Language & Communication

Nepali students talk with Forest Foragers - Raute women

Language and Communication

What Is LanguageNonhuman CommunicationNonverbal CommunicationThe Structure of LanguageLanguage, Thought, and CultureSociolinguisticsHistorical Linguistics

What Is Language?

Transmitted through learning as part of enculturation

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

• Primary means of communication (spoken or written)

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:

Nonhuman 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

Nonhuman > Human Communication

Communication came to rely almost totally on learning

• Call Systems– Number of calls expanded, eventually

becoming too great to be transmitted even partly through genes

Animal Communication

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

• Sign Language

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

Animal Communication

Washoe and Lucy exhibited several human traits

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

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

Hominoid: Pongids: Orangutans

Chantek, an orangutan, has learned more than 150 ASL words

Nonhuman Communication

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 that apes share linguistic ability with humans

Nonhuman Communication

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

Hominoid: Chimps & Human

Language Contrasted with Call Systems

p. 112

The Origin of Language

Language developed over hundreds of thousands of years from human ancestors’ call systems

Language is effective for learning; enables humans to adapt rapidly to new stimuli

Tower of Babel; courtesy Gustave Doré's Illustrated Bible

The 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

The Structure of Language

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

Phonetics – study of human speech soundsIPA - International Phonetic Alphabet

Phonemics – studies only the significant sound contrasts of given language

• Speech Sounds

Phonetic Chart of Vowel Positions

KhoeKhoegowab Lesson No:1

The Khoekhoe language

International Phonetic Alphabet

The Nama people’s Khoekhoe implosive sounds

/ - dental ! - alveolar # - palatal // - lateral

Language, Thought, and Culture

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 all languages have common structural basis

Hopi Verb Tenses

Realis - present & past; things that are real

Irrealis - future & conditional - things not accomplished

Language, Thought, and Culture

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 Types of olives, terms used in a sport, etc.

• Focal Vocabulary

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

e.g. Hockey

Language, Thought, and Culture

Meaning

Sociolinguistics

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

Linguistic Diversity

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

Politicians speak w/ Southern drawl in the South/Northern accent in the North

• Style Shifts – varying speech in different contexts

Gender Speech Contrasts

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

Men and women have differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, as well as in the body stances and movements that accompany speech

Gender Speech Contrasts

Men tend to make reports, reciting information that serves to establish a place for themselves in a hierarchyWomen use less powerful words - gosh/god, darn/damn, shoot/shit...

Gender & Language

Deborah Tannen found women esp. use language and body movements to build rapport, social connections with others

Photo; Www.canuuwomenhistory.ca

Language and Status Position

Honorifics – terms used with people to “honor” them

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

British have a more developed set of honorifics

Japanese language has several honorifics

Kin terms can be associated with gradations in rank and familiarity

Stratification

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

• Use and evaluate speech in context of extralinguistic forces – social, political, and economic

Sociolinguistics

Linguistic forms take on the power of the groups they symbolize

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

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

Pronunciation of ‘r’ in NYC Stores

p. 122 William Labov, “What Floor is This?”

When Languages Collide

Pidgen - speaking the dominant colonizer’s language

Creole - regular grammatical rules that combine 2 languages

French Creoles

Louisiana Creole is a combination of French,West African,and the Spanish language

Creoles combine grammar of subordinate language with words of dominant language

Herb Metoyer.www.herbmetoyer.com

English Creoles: Gullah, Sea Island Creole from South Carolina Island Region

Gullah is a creole form of English, indigenous to the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia

Annie Scott weaves a sweetgrass basket Saturday afternoon at the Gullah Flea Market on Hilton Head Island.Photo: J. Dyer

When languages collide...

Codeswitching - speaking with regularized rules using 2 languages

Dialect - a noticeably different way of speaking a language; mutually intelligible with the standard dialect

Linguists view B.E.V. as a dialect of English rather than a separate language

Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.)

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 . . . ”

Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.)

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

th --> d- Omit possessives “That’s the child’s doll --> “Dat

da child’ doll” Use more contractions: Doesn’t --> Don’t “It

doesn’t matter --> It don’t matter” Standard English not superior in terms of

ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige dialect

Historical Linguistics

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

Written forms vs. reconstruction based on oral languages

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

Historical LinguisticsDaughter Languages – languages that

descend from same parent language and that have been changing separately for hundreds or even thousands of years

Protolanguage – original language from which daughter languages descendSubgroups – languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related

Canterbury Tales Woodcut 1484A.D.

Chaucer - The Canterbury TalesA Frere ther was, a wantowne and a

merye, A lymytour, a ful solempne man. In alle the ordres foure is noon that kan so muche of dalianune and fair language.

•A Friar there was, wanton and merry, A limiter [limited to certain districts], a full solemn [very important] man. In all the order four there in none that knows so much of dalliance [flirting] and fair [engaging] language.

PIE Family TreeThe Indo-European languages. Traceable to a protolanguage, Proto-Indo-European (PIE),

*PIE spoken more than 6,000 years ago.

*PIE split into separate languages

*Identify relations using cognates

Indo-Eur. Numerals in IPA*

English French Spanish Nepali

1 wøn ~ø uno Éïk

2 tu d~ø dos dwi

3 ƒri t¿wa tres ti≥

4 for kat¿ra kwat^o

char

IPA=International phonetic alphabet

Ethnologue

www.ethnologue.com