Introduction to linguistic anthropology and Sociolinguistics

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering linguistic anthropology concepts, semiotics, performance, and sociolinguistic theories found in the lecture transcript.

Accents

Linguistic features that communicate by indexing a person’s assumed social status, identity, place of origin, or stance rather than by the content of what is said.

Indexicality

A sign that points to something else; includes direct relationships between expressions and meaning (first order) or indirect relationships conveying social context (second order).

Language Ideologies

Culturally specific attitudes and ideas about what language is, what it does, how speakers should behave, and its connections to power.

Code-switching

Moving between languages, speech sounds, and other linguistic features to play with identity.

Franz Boaz

The founder of four-field anthropology who argued there is no primitive language and whose work was fundamentally anti-racist.

Salvage Anthropology

The early 20th-century practice of documenting, recording, and collecting the languages and traditions of Indigenous cultures believed to be facing imminent extinction.

Ethnography of Communication

The study of how communication is patterned and used within specific cultural groups, emphasizing that competence is more than being fluent in code.

Multifunctionality

The concept that people use language to accomplish many things beyond labeling items, such as conveying emotions, hiding attitudes, or reinforcing social bonds.

Expressive function

A function of language used mainly to express the speaker's feelings or opinions.

Conative function

A function of language primarily oriented toward the addressee, such as questions, commands, or vocatives like "Hey you".

Referential function

A function of language oriented largely toward a third person, toward the context, or toward events.

Poetic function

Occurrences in everyday speech involving rhyme, alliteration, repetition, parallelism, or other ways of playing with the sound or structure of words.

Phatic Function

Language oriented primarily toward the channel that carries it, such as "Testing, 1, 2, 3" or "How are you?".

Metalinguistic function

Language oriented primarily toward language itself, such as asking "what does fold in the cheese mean?".

Taboo

Culturally and contextually specific restrictions that reveal information about kinship circles, membership to subgroups, and notions about personhood.

Linguistic relativity

The principle that a language's structure influences thought and behavior, requiring speakers to pay attention to certain aspects of the world while ignoring others.

Grammatical categories

Elements such as gendered nouns or active/passive voice that direct speakers to different observations of the world.

Semantic domains

Specific areas of cultural emphasis within a language, such as color categorization.

Diglossia

A situation where two languages or dialects are used within the same speech community.

Communication Accommodation Theory

The theory that people modify their verbal and non-verbal speech styles to either get closer to or further away from the people with whom they are speaking.

Speech Community

A human aggregate characterized by regular interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from others by significant differences in language use.

Metapragmatic descriptors

Terms that not only designate kin relations but also point to the cultural norms governing those social roles.

Dude

In the context of kinship, it mediates between contradictory discourses of heteronormative masculinity and masculine solidarity (cool solidarity).

Darmok

A reference to the Tamarians' language which operates through metaphors and allegories without self-identity pronouns like I and you.

Emergent quality of performance

The idea that norms, rules, and structure are constantly being accomplished and created by social actors during interaction.

Genre

An orienting framework for the production and reception of discourse that is always interdiscursive, such as "Once upon a time".

Frame

Vocal, visual, and physical signals that help an audience interpret the performance and understand "what's going on here?".

Key

Implicit or explicit metacommunicative instructions used to guide an audience's interpretation, such as make-believe or ceremonials.

Language and Nationalism

A political ideology that links national identity directly to a shared language to promote cultural homogeneity and national unity.

Algospeak

A strategy of self-censorship using alternate words or symbols to avoid content suppression by social media algorithms.

Algorithmic Listening Subject

The construction of the algorithm as an entity that is sensitive to and "listens" for specific terms, leading users to censor content.

Midalects

Specialized variants of language shaped by and propagated through media platforms like television, radio, and the internet.

"Language is a dialect with an army and a navy"

A quote attributed to Max Weinreich in 1945 highlighting that the distinction between language and dialect is often political rather than purely linguistic.

Pidgin

Simplified makeshift languages developed for communication between groups with no common language, typically for trade or survival.

Creole

A fully developed, stable language that evolves when a pidgin becomes the native, first language of a community.

Pittsburghese

The stylized version of Pittsburgh speech found on commercial items like t-shirts and bumper stickers, rather than the actual speech used by all residents.

Enregisterment

The meaning-making process where people notice correlations between different ways of speaking and different ways of acting and being over time.

Structural Linguistics

A view of language as a closed system where meaning emerges only from the relations between units and signs are arbitrary.

Peircean Semiosis

A sign system consisting of the Sign (the stand-in), the Object (what is stood for), and the Interpretant (the meaning created).

Heteroglossia

The coexistence of distinct varieties, voices, and viewpoints within a single language or text.

Raciolinguistics

A field where racial and linguistic ideologies are co-constructed and "co-naturalized" into colonial distinctions and hierarchies.

Protactile movement

A touch-based communication philosophy and language developed by and for DeafBlind individuals.

Language shift

The gradual process where a community replaces its native language with another, usually higher-status or dominant language.

Linguistic marketplace

A concept where standard and high registers of speaking are valued and can be converted into economic capital.

Anti-languages

Specialized, often secret forms of language generated by marginalized "anti-societies" to create their own social reality and exclude outsiders.