Language & Culture

1. Language & Communication Nepali students talk with Forest Foragers - Raute women

2. Language and Communication • What Is Language • Nonhuman Communication • Nonverbal Communication • The Structure of Language • Language, Thought, and Culture • Sociolinguistics • Historical Linguistics

3. What Is Language? • Primary means of communication (spoken or written) • Transmitted through learning as part of enculturation • Based on symbols - arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent

4. What Is Language? • Allows humans to: • 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

5. Nonhuman Primate 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

6. Nonhuman > Human Communication • Call Systems • Number of calls expanded, eventually becoming too great to be transmitted even partly through genes • Communication came to rely almost totally on learning Traditional singer (Gaine) at center discusses his performance. Photo: J. Fortier

7. Animal Communication & Sign Language • 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

8. Animal Communication • Lucy, another chimpanzee, lived in a foster family and used ASL to converse with foster parents • Washoe and Lucy exhibited several human traits • Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and has used 700 at least once. Dr. Roger Fouts teaching Lucy ASL; Photo: Time Mag.

9. Hominoid: Pongids: Orangutans Chantek, an orangutan, has learned more than 150 ASL words

10. Nonhuman Communication • Koko and the chimps show that apes share linguistic ability with humans • 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

11. 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

12. Non-Verbal Communication: Chimps & Human

13. Language Contrasted with Call Systems p. 68

14. The Origin of Language • Language developed over 150,000y.a.+ from human ancestral call systems Language is effective for learning; enables humans to adapt rapidly to new stimuli Tower of Babel; courtesy Gustave Doré's Illustrated Bible

15. The Structure of Language • Scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization • Phonology – study of speech sounds • Morphology – study of meaningful speech sounds (sound segments combining to form words) • Lexicon – dictionary containing all its morphemes, words, and meanings • Syntax – arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences

16. The Structure of Language • Speech Sounds • Phoneme – sound contrast that makes a difference, that differentiates meaning • Phonetics – study of human speech sounds • IPA - International Phonetic Alphabet • Phonemics – studies only the significant sound contrasts of given language

17. Phonetic Chart of Vowel Positions

18. KhoeKhoegowab Lesson No:1 The Khoekhoe language at ww.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz44WiTVJww

19. International Phonetic Alphabet • The Nama people’s Khoekhoe implosive sounds • / - dental • ! - Palatal • # - alveolar • // - lateral Khoisan language speakers

20. Language, Thought, and Culture • Noam Chomsky argues human brain contains limited set of rules for organizing language, so all languages have common structural basis

21. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis – • Grammatical categories of different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways Irvin Poleahla (Hopi) films at Mesa Verde National Park, Colo.

22. Hopi Verb Tenses • Hopi has 2 main verb tenses • Realis - present & past; things that are real • Irrealis - future & conditional - things not accomplished

23. Language, Thought, and Culture • Focal Vocabulary • 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.

24. Language, Thought, and Culture • Semantics = Meaning 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. Rice (Eng.) : Arroz (Span.) : chamal, bhat (‘uncooked rice’ ‘cooked rice’ Nep.; also aluwa 'freshly husked rice')

25. 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 Scene from film “Himalaya”

26. Diversity & Sociolinguistics • StyleShifts – 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 • Politicians speak w/ Southern drawl in the South/Northern accent in the North

27. Gender Speech Contrasts Men and women have differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, as well as in the body stances and movements that accompany speech *swear words *tag questions *tonal shifts *In non-English langs, sometimes diff vocab & grammar

28. Gender & Language • Deborah Tannen found women esp. use language and body movements to build rapport, social connections with others; men deliver more reported speech Photo; Www.canuuwomenhistory.ca

29. 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

30. Stratification • 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

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

32. Pronunciation of ‘r’ in NYC Stores Researcher Q: “Excuse me, where are the women's shoes?” from ‪The social stratification of English in New York City‬ By William Labov

33. When Languages Collide • Pidgin - speaking the dominant colonizer’s language • Creole - regular grammatical rules that combine 2 languages Tok Pigin spoken in New Guinea

34. 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

35. 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

36. 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

37. Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.) • 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 . . . ”

38. 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

39. Historical Linguistics • Long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages • Historical linguists reconstruct many features of past languages by studying contemporary daughter languages • Written forms vs. reconstruction based on oral languages

40. Historical Linguistics • Daughter 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 descend Subgroups – languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related

41. Canterbury Tales Woodcut 1484A.D.

42. Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales • A 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.

43. PIE Family Tree The 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

44. Indo-Eur. Numerals in IPA* IPA=International phonetic alphabet

45. Ethnologue • www.ethnologue.com