Study Notes on Linguistic Anthropology

Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

1. Anthropological Linguistics vs. Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is distinct from anthropological linguistics.
Key Point: You don’t need anthropology to conduct linguistics.
Essential Requirement: Linguistics is necessary for studying linguistic anthropology.
- Rationale: Linguistic anthropology requires an understanding of how language functions within cultural contexts; therefore, linguistic tools are indispensable to its study.

2. Language & Fieldwork

Linguistic anthropologists engage in fieldwork with the goal of documenting and analyzing languages.
Example:
- An image referenced (see page 3) depicts Franz Boas traveling to Baffin Island in 1883.
- Boas is a foundational figure in linguistic anthropology, known for emphasizing the learning process from communities directly.

3. North American Origins of Linguistic Anthropology

A map included (see page 4) illustrates the diversity of Indigenous languages in North America.
Key Statistics:
- Approximately 296 languages are identified.
- These languages belong to about 30 language families.
- There are 28 language isolates.
This data highlights the significant complexity and diversity of Indigenous languages prior to colonization.

4. Descriptive Linguistics (Descriptive Grammar)

Core components that linguists analyze include:
- Phonology: The sound system of a language.
- Morphology: The structure and formation of words.
- Syntax: The rules governing sentence and phrase structure.
- Semantics: The study of meaning in language.
These components collectively form a foundational framework for the scientific description of language.

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5. Case Study: The Tunica Language (Mississippi Valley)

The Tunica language serves as a prime example of salvage anthropology, aimed at documenting cultures and languages at risk of extinction.
The Tunica language is classified as a language isolate, meaning it has no known relatives.
Key Scholarly Works by Mary Haas:
- A Grammar of the Tunica Language (1941)
- Tunica Texts (1950)
- Tunica Dictionary (1953)
These works emphasize the importance of documentation in preserving endangered languages.

6. Language & Communication

Definition of Communication: The act of transmitting messages, which may be verbal, non-verbal, or symbolic.
Purposes of Communication:
- To inform
- To persuade
- To entertain
- To deceive
Communication is observed universally across different animal species.
It has significant adaptive evolutionary value, suggesting its role in the survival and social organization of species.

7. Non-Human Primates & Language Studies

Examples of primates trained to use symbols or American Sign Language (ASL):
- Washoe (chimp): Learned 132 ASL signs.
- Loulis (chimp): Learned 50 ASL signs from Washoe.
- Sara (chimp): Communicated with plastic symbols.
- Lana (chimp): Learned 30 words.
- Koko (gorilla): Acquired approximately 1,000 ASL signs.
These studies are essential for exploring the potential for language-like abilities beyond human beings.

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8. Critiques of Ape Language Research

Major Scholars' Critiques:**
- Noam Chomsky: Argues that only humans possess recursion, a core feature of language.
- Steven Pinker: Posits that language is a species-specific phenomenon.
- Herbert Terrace: Claims that Nim Chimpsky was not using ASL in a linguistically valid manner.
- Thomas Sebeok: Cites the “Clever Hans effect,” suggesting that primates may merely respond to external cues rather than using language genuinely.
- David Premack: Asserts that apes lack culture and history, which limits their ability to develop complex symbolic systems.
Conclusion of Critiques: Non-human primates can communicate, but they do not possess the full linguistic capacity characteristic of human language.

Phonology (Language Sounds 1 & 2)

1. What Is Phonology?

●

Phonology = the study of the system of speech sounds in a language.

Key early scholars: Ferdinand de Saussure, Nikolay Trubetskoy.

Two major branches:

○

Phonetics (encoding) → how speech sounds are produced

○

Phonemics (decoding) → how speech sounds are heard and interpreted

2. Language Areas of the Brain

A. Broca’s Area (left frontal lobe)

Speech production

Grammar & syntax

Motor planning for articulation

B. Wernicke’s Area (left temporal lobe)

Language comprehension

Semantic processing

Word recognition

C. Angular Gyrus

Reading & writing

Semantic integration

Abstract language & metaphor

D. Neocortex (page 3 diagram)

Contains four lobes (frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital)

Divided into two hemispheres

Lateralization: left hemisphere = language-dominantE. Cortical Homunculus (page 4 diagram)

●

Shows how different body parts have different amounts of neural control

Mouth, lips, tongue have huge representation → explains fine motor control for speech

3. Phonetics

Types

1. Acoustic phonetics

○

Physical properties of sounds (frequency, amplitude)

○

Spectrograms shown for [g] and [b] on p. 6

2. Articulatory phonetics

○

How sounds are produced using the vocal apparatus

Vocal Apparatus (page 7)

1. Lungs → air supply

2. 3. Larynx → vocal cords (voicing)

Resonators → pharynx, oral cavity, nasal cavity

4. Articulators:

○

Tongue

○

Lips

○

Teeth

○

Alveolar ridge

○

Hard palate

○

Velum (soft palate)

4. Phonemics

Key Terms

●

Phones → actual speech sounds produced

Phonemes → meaningful, contrastive sounds (e.g., /p/ vs. /b/)

Allophones → variations of a phoneme that don’t change meaning

Number of Phonemes by Language (page 8)●

●

English: 36

Japanese: 20

Spanish: 24

Arabic: 34

Russian: 40

!Xu (Ju): 141 (most)

Pirahã: 10–12 (fewest)

This shows how languages vary dramatically in complexity.

5. The International Phonetic Alphabet

(IPA)

Purpose

●

Provides a standardized system to represent actual sounds, not spelling.

Examples (page 9)

●

“cat”

“rouge”

“sushi”

→ /kæt/

→ /ʁuʒ/

→ /sɯɕi/

6. English Phonemes

A. Consonants (page 10)

Consonants classified by:

1. Place of articulation

●

Bilabial (p, b)

Labiodental (f, v)

Dental

Alveolar (t, d, n, s, z)

Palatal●

●

Velar (k, g)

Glottal (ʔ)

2. Manner of articulation

●

Stops

Fricatives

Affricates

Nasals

Laterals

Glides

3. Voicing

●

Voiced (vibration) → /b/, /d/, /g/

Voiceless → /p/, /t/, /k/

B. English Vowels (page 12)

Vowels differ by tongue height, tongue position, and lip rounding.

Examples from chart:

●

i –

ɪ –

e –

æ –

“east, bee”

“it, in”

“eight, aid”

“cat”

ə (schwa) –

u –

“moon”

“alone, the”

ɔ –

“song, ball”

Vowel Chart (page 12 image)

Shows tongue positions:

●

Front vs. Back

High/Close vs. Low/Open

Spanish vs. English Vowels (page 13)

●

Spanish has 5 pure vowels, simpler than English.

Shown circled in green in the chart.7. Allophones

Definition

A context-dependent variant of a phoneme that does not change meaning.

Two Types (page 14)

1. Complementary distribution

○

Predictable environments

○

Example:

■ Aspirated [pʰ] in pin

■ Unaspirated [p] in spin

2. Free variation

○

Either version acceptable

○

Example: final [t] released vs. unreleased

Allophones of /t/ in English (page 15)

1. /tʰ/ → aspirated (top)

2. /t/ → unaspirated (stone)

3. /t ̚ / → unreleased (soot)

4. /ʔ/ → glottal stop (cotton)

5. /ɾ/ → voiced alveolar flap (latter)

Shows how the same phoneme can surface as many different sounds.8. Why Phonology Matters in

Anthropology (page 16)

Used to study:

1. Cultural variation

2. Social structures

3. Identity

4. Language ideologies

5. Historical change

Phonology reveals how social meanings attach to pronunciation (accents, dialects, identity).

Semantics & Pragmatics

1. SEMANTICS

Semantics = the linguistic meaning of utterances (page 2).

Two major branches:

A. Lexical Semantics (page 3)

1. Semantic Properties

●

Each word can be broken down into smaller components of meaning.

These elements help define the word.

2. Referential vs. Grammatical Meaning

●

Referential meaning → the actual object/idea a word refers to

Grammatical meaning → relationships created by grammar (plurality, tense, gender

markers, etc.)

3. Shifting Referents

●

Words whose meaning depends on context (e.g., you, here, now).

4. The “Nyms”

●

Hyponyms — specific types of a broader category (poodle is a hyponym of dog)

Synonyms — similar meaning (big / large)

Homonyms — same form, different meaning (bat / bat)

Antonyms — opposite meaning (hot / cold)B. Distinctive Feature Analysis (page 4)

A method of breaking down meaning using semantic features.

Example chart compares cat, elk, orca, pike using features like:

●

Animal

Mammal

Carnivorous

Terrestrial

Pet

Whiskers

Fur

Meows

This shows how categories differ based on bundles of features.

C. Structural Semantics 1: Denotation & Connotation

(page 5)

1. Denotation

●

Literal, logical, primary meaning

Goal: accuracy

2. Connotation

●

Implied, emotional, associative meaning

Goal: persuasion, influence

D. Structural Semantics 2: Metaphor (page 6)

1. Metaphor = Figurative Language

●

A type of trope (figurative device)

Shapes how people think, not just how they speak.

2. Linking Semantic Domains●

Borrowing terms from one domain to describe another

Examples:

○

Sports → business ("He scored a big deal")

○

Food → sex

3. Metaphor as a Conceptual System

Examples of metaphorical frameworks:

●

Time is money

Argument is war

These concepts shape how we understand abstract ideas.

E. Cultural Metaphors

Western Apache Metaphors for Car Parts (page 7)

Car parts are described using horse anatomy terms, e.g.:

●

Headlights → horse’s eyes

Windshield → horse’s neck skin

Hood → horse’s neck

Fenders → horse’s shoulders

Radiator grill → horse’s teeth

Tail lights → horse’s tail eyes

Root metaphor: The automobile is like a horse.

Trobriand Metaphor —

“Scraping the tapioca” (page 8)

Used metaphorically (you may be asked what context it refers to).

Anthropologists use metaphor analysis to reveal cultural worldview.2. PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics = meaning in context, beyond literal language (page 9).

Three main areas:

A. Social Meaning (page 10)

What an utterance reveals about the speaker’s identity, such as:

●

Region: “Y’all come back now!”

Age/group slang: “The after-party was dope!”

”

Dialect: “I ain’t gonna do nothin’

”

Social meaning encodes:

●

background

group membership

education

style

identity

B. Affective Meaning (page 11)

The emotional tone of language.

Examples:

“She accidentally ran over a squirrel.

”

“She killed a poor animal with her car.

Another example:

●

“I worked overtime today.

”

→ factual

“I worked my ass off today.

”

→ emotional emphasis

Prosody influences affective meaning

Prosody includes:

→ neutral / innocence

”

→ guilt / emotional charge●

●

Rhythm

Intonation (pitch)

Stress (syllable emphasis)

Emphasis (word focus)

C. Speech Acts (page 12)

A speech act = an utterance that does something socially.

Examples:

1. Ordering

2. Promising

3. Warning

4. Daring

5. Threatening

6. Declaring / proclaiming

7. Wagering

8. Greeting

Speech acts rely heavily on context and prosody.

Language Variation

1. DIALECT (page 2)

A dialect is a language variety associated with region, social group, or function.

A. Regional Dialects

Based on geographic differences.

Examples of French varieties:

●

Île-de-France

Provençal

Langue d’Oc

Caribbean French

Acadian

Québécois

B. Social Dialects (Sociolects)

Based on social status or group identity.

Examples:

●

English Received Pronunciation (RP)

Cockney English

C. Registers

Language variation based on function, not social group.

Examples:

●

Formal (courtroom speech)

Informal (tavern / casual conversation)2. SOCIAL DIALECTS OF JAMAICA (page

Jamaican speech varies across a continuum from most “standard” to most “creole-like.

”

A. Acrolect

Closest to Standard English

●

“Good morning, how you do?”

B. Mesolect

Blend of English and Patois

●

“Wa gwaan, yuh good?”

C. Basilect

Deepest Patois, furthest from English

●

“Wa yuh deh pon?” / “Wah di pree?”

3. STANDARD & NON-STANDARD

DIALECTS (page 4)

Standard Dialects

Promote political and economic cohesion through:

●

education

media

government

arts

Examples:

1. RP English (UK)

○

Non-rhotic: /r/ is barely pronounced2. ○

car → ca, park → pahk

Standard American & Canadian English

○

Rhotic: /r/ is pronounced

4. OTHER LANGUAGE VARIETIES (page 5)

A. Pidgin

●

Simplified, arises in multi-lingual contact situations

Used for transactional communication

Example: Tok Pisin, Tok Ples (Papua New Guinea)

B. Creole

●

A pidgin that becomes a full language with native speakers.

Examples:

○

Haitian Creole

○

Maltese

C. Lingua Franca

●

A common language used between groups with different native languages.

Examples:

○

Koine Greek

○

Aramaic

○

Indonesian

5. Pidgins and Creoles Map (page 6)

Page 6 includes a world map identifying:

●

English-based Creoles

French-based Creoles

Portuguese-based Creoles

Dutch-based Creoles●

Pacific pidgins

This visually demonstrates global language contact.

6. SWAHILI AS A LINGUA FRANCA (page

Swahili is:

●

A Bantu language

An important indigenous African lingua franca

Adopted in 2017 as an official language of the East African Community (EAC)

EAC Member States:

●

Burundi

DRC (2019)

Kenya

Rwanda

South Sudan (2016)

Tanzania

Uganda

Swahili facilitates trade, diplomacy, and regional unity.

7. DIGLOSSIA & CODE-SWITCHING

(AUSTRIA)(page 8)

Based on Susan Gal’s 1978 ethnography in Oberwart, Austria.

Diglossia

Two languages used in the same community but in different contexts:

●

German = prestigious / high variety

Hungarian = lower-status / informal varietyCode-Switching Influenced By:

1. Context (formal vs. informal)

2. Age (younger vs. older speakers)

3. Gender

○

Women used German more (associated with modernization)

Men used Hungarian more (associated with tradition)

This shows how language choice indexes social identity.

Language and Cognition

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices.

They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are

all talking at once!

Camille Paglia (1947~ )

[: his study of American aboriginal languages, Franz Boas

discovered features that suggested to him that languages

served people, above all else, as classificatory devices for

coming to grips with their particular environmental and social

realities. For example, he noted that the Eskimo language had

devised various terms for the animal we call simply a seal in

English:

¢ one is the general term for “seal”

¢ another renders the idea of “seal bask-

ing in the sun”

¢ a third refers to a “seal floating on a

piece of ice”

145

The larger specialized vocabulary, as it is called, for referring to this

particular animal is necessitated by the vital role that seals play (or

have historically played) in Eskimo life. In English, we must instead

use descriptive terms (usually adjectives, metaphors, and the like) for

referring to seals: for example, bull seal and elephant seal, which are

analogies to other animals that the seals appear to resemble.

Specialized vocabularies serve classificatory functions across the

world, encoding realities that are perceived to be critical by particu-

lar cultures. In contemporary technological culture, specialized terms

to name new devices (iPod, iPhone, and so on) are being devised on a

regular basis, bearing witness to the importance of digital devices and

technologies in our culture. Not too long ago, we possessed a sophisti-

cated terminology for referring to typewriters. Most of the terms have

disappeared, for the simple reason that we no longer need them, unless

of course we are an antique collector of typewriters. In a phrase, chan-

ges in language mirror changes in society and culture. Language also

shapes how we come to perceive and understand that world, since the

words we use populate the brain and guide its everyday tasks of refer-

ting to the world. This chapter will take a look at some of the ways

in which language and cognition are intertwined—a topic that has

ancient origins, becoming a major target of scientific and philosophical

interest in the writings of Romantic German scholars such as Johann

Herder (1744-1803) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1762-1835). In the

twentieth century, this interplay between language and thought came

to be known as the Whorfian Hypothesis (WH), as discussed briefly in

chapter 1. Essentially, the WH posits that language structures predis-

pose native speakers to attend to certain concepts as being necessary.

They do so because we acquire linguistic categories in childhood as

“organizing templates” of the many perceptions of reality that are pos-

sible. This does not imply, however, that people cannot understand each

other. The paraphrases used above to convey the various meanings of

the terms used by the Eskimo language to refer to seals show that there

are always ways in which the resources of any language can be used for

the purpose of cross-cultural communication. Paradoxically, the WH

suggests that language is both a specific world-making device and a

flexible tool that can be used creatively to understand people from all

over the world.

146 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

CLASSIFICATION

Naming the objects, events, things, plants, flowers, animals, beings,

ideas, and so on that make up human experience allows people to

organize the world conceptually. Words allow us to remember those

parts of the world that are considered meaningful in the society

in which we are reared. Without names the world would not have

parts to it that can be recalled at will through their names; the world

would remain a flux of impressions that our senses and instincts

would process for survival purposes.

Let’s look at some of the ways in which seals and snow are named,

and thus classified, by the Inuit speakers of central Canada:

Seal Meaning Snow Meaning

tiggafniq strong-smelling bull seal natibvik

quaibutlik bearded seal

Even though English does not have distinct lexical items for the

different Inuit concepts it can render them nonetheless through

paraphrases. As this example shows, although classification systems

vary across cultures, people are not blocked from understanding

them. Given where they live, the Inuit people developed a special-

ized vocabulary for seals and snow, both of which play a significant

role in their daily lives. English speakers have not, given that they

originate from areas of the world where these do not play as import-

ant a role as they do in Inuit culture. In an analogous fashion, the

Nuer of Sudan have devised an elaborate specialized vocabulary

for describing cattle, which play significant roles in their culture;

Europeans have devised extensive colour vocabularies, given the

importance of fashion and painting in that culture; and so on and

so forth.

When a word is coined for a specific reason; it automatically clas-

sifies something as part of a category, culling it into mental aware-

ness. Consider the word cat. By naming this type of animal, we have

necessarily differentiated it conceptually from other animals. At the

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 147

point of naming, the world is divided conceptually into animals

that are cats and all the other animals, perceived provisionally as

non-cats. Now, having distinguished cats from non-cats bears cogni-

tive consequences—by having the word cat in our mental lexicon

we are predisposed to attend to the presence of this creature in the

world as unique. Armed with that word, we now turn our attention

to the world of non-cats. Within that larger domain, we start to per-

ceive the existence of creatures that have physical affinities to cats.

Features such as whiskers, tails, and retractile claws, for instance,

seem to associate the cat conceptually to other animals. This sug-

gests a larger category. In English, the name for that category is

feline. The world of animals can now be divided into felines and non-

felines. In the feline part, we can now devise further differentiations

of cat-like creatures, naming them lions, tigers, cougars, jaguars. We

might then consider further distinctions as being useful. The words

Siamese and Persian (indicating the origin of the cat) are two such

distinctions. At that point, we stop classifying the feline world and

consider the non-feline one. And the whole differentiation process

starts over. Cultures stop their classificatory decision-making when

they no longer see differentiations as useful or necessary.

The word feline encodes what is known today in psychology as a

superordinate concept. Such a word has a general classificatory func-

tion. The word cat encodes instead a basic or prototypical concept.

Lions, cougars, jaguars, and tigers also belong to this level of classifi-

cation. Finally, the word Siamese encodes a subordinate concept. It

indicates a type of cat. The reason for making such fine distinctions

has some social or cultural reason behind it. Classifying felines in

the way just described is just that—one way. We could easily have

classified cats in some other category, along with dogs and horses,

given that they are all four-legged creatures.

Because of the inbuilt relativity of classificatory schemes, biolo-

gists decided early on to establish specific criteria for classification,

so that they could communicate with each other unambiguously

regardless of language. But deciding what criteria are critical in sci-

ence has always been a difficult problem. The scientific classification

of animals depends largely on the features the animals are perceived

to share. In general, the more features they share, the more closely

148 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

they are seen to be related. The largest group is the kingdom Animalia,

which includes all animals. Next, each animal is placed in a group

called a phylum. Each phylum is divided into groups called classes. The

Classes are broken down into orders, and the orders into families. The

families are split into genera, and the genera into species.

Science is basically the craft of classification, which is called tax-

onomy (the word comes from the Greek for “naming arrangements”),

Early human beings divided all organisms into two groups—useful

and harmful, as archeological research has revealed. As people

began to recognize more kinds of living things, they developed

new ways to classify them. One of the most useful schemes was

Suggested by Aristotle, who classified animals as those having red

blood (animals with backbones) and those without red blood (ani-

mals without backbones). He divided plants by size and appearance

as herbs, shrubs, or trees. Aristotle’s scheme served as the basis for

classification for almost 2,000 years. During the seventeenth century,

the English biologist John Ray (1627-1705) first suggested the idea of

species in classification. But the basic system for modern classifica-

tion began with the work of the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus

(1707-1778) in the subsequent eighteenth century. Linnaeus classi-

fied organisms according to their physical structure and gave dis-

tinctive two-word names to each species. Modern classifications are

based on microscopic structural and biochemical characteristics, as

well as on presumed evolutionary relationships among organisms.

Conceptual knowledge is not an innate feature of the mind. Like

other animals, human infants come to understand the world at first

with their senses. When they grasp objects, for instance, they are

discovering the tactile properties of things; when they put objects

in their mouths, they are probing their gustatory properties; and

so on. However, in a remarkably short period of time, they start

replacing sensory knowing with conceptual knowing—that is, with

words, pictures, and other sign-forms that stand for things. This

event is extraordinary—all that children require to set their con-

ceptual mode of knowing in motion is simple exposure to words

in social context. From that point on, they require their sensory

apparatus less and less to gain knowledge, becoming more and more

dependent on words to learn about the world.

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 149

The question now becomes: How do we shift from sensory to con-

ceptual modes of knowing? Take the word blue in English. As a con-

crete concept, blue was probably motivated from observing a pattern

of hue found in natural phenomena such as the sky and the sea, and

then by noting the occurrence of the same hue in other things. The

specific concept that blue elicits in the mind will, of course, be dif-

ferent from individual to individual. But all variants will fall within

a certain hue range on the light spectrum. In a phrase, the word blue

allows speakers of English to talk and think about the occurrence

of a specific hue in the world. But that is not all it does. Speakers

use the very same word to characterize emotions, morals, and other

abstractions. Consider, for instance, the two sentences below:

(1) Today I’ve got the blues.

(2) That piece of information hit me right

out of the blue.

The use of blue in (1) to mean sad or gloomy is the result of a

culture-specific process, coming out of the tradition of blues music,

which is perceived typically to evoke sadness or melancholy through

its melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and lyrics. The use of blue in

(2) to render the concept of unexpectedness comes, instead, out of

the tradition of ascribing unpredictability to the weather. In other

words, the category encoded by blue is expanded in culture-specific

ways through a system of associations. The study of such semantic

phenomena will be discussed in the next chapter. Suffice it to say

here that it was Aristotle who identified four strategies by which

associations are forged: by similarity (for example, an orange and a

lemon), difference (for example, hot and cold), contiguity in time

(for example, sunrise and a rooster’s crow), and contiguity in space

(for example, a cup and saucer). In the nineteenth century, the early

psychologists, guided by the principles enunciated by James Mill

(1773-1836) in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind

(1829), studied experimentally how subjects made associations. In

addition to Aristotle’s original four strategies, they found that fac-

tors such as intensity, inseparability, and repetition played a role in

associative processes: for example, arms are associated with bodies

150 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

because they are ‘inseparable from them; rainbows are associated

with rain because of repeated observations of the two as co-occur-

ring phenomena; etc.

THE WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS

The presence of specialized vocabularies in the world’s languages

suggests that early cultures do not coin words arbitrarily, but on

the basis of need. This suggests, in turn, that languages that are

used habitually, rather than reflectively, shape perception. This is

commonly called the relativity principle, or the Whorfian Hypothesis

(WH). This claims that we come to perceive the world in a relative

fashion, according to the linguistic concepts that we have acquired

in childhood. The workings of this principle can be seen even in the

use of an apparently simple particle of speech such as a preposition.

In English we read something in a newspaper, implying through that

preposition that we have learned to perceive the newspaper as a con-

tainer of information into which we must go to seek it out. That is

why we also say that we got a lot out of the newspaper, or that there

was nothing in it. On the other hand, Italian speakers use the prep-

osition su (on), implying that the information is impressed on the

surface of the pages through its words. In Italian, therefore, there

are no expressions similar to we got a lot out of the newspaper and

there was nothing in it. In other words, specific language forms shape

concepts (mental impressions). These can be called Whorfian effects,

for lack of a better term. The raw, unorganized sensory stimuli that

we are exposed to on a daily basis are not taken in by our brains as

such. Rather, they are unconsciously “corrected” into categories (as

discussed above) by the words we have in our brain. These act like

filters, sifting through the stimuli for us to identify which are mean-

ingful (or known) to us and which are not. In a phrase, language

and perception are intertwined.

This was a basic premise in the work of Franz Boas and his stu-

dents at Columbia University in the 1920s. Edward Sapir in particular

devoted his career to determining the extent to which the language

of a culture shaped the perceptions of its users. Sapir was fascinated

by the fact that every culture developed its own particular lexical and

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 151

grammatical categories that largely determined the ways in which

individuals reared in the culture came subsequently and consequent-

ly to view the world:

Human beings do not live in the object world alone, nor alone

in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but

are very much at the mercy of the particular language system

which has become the medium of expression for their society.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality

essentially without the use of language and that language is

merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of

communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the

“real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the

language habits of the group. (Sapir 1921: 75)

The idea that language shapes people’s perception of reality caught

the attention of the Gestalt psychologists in the 1930s. Gestalt psych-

ology is a school of psychology that aims to discover the extent to

which forms influence perception. The psychologists Carmichael,

Hogan, and Walter conducted a truly remarkable experiment in 1932.

They found that when they showed subjects a picture and then asked

them later to reproduce it, the reproductions were influenced by the

verbal label assigned to the picture. The drawing of two circles joined

by a straight line, for instance, was generally reproduced as some-

thing resembling eyeglasses by those subjects who were shown the

eyeglasses label (second figure below). On the other hand, those who

were shown the dumbbells label tended to reproduce it as something

resembling dumbbells (third figure below):

TP 2. 3.

Reproductions of the Same Figure According to Label

There is no other way to explain the results, other than by the

fact that language conditions the way we see things. In another clas-

152 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

sic study, the linguist John Lucy (1996) took a different approach

to studying the WH. He studied the effect of grammar on memory

tasks on English and Yucatec (a Mayan language) speakers, knowing

the presence of a basic dichotomy between the two languages:

English Yucatec

Requires an obligatory marker for | Allows for plural marking, but

plurals of count nouns, including | does not require it, only for a

nouns referring to animate beings | small number of nouns

(humans, animals) and inanimate

objects

Plural marking does not occur with | Such marking is likely to be used

mass nouns (sugar, mud, water, etc.) | with nouns referring to animate

beings, but it is not obligatory

Lucy presented pictures of Yucatec village scenes to both speak-

ers and asked them to perform recall tasks. He found that English

speakers paid attention to number for animate beings and objects,

but ignored number for substances; Yucatec speakers paid atten-

tion to number only for animate beings. The experiment seemed to

show that grammatical categories did indeed condition how people

recalled the world.

In addition to empirical studies, anecdotal verifications of the WH

are everywhere. The Navajo language of Arizona is rich with words

referring to lines of various shapes, colours, and configurations. The

language has around 100 words for this purpose (much more than

English). Among the words are the following three:

(1) adziisgai, a word referring to “parallel

white lines running off into the dis-

tance”

(2) ahééhesgai, a word referring to “more

than two white lines forming concen-

tric circles”

(3) dlhch’inidzigai, a word referring to

two white lines coming together at a

point”

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 153

Although the word angle is used in English for (3), it refers to

the space between the lines, not the lines themselves. There are no

equivalent words for these figures in English. The gist is that Navajo

speakers have a more sophisticated vocabulary for discussing geo-

metrical arrangements than do speakers of English, who must use

lengthier descriptions to achieve the same result. Nevertheless, Eng-

lish speakers (or speakers of any other language) can come up with

ways of describing the figures encoded by the Navajo words. To the

linguistic anthropologist the Navajo classificatory system suggests

that the geometry of basic shapes has cultural value. It thus comes as

little surprise that Navajo toponyms (place names) are overwhelm-

ingly geometrical. For example, the term Tse Ah“iiéhd is used to

describe “two rocks standing vertically parallel to each other.” Does

this mean that Navajo speakers perceive the world differently from

English speakers? It might. Once classified, the world is passed on

through language forms to subsequent generations who acquire

knowledge of the world through those very forms. Of course, sub-

sequent generations can change their views of the world any time

they want, by simply inventing new words.

Examples of perceptual differences shaped by language differen-

ces abound. In English, when we say that something is in front of us

or ahead, we imply that it will occur in the future; while something

which is behind us is perceived as having occurred in the past.

(1) Your whole life lies in front of you.

(2) Do you know what lies ahead?

(3) Just put all that behind you. It’s ancient

history.

(4) I have fallen behind in my work.

This use of these expressions seems so natural to us that we rarely

stop to consider what it implies. In ancient Greek, the perception of

time was the other way around. For Greek speakers, the future was

perceived as being behind and the past as in front. English speak-

ers apparently perceive time as standing still while people travel

through it. The lexicon of the English language presents us with

ways to articulate this. Greek speakers, on the other hand, perceive

154 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

people as standing still while time overtakes them from behind. The

future is still behind, and not yet visible, while the past is already in

front, and thus visible. The Greek lexicon presents comparable ways

to articulate this.

Whort was Sapir’s student. For this reason, the WH is sometimes

called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, acknowledging the shared views

of teacher and pupil. Like Boas, Whorf suggested that the function

of language was to allow people to classify experience according to

their needs and, thus, that it was an organizing grid through which

humans come to perceive and understand the world around them.

Whorf noted that empty gasoline drums were treated in his day

carelessly, apparently because they were labelled as empty (despite

the explosive vapour they still contained). We have to go beyond

the meaning of empty, he suggested, to perceive the danger.

The language with which he became fascinated was Hopi, an

American aboriginal language spoken in the southwest region of the

US (Whorf 1956). Today there are only about 11,000 Hopi people,

half of whom live on the Hopi reservation in Arizona. They live in

11 villages on or near three high mesas (tablelands). One village,

Oraibi, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in Amer-

ica. It was founded about 800 years ago. Two things in particular

about the language spoken by the Hopi caught Whorf’s attention

(note that SAE = Standard Average European):

(1) Plurality and Numeration. SAE languag-

es form both real and imaginary plu-

rals—“4 people,” “ten days.” The latter

is considered to be imaginary because

it cannot be objectively experienced

as an aggregate. SAE tends to objectify

time, treating it as a measurable object

(“two days, four months,” etc.). Hopi,

on the other hand, does not have

imaginary plurals, since only objective

aggregates can be counted. Moreover,

it treats units of time as cyclic events,

not as measurable ones.

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 155

(2) Verb Tense. SAE languages have three

basic tense categories that predispose

speakers to view time sequences as

occurring in the present, in the past,

and in the future. Hopi verbs, on

the other hand, are marked by valid-

ity forms, which indicate whether the

speaker reports, anticipates, or speaks

from previous experience, and by

aspectual forms, which indicate dura-

tion and other characteristics of an

action.

These two aspects of Hopi grammar, Whorf claimed, mirror

the Hopi’s philosophy of the world and, more generally, how they

organize their lives. By not seeing time as an objectifiable phenom-

enon, Hopi people are less dependent on devices such as watches,

timetables, and the like to carry out their daily affairs. Their phil-

osophy of how things work in the world is mirrored in their verb

tense system.

The WH has been a topic of fierce debate among linguists, ever

since Whorf articulated it in the 1940s. Those opposed to the WH

allege that it implies that we are prisoners of the languages we speak.

But there is no such implication in the WH, at least as | understand

it. It simply states that language and perception are intertwined. It

says that the language we speak is a guide for daily living. The WH

certainly does not claim that the linguistic guides of other cultures

cannot be learned. This happens every time someone learns a for-

eign language, as a classic study of Navajo children dramatically

showed (Kramsch 1998: 13-14). Navajo children speak a language

that encodes the actions of “picking up a round object,” such as a

ball, and “picking up a long, thin flexible object,” such as a rope,

as obligatory categories. When presented with a blue rope, a yellow

rope, and a blue stick, and asked to choose which object goes best

with the blue rope, Navajo children tend to choose the yellow rope,

associating the objects on the basis of their shapes, whereas English-

speaking children almost always choose the blue stick, associating

156 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

the objects on the basis of colour, even though both groups of chil-

dren are perfectly able to distinguish colours and shapes. In effect,

the speakers tend to sort out and distinguish things according to

the categories emphasized by their cultures. Interestingly, Navajo

children who had studied English chose the blue stick and yellow

rope in a fairly equal way.

In a truly fascinating study, a government survey-taker named

Alfred Bloom reported what he found during one of his surveys just

before Hong Kong was to become part of China in the 1980s, gain-

ing autonomy from its British past (Bloom 1981), He did so because

he found the answer to one of his questions rather extraordinary,

given its Whorfian implications. The question was: If the government

were to take away your freedom, what would you do? Bloom found that

native speakers of English responded, as anticipated, with answers

such as the following (paraphrased here for convenience):

Speaker A: I would leave.

Speaker B: I’m not sure what I would do.

Speaker C: I probably wouldn’t do anything.

Speaker D: I would organize a protest.

Speaker E: What could I do? Probably nothing.

The verbal structure /f...were to is an example of a counterfactual,

a syntactic form that is intended to convey the concept of “contrary

to given facts.” In all responses by native speakers he got a type of

response that follows logically from the counterfactual: I would...,

What could I.... However, when he asked the same question to speak-

ers who had learned English in school and for whom it was not a

native language, he got the following typical response:

Question: If the government were to take away

your freedom, what would you do?

Response: It hasn’t.

Bloom explained the differential pattern of responses in Whor-

fian terms by suggesting that the non-native speakers had no lin-

guistic grasp of counterfactuals and thus answered in factual terms.

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 157

Bloom’s study created a fuss, with many claiming that it showed

a bias towards native speakers of Chinese. But others saw no such

thing in it. Indeed, native speakers of English made parallel errors

in Chinese in analogous ways. In effect, Bloom had documented a

Whorfian effect.

Take, as another example, the verb system of Navajo. In that lan-

guage, the categorization of motion is a major conceptual focus of

its verb system. Many verbs designate specific aspects of motion and

of objects affected by motion. For this reason, Navajo uses meta-

phors of motion that manifest a specific kind of understanding and

experience of the world which contrasts conspicuously with English,

as the following examples show:

English Concept one dresses one lives one is young to sing to greet someone Navajo Concept Translated Literally

one moves into clothing

one moves about here and there

one moves about newly

to move words out of an enclosed space

to move a round solid object to meet someone

Comparisons such as this provide concrete insights into how

cultural perceptions of reality are reflected in the structure of gram-

mars. Differences in grammar end up being, essentially, differences

in worldview. They produce Whorfian effects, as they have been

called here.

The American linguist Ronald Langacker (1987, 1990) has become

well known for his study of such effects. Nouns, he claims, elicit

images of referents that appear to trace a “region” in mind-space—for

example a count noun is imagined as referring to something that

encircles a bounded region, whereas a mass noun is visualized as

designating a non-bounded region. The noun water elicits an image

of a non-bounded region, whereas the noun leaf evokes an image of

a bounded region. This conceptual dichotomy produces grammatical

effects—leaves can be counted, water cannot; leaf has a plural form

(leaves), water does not (unless the referential domain is metaphoric-

al); leaf can be preceded by an indefinite article (a leaf), water cannot;

and so on. These grammatical features encode different perceptions

158 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

of things, as can be seen by examining the same referential domains

in other languages. In Italian, for instance, the concept of grapes is

assigned to the mass noun category (uva). As a consequence there is

no plural form for uva.

SPECIALIZED VOCABULARIES

As mentioned several times, every culture develops specialized

vocabularies over time according to need (or even whim). In Shin-

zwani (a language spoken in the Comoro Islands of the Western

Indian Ocean), the word mama refers to both mother and aunt. The

reason for this is that the two individuals perform similar kinship

duties. Naming family members and relatives constitutes, actually, a

classic case used by linguists to show how language and classification

mirror social organization. In English, the primary kinship relations

are encoded by the words mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother,

grandfather, grandson, granddaughter, niece, nephew, mother-in-law,

father-in-law, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law. English vocabulary also

distinguishes between first cousins and second cousins and great-aunts,

great-uncles, and so on. However, it does not distinguish lexically

between younger and older siblings. Moreover, English distinguish-

es a nephew/niece from a grandchild. But the latter distinction is not

encoded in other languages. In Italian, for example, nipote refers to

both nephew/niece and grandchild.

Kinship terms mirror social relations. They reveal how the family

is structured in a given culture, what relationships are considered

to be especially important, and what attitudes towards specific kin

may exist. Take, for instance, the Hawaiian kinship system, where

all relatives of the same generation and sex are referred to with

the same term—the term used to refer to father is used as well for

the father’s brother and the mother’s brother (for which we use

uncle). Similarly, the mother, her sister, and the father’s sister (for

which we use aunt) are all classified together under a single term.

Essentially, kinship reckoning in Hawaiian culture involves put-

ting relatives of the same sex and age into the same category. On

the other hand, in the Sudanese system, the mother’s brother is

distinguished from the father, and mother’s sister is distinguished

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 159

from the mother, as well as from the father’s sister. Each cousin is

distinguished from all others, as well as from siblings. This system

is one of the most precise ones in existence. In few societies are all

aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings named and treated as equals in

the kinship line.

Colour terminologies are similarly specialized. Experts estimate

that we can distinguish perhaps as many as 10 million colours.

Our names for colours are, thus, far too inexact to describe accur-

ately all the colours we actually see. As a result, people often have

difficulty trying to describe or match a certain colour. If one were

to put a finger at any point on the colour spectrum, there would be

only a negligible difference in hue in the colours immediately adja-

cent to the finger at either side. Yet, a speaker of English describing

the spectrum will list the hues as constituting colour categories

named purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. This is because the

English language has pre-classified the content of the spectrum for

us in specific ways. There is nothing inherently “natural” about

the English colour scheme; it is a reflex of English vocabulary, not

of nature. What is a shade of colour in one language is a distinct

colour in another.

Speakers of Shona, an indigenous African language divide the

spectrum up into cipswuka, citema, cicena, and cipswuka (again), and

speakers of Bassa, a language of Liberia, segment it into just two

categories, hui and ziza. The relative hues encoded by these terms

vis-a-vis the hues encoded by English words can be shown graphic-

ally as follows:

Bassa

Potential

Number of