, principles, and encouragement. The findings showed that the language function of expressing praise ranked first, while the function of expressing encouragement occupied the ninth rank. While analysing these functions, the study provided plausible explanations to shed some light on the implications of the functions expressed by these slogans. Finally, as the study was limited to analyzing the linguistic functions of the raised slogans, it is recommended that other studies tackle other linguistic features (e.g., phonological, semantic, and syntactic) of these slogans.