Chapter 12 Outline

Introduction

• Linguist Deborah Tannen describes how gender affects our usage and undersrtanding of gender. Within any given cultural context, there are behavioral norms associated with different genders, and this affects how we use language.
• The miscommunication between Brad and Kaitlin described at the opening of Chapter 4 illustrates that men and women can speak the same language, and even the same words, but the interpretation and meaning of these words vary greatly based on cultural expectations.
• If Kaitlin is direct, her use of language is devalued as harsh, aggressive, or unladylike. Brad’s identical directness is valued as strength, independence, and maturity.
• If Brad told his friend he would have to check with Kaitlin, it would make him feel weak, like a small boy. Yet, if Kaitlin told a friend that she would have to check with Brad, it would make her feel their relationship was solid.
• This chapter focuses on the question, How do the ways people talk reflect and create their cultural similarities, differences, and social positions? To address this focal question, the chapter is organized around the following problems:
• Where does language come from?
• How does language actually work?
• Does language shape how we experience the world?
• If language is always changing, why does it seem so stable?
• How does language relate to social power and inequality?
• Language is one of the most rule-bound, yet least conscious, aspects of culture. It is also dynamic and closely related to social hierarchies.

Where Does Language Come From?

• Language is a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and grammar. This definition emphasizes three features:
• Language consists of sounds organized into words according to some sort of grammar.
• Language is used to communicate.
• Language is systematic.
• We can address this question in two ways: (1) the evolutionary origins of language (our biological capacity for language as a whole) and (2) the historical development of specific languages (how languages are related to one another and have changed through time).
• Is language uniquely human? There are certainly nonhuman animals that appear to speak. For example, an African gray parrot named Alex could use basic symbolic concepts of shape, color, and number.
• One impediment to animal language is the non-human animals’ lack of a larynx..
• Nonhuman animals communicate using sounds, gestures, and movements. These types of communication are classified as animal communication systems, or call systems: patterned forms of communication that express meaning.
• Is this differentiation just human conceit? After all, we’re the ones defining terms. Here are four key characteristics that distinguish language from call systems:
• Call systems most often communicate emotions or occur in response to immediate stimuli. In comparison, language is effectively limitless in terms of the content that may be expressed.
• Call systems are stimuli-dependent, referring to nearby objects or present circumstances. In contrast, people can talk about the past, future, and entire worlds of the imagination.
• Animal calls are distinct and not combined or modified to produce calls with a different meaning. Language sounds can be combined in limitless ways to produce meaningful new utterances.
• Animal call systems are generally shared across an entire species, regardless of geographic distance. In contrast, contemporary humans speak between 5,000 and 6,000 different languages, each with its own complex patterns.
• The human brain and larynx combine to form the biological basis of our extraordinary linguistic ability.
• Despite high intelligence and cognitive capacity, great apes in the wild do not use language. Ape vocal tracts limit spoken language, so for decades researchers have probed the limits of ape communication by teaching them signed languages.
• For example, a chimpanzee named Washo and a gorilla named Koko have demonstrated the ability to produce hundreds of signs and even combine them into simple sentences.
• The evolutionary origins of language go back perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, to before the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
• Historical linguists focus on more recent history, tracing the languages spoken today back to their shared roots.
• Historical linguistics began in the eighteenth century as philology: the comparative study of ancient texts and documents.
• It was clear to early philologists like Jakob Grimm that European languages had patterned similarities and differences. Grimm hypothesized that these patterns were a result of shared ancestry. In other words, many modern languages evolved from a few (or even one) language, what linguists now call a proto-language: a hypothetical common ancestral language of two or more living languages.
• Today, historical linguists study the “genetics” of language change. Obviously, languages don’t literally have DNA, but this is an apt metaphor because all modern languages are derived from earlier languages that linguistic anthropologists call “ancestral” languages.
• Historical linguists search for clues in cognate words: words in two languages that show the same systematic sound shifts as other words in the two languages, usually interpreted by linguists as evidence for a common linguistic ancestry.
• As speakers become geographically, politically, or culturally separated, pronunciations diverge until linguistic communities are speaking mutually unintelligible languages.
• For example, English, German, and Dutch are descended from a proto-Germanic language. Today, being fluent in one of these “daughter” languages does not provide much help in learning the others (see Table 4.1).
• Languages also change in nongenetic ways (not based on descent). Nongenetic changes most often occur where people routinely speak multiple languages. When people are multilingual, their use of each language subtly influences the other languages’ sounds, words, syntax, and grammar.
• For example, the pronunciation of “r” (trilled or flapped) in southern Europe varies depending on location. Pronunciations move across language boundaries from community to community like a wave (see Figure 4.3).

How Does Language Actually Work?

• All languages that have been studied are complex and highly structured, even those languages that are unwritten or spoken by very few people. In other words, there are no “primitive” languages.
• Most people have little understanding of the formal structure of their language, but they do have a remarkably intuitive sense of pronunciation, syntactical, and grammatical rules. Mistakes are easily noticed by any native speaker.
• Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished langue (language) from parole (speech). Langue is the technically correct manner in which people should speak. Parole is language in its living, breathing sociocultural context—that is, language as it is actually used by people.
• We now call the study of the formal structure of language descriptive linguistics and the study of the social context of language use sociolinguistics.
• Descriptive linguistics is the systematic analysis of a language’s sound system and grammar. Linguists divide language structure into three aspects or levels:
• Phonology: the structure of speech sounds
• Morphology: how words are formed into meaningful units
• Syntax: how words are strung together to form sentences and more complex utterances, such as paragraphs
• All languages have predictable phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures.
• An intricate combination of moving parts is necessary for us to produce the sounds of language; glottis, tongue, teeth, lips, and many other parts moving in concert are required to utter the simplest words and sentences.
• Linguists studying the phonology of a language catalog its meaningful sounds by identifying minimal pairs: pairs of words that differ only in a single sound contrast.
• Since there is a difference in meaning between the words “pat” and “bat,” we can label [p] and [b] as distinct sounds within the English language.
• [p] and [b] are called stops because there must be some stoppage of air flow for us to produce these sounds. (More specifically, [p] and [b] are classified as bilabial sounds because they are produced by stopping air with both lips. In contrast, “vowel” sounds can be held continuously with no stop).
• Linguists use similar characteristics of sounds to classify every sound in a given language. Many sounds employed by other languages do not occur in English. For example, one of the “clicks” is symbolized by “!” in some South African languages.
• Dialects are mutually intelligible regional or social varieties of a single language. For example, British English and American English have systematic differences in pronunciation, words, and grammar; but these dialects can be easily understood by any English speaker.
• Prior to the 1970s linguists assumed that American English would become increasingly homogeneous, owing to the spread of mass media and its standardized, “unaccented” English. Instead, regional dialects and sound changes between generations within communities are greater than ever. This suggests that, despite media homogenization, peer groups play a much stronger role in the transmission of linguistic forms.
• Grammatical elements like tense, word ordering within sentences, and gender markings are structured according to patterned rules. The patterns learned in one cultural context can feel quite natural and “normal” to a native speaker but unusual or illogical to speakers of other languages. For example,
• In contrast to the past, present, and future tenses of English, the Ningerum language of Papua New Guinea features five tenses and Indonesian has no regular tense markings.
• In English, the pronoun you may refer to one person or many people. French features the informal tu and formal vous. The Awin language of Papua New Guinea includes equivalents of you (one person), you (two people), and you (more than two people).
• Sociolinguists study how context and cultural norms shape language use among a linguistic community.
• Sociolinguists focus on the use of signs, symbols, and metaphors in daily life.
• Signs are the most basic way of conveying simple meaning. Stop signs in the United States capitalize on the fact that Americans identify red as a “dramatic,” attention-getting color.
• Symbols are elaborations on signs, with a wider range of meanings. College sports mascots and team colors may become symbols of the school—or region—as a whole. Anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1971) distinguished between:
• Summarizing symbols such as the American flag; democracy, free enterprise, hard work, competition, progress, and freedom.
• Elaborating symbols like the cow among the Nuer and Dinka peoples of southern Sudan; food, wealth, symbol of society and its parts.
• Key scenarios imply how people should act. An American key scenario is the Horatio Alger myth; the idea that anyone can go “from rags to riches” with hard work and perseverance.
• Metaphors are comparisons that emphasize the similarities between things. Often, this involves using a physical action in a more abstract sense, for example, “She rose to the challenge and lifted the spirits of those around her.”
• Language makes use of signs, symbols, and metaphors to continually reinforce cultural values in the community.

Does Language Shape How We Experience the World?

• According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the language we speak does affect our perception of the world.
• In the 1920s, linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir (1929) argued that a language inclines its speakers to think about the world in certain ways because of its specific grammatical categories.
• See “Classic Contributions: Edward Sapir on How Language Shapes Culture”
• Sapir’s work was an early expression of linguistic relativity: the idea that people speaking different languages perceive or interpret the world differently because of differences in their languages.
• Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) later expanded on Sapir’s work. Whorf’s research of the Hopi language led him to argue that people who speak different languages perceive and experience the world differently.
• This is a stronger position than Sapir’s idea that language promotes a tendency to see the world differently.
• Regardless of their subtly different positions, by the 1950s scholars had begun referring to the combined research of Sapir and Whorf as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.”
• Whorf concluded that the Hopi language lacked past, present, and future tenses as used in English. In contrast, Hopi employs mutually exclusive “assertion categories”: statements of fact, statements of expectation (past or present), and statements of general truth.
• Whorf suggested that translating Hopi into English fundamentally altered its meaning. In other words, it was not effectively translatable.
• There is still disagreement over Whorf’s interpretation of Hopi, with some scholars (Malotki, 1983) arguing that it does, in fact, include tenses comparable to those in English.
• In the 1960s, anthropologists continued to explore language and perception with ethnoscience: the study of how a people classify things in the world, usually by considering some range or set of meanings.
• Early ethnoscientific studies proceeded from the assumption that differences in classification were simply different ways of mapping categories onto empirical reality.
• For example, Berlin and Kay (1969) analyzed the color terms of more than 100 languages and found that basic color terms are consistent across languages. Some anthropologists suspect that these may be universal patterns related to the way our optic nerve responds to light of different wavelengths (Figure 4.9).
• Speakers of vastly different languages did not appear to perceive colors differently; they just classified them differently. Findings like this do not necessarily disprove the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity more generally, but they do argue against linguistic determinism.
• Today most anthropologists accept a weak (nondeterministic) version of the linguistic relativity argument: the language habits of a community create tendencies to think about the world in certain ways and not others.

If Language Is Always Changing, Why Does It Seem So Stable?

• Like culture as a whole, language constantly changes, yet most people experience their own language as stable and unchanging.
• Increased global communication, migration, and commerce over the past few centuries have spurred language change. Societies blended by colonialism developed dynamic new languages, such as creoles and pidgins.
• In the Americas, local colonized societies developed hybrid languages called creole languages: a language of mixed origin that has developed from a complex blending of two parent languages and that exists as a mother tongue for some part of the population.
• For example, the Haitian language combines several African languages with Spanish, Taíno (a native Caribbean language), French, and English.
• In Asia and the Pacific Islands, similar hybrid forms are usually called pidgin languages: a mixed language with a simplified grammar, typically borrowing its vocabulary from one language and its grammar from another. Pidgins have historically been developed for the purpose of business and trade.
• For example, in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, pidgins that combine local languages and English have become national languages along with the colonial languages of French and English.
• How languages will change (and they are always changing) is ultimately decided democratically by speakers—each linguistic choice is a “vote.” Nevertheless, there are many historical examples of national language policies which attempt to prescribe language use from the top down.
• Twice during the twentieth century, Dutch monarchs altered the official spelling of words to match contemporary pronunciations, formally recognizing choices made by speakers of the language.
• French Canadians in the province of Quebec have been successful at preserving Quebecois (local dialect of French) against Canadian anglicization (the creeping influence of English). Government business in the province of Quebec is conducted in French, and public signs must be written in French.
• The connection between cultural stability and language use is critical for many indigenous peoples. Indigenous groups around the world are facing language death: when a language no longer has any native speakers.
• It’s possible that as many as half of the world’s languages face extinction within the next century as thousands of small languages are gradually replaced by fewer, bigger ones.
• In light of linguistic relativity, language is a primary way that people experience the richness of their culture, and loss of language represents the loss of a culture’s fullness.
• See “Doing Fieldwork: Helping Communities Preserve Endangered Languages”

How Does Language Relate to Social Power and Inequality?

• Language ideology refers to the beliefs people have about the superiority of one language or dialect and the inferiority of others. It links language with identity, morality, and aesthetics, shaping our image of who we are as individuals and members of social groups and institutions.
• Language ideologies are viewed as truths. These truths are reflected in social relationships as a group’s assumption of the superiority of its language justifies its power over others.
• There is no universally correct way to speak English or any other language. From an anthropological perspective of language ideology, there are only more and less privileged versions of language use.
• A classic study in sociolinguistics (Lakoff, 1975) explored how gendered expectations of how women speak English in our culture can reflect and reinforce the idea that women are inferior to men.
• According to Lakoff’s research, female speech patterns were expected to express hesitation, repetition, and uncertainty more than male speech. Unfortunately, the appearance of uncertainty can be detrimental in many professional settings.
• Language ideologies are closely tied to the creation and maintenance of social status.
• On the Indonesian island of Java, individuals are extremely conscious of status. Position within the social hierarchy is expressed in nearly every sentence.
• Words are spoken in three different registers: informal speech, intermediary register, and polite speech (see Table 4.2).
• Javanese words used by each speaker and listener will be different and mark their relative social positions in society.
• Nineteenth-century European colonial powers often introduced their own language as the official language in places like sub-Saharan Africa. They viewed indigenous languages as socially inferior and sought to replace them with European languages, languages that persist in these former colonies decades after their independence.
• See “Doing Fieldwork: Untangling Language Ideologies in Contemporary Egypt”

Conclusion

• The capacity for language is one of humanity’s defining features.
• Languages are universally structures and ruled bound and change in fairly uniform ways.
• Language always has social consequences because how one speaks, the words one uses (or doesn’t use), and the ways we express ideas identify our social position, our class, our background, and even our gender.
• Language has the power to shape not just the meanings of the words we use but also our comprehension of the world around us, just as it shapes our experiences as social beings within that world.