McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 1 15 Language and Communication Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity 11 th Edition Conrad

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

115

Language and Communication

Anthropology:The Exploration of Human Diversity

11th Edition

Conrad Phillip Kottak


2 Language and CommunicationLanguage and Communication

• What Is Language

• Animal Communication

• Nonverbal Communication

• The Structure of Language

• Language Thought and Culture

• Sociolinguistics

• Historical Linguistics


3 What Is Language?What Is Language?

• Transmitted through learning as part of enculturation

• Based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent

• Primary means of communication (spoken or written)


4 What Is Language?What Is Language?

– Conjure up elaborate images– Discuss the past and future– Share experiences with others– Benefit from their experiences

Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context

• Allows humans to:


5 Animal CommunicationAnimal Communication

– Automatic and cannot be combined– At some point in human development,

ancestors began to combine calls and to understand the combinations

• Call Systems—limited number of sounds that are produced in response to specific stimuli



– Communication came to rely almost totally on learning

– Although primates use call systems, the vocal tract is not suitable for speech

• Call Systems– Number of calls expanded, eventually

becoming too great to be transmitted even partly through genes



– More recent experiments show that apes can learn to use, if not speak, true language

– Washoe, a chimpanzee, eventually acquired vocabulary of over 100 ASL signs

• Sign Language



– Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and has used 700 at least once.

Washoe and Lucy exhibited several human traitsSwearing JokingTelling lies Trying to teach

language to others

– Lucy, another chimpanzee, lived in a foster family and used ASL to converse with foster parents



– Cultural transmission of a communication system through learning is a fundamental attribute of language

– Productivity—combined two or more signs to create new expressions

– Displacement—ability to talk about things that are not present

• Koko and the chimps show apes share linguistic ability with humans



• Experiments with ASL demonstrate that chimps and gorillas have rudimentary capacity for language

There are no known instances where chimps or gorillas in the wild have developed a comparable system of signs on their own



• Language developed over hundreds of thousands of years, as call systems gradually transformed into language

Language uniquely effective vehicle for learning that enables humans to adapt more rapidly to new stimuli than other primates



• Language Contrasted with Call Systems• Insert Table 15.1


13 Nonverbal CommunicationNonverbal Communication

• Kinesics—study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions


14 The Structure of LanguageThe Structure of Language

– Phonology—study of speech sounds– Morphology—forms in which sounds

combine to form morphemes– Lexicon—dictionary containing all its

morphemes and their meanings– Syntax—arrangement and order of words

in phrases and sentences

• Scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization


15 The Structure of LanguageThe Structure of Language

– Phoneme—sound contrast that makes a difference, that differentiates meaning

– Phonetics—study of human speech sounds

– Phonemics—studies only the significant sound contrasts of given language

• Speech Sounds


16Language, Thought, and Language, Thought, and CultureCulture

• The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis—grammatical categories of different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways

• Noam Chomsky argues human brain contains limited set of rules for organizing language, so that all languages have common structural basis


17Language, Thought, and Language, Thought, and CultureCulture

– Specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups

– Vocabulary is area of language that changes most rapidly

– Language, culture, and thought are interrelated

• Focal Vocabulary


18Language, Thought, and Language, Thought, and CultureCulture• Ethnosemantics—study of how

speakers of particular languages use sets of terms to organize, or categorize, their experiences and perceptions

The ways people divide up the world—the contrasts they perceive as meaningful or significant—reflect their experiences


19Language, Thought, and Language, Thought, and CultureCulture• Focal Vocabulary for Hockey

– Insert Table 15.2


20 SociolinguisticsSociolinguistics

• Investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation, or language in its social context

Sociolinguists focus on features that vary systematically with social position and situation



– Style Shifts—varying speech in different contexts

– Diglossia—regular style shifts between “high” and “low” variants of the same language

We rank certain speech patterns as better or worse because we recognize they are used by groups that we also rank

• Linguistic Diversity



– In North America and Great Britain, women’s speech tends to be more similar to standard dialect than men’s speech

• Comparing men and women, there are differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, as well as in the body stances and movements that accompany speech



• Deborah Tannen found that women typically use language and body movements to build rapport, social connections with others

Men tend to make reports, reciting information that serves to establish a place for themselves in a hierarchy



• Language and Status Position– Honorifics—terms used with people, often

by being added to their names, to “honor” them



– British have a more developed set of honorifics

– Japanese language has several honorifics• Some convey more respect than others do

– Kin terms can be associated with gradations in rank and familiarity

– Americans tend to be less formal than other nationalities, although they include honorifics



– We use and evaluate speech in context of extralinguistic forces—social, political, and economic

– Our speech habits help determine our access to employment and other material resources

• Stratification



• Linguistic forms, which lack power in themselves, take on the power of the groups they symbolize

• Bourdieu views linguistic practices as symbolic capital that properly trained people may convert into economic and social capital



• Linguistic insecurity often felt by lower-class and minority speakers is result of symbolic domination



• Multiple Negation (“I don’t want none”) According to Gender and Class (in Percentages– Insert Table 5.3



• Pronunciation of r in New York City Department Stores– Insert Table 5.4



• Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.), a.k.a. “Ebonics”– Most linguists view B.E.V. as a dialect of

English rather than a separate language

William Labov writes B.E.V. is “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the U.S. today . . . ”



– B.E.V. speakers less likely to pronounce r than Standard English (SE) speakers

– B.E.V. speakers use copula deletion to eliminate the verb to be from their speech

• Standard English is not superior in terms of ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige dialect

• B.E.V. a complex system of linguistic rules


33 Historical LinguisticsHistorical Linguistics

• Historical linguists reconstruct many features of past languages by studying contemporary daughter languages

• Long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages



• Daughter Languages—languages that descend from the same parent language and that have been changing separately for hundreds or even thousands of years



• Subgroups—languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related

• Protolanguage—original language from which daughter languages descend



• PIE Family Tree– Insert Figure 15.2

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McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 1 15 Language and Communication Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity 11 th Edition Conrad