Bankspeak: the language of World Bank reports

This article investigates what quantitative linguistic analysis can tell us about the operations and outlook of the international financial institutions. From Bretton Woods to the present, the language of World Bank Reports has undergone telling modulations. Read alongside each other, the Reports de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:New Left review 2015-03, Vol.92 (92), p.75-99
Main Authors: Moretti, Franco, Pestre, Dominique
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Annual reports
Financial institutions
International banking
Linguistics
Quantitative analysis
World Bank
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This article investigates what quantitative linguistic analysis can tell us about the operations and outlook of the international financial institutions. From Bretton Woods to the present, the language of World Bank Reports has undergone telling modulations. Read alongside each other, the Reports describing the world in 1958 and 2008 seem to be written in different languages, in terms of both semantics and grammar. A key discontinuity occurs at the turn of the 1990s when the style of the Reports becomes much more codified, self-referential and detached from everyday language. The authors track in this Bankspeak the decline of concrete referents and active verbs, the triumph of acronyms over nation-states - and the irresistible rise of "governance". (Quotes from original text)
ISSN:0028-6060