ANTH 114
For the midterm - the questions on the slides are the ones to focus on the most
Practice example questions
Look for key terms
Write your own essay questions based on the final
what is _ approach to _ (philosophers)
memorize what each reading is ABOUT - main take aways
Vocab
The pristine myth - the idea that the Americas were sparsely populated without any complex building
Large complex settlements (e.g. South American empires)
Large populations and complex works backed by archeological evidence
Romanticism - a period and style of art that engaged heavily in the pristine myth and cast a rose-tinted picture of the untouched American wilderness and the people living in it as a true and less corrupt way of being that needed to be tapped in the minds of the europeans
Proto-language - proposed parent-language from the study of modern languages
Genetic diversity - an assumption can be made based on words whether a language is close to another, the relatedness of languages (e.g. thirst, dorst, mother, mutter)
Structural diversity - languages can differ in that they have different structures
Language relativity - the idea that the language you speak can shape the way that you see the world
Linguistic functionalism - if there wasn’t a certain thing, there wouldn’t be a word for it (example - we wouldn’t have a word for i-pad if it didn’t exist)
Count nouns vs non-count nouns - can you put a/an in front of it?
patience vs person
Ethnocentrism - evaluation of other cultures based on your own
White mans burden
Historical Particularism - against ethnocentrism, the idea that every culture has its own history and we are limited by our own cultural assumptions and language
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - language shapes how people think
Holism - studying society, culture, and language as an interconnected whole
Native speaker - grew up knowing a language or learned a language at a very young age
Settler colonialism - when a ruling country from a different geographic moves large groups of people to another country to establish dominance
Genocide - killing of a large number of people of a particular nation/ethnic group, and is a way for settler colonists to establish dominance
Structuralism - studying relationships and systems between parts and how they come together, producing a new way to study languages
Dialect - language variation particular to a given region or social group
Dialectology - the study of language variation particular to a social group
Isoglosses - varieties of speech that occur only in a specific area
Dialect boundary - when multiple isoglosses colide
Leveling - the reduction in variation in features of dialect
Pidgin - languages that are used in contact situations where people don’t speak the same language, often occuring in places where trade is happening between many groups
Creole - when pidgin languages become the native languages of a new generation, they are called creoles - which have fully developed grammar and are spoken like any language
Bivalent indexicality - two different things are being indexed at the same time
Wine talk only indexes one thing: upper class identity
Coffee talk indexes two things: upper class identity and down to Earth values
Ripped jeans
Language
Languages are ideologies and social constructs
Vernacular language was standardized with the increase of importance of nation-states
Languages can be grouped together based on their relatedness (language family)
According to early philosophers, different linguistic structures were linked to culture and biology - language used to classify people (race)
Racist way of thinking based of morphemes (Latin languages were superior to Chinese or Arabic)
Language death (metaphor) has 6 categories of language endangerment
Definitely endangered to critically endangered = children do not speak the language to language is only spoken by a few members of the oldest generation
Language revitalization - Language change come into existence to demarcate different identities from each other
Structural linguistics
Phonology - the study of sound systems
Morphology - the study of word part systems
Syntax - the study of word order
Semantics - the study of meanings as a system
Semiotics - the study of signs
Generative linguistics
Distinguishes between:
Linguistic competence: our knowledge about language systems
Linguistic performance: how we actually speaks
Involves the idea of an ideal native speaker that does not make mistakes and has a perfect grammatical system in their head
Sociolinguistics
Often studies dialectal variation (region, class, gender, age, ethnicity)
Some observations:
Women tend to speak more stand varieties of English
Both class and region affect how people speak
People’s aspirations can affect how people speak
Types of dialects:
Regional dialects
Social dialects
Ethnic dialects
Dialect geography - mapping distributions of various linguistic features so as to show their geographical provenance
Isoglosses - varieties of speech that occur only in a specific area
Critiques of sociolinguistics
Class isn’t easy to measure
Linguistic Ethnography - method of research involving spending extended time with people you study, participate in activities, and look at them in their environment, focusing on how they speak
Qualitative and long-term research meant to try to understand the social worlds of the people being studies
Neurolinguistics - interested in understanding how language is learned in the brain
Applied Linguistics - focuses on language policy, language education, and other practicals
Comparative Historical Linguistics - comparing languages in the present, to make predictions about the past
Language families
Comparing languages and grouping them into language families (Family tree of the Indo-European languages)
Dialectology
Can indicate some potential difficulties in communication between regions and groups
Variety -
Variable -
Variant -
Variation -
Free variation - much of variation is of no apparent social significance
The lines of what constitutes a language or a dialect are often racial and economic - standard languages are standard because they have been privileged in society
Acrolect - the most formal, prestigious, and standard variety of a language in a speech community
the more class privilege someone has, the more likely they are to speak similarly to an acrolect]
Code switching - is when a language user intentionally changes the variety they are using during a conversation
People tend to codeswitch less in situations with a higher cognitive load, suggesting that code switching requires more mental work than using a single code
Coginitive load -
Models of language - some speaches are associated with medicine and doctors , while others are linked to everyday social interactions, showcasing the diversity of language use across different contexts. Understanding these models helps us analyze how language reflects social identities and power dynamics within a community.
Register - linguistic repertoire that’s associated with particular social practices and who engages with it
Words, sounds, sentence structure, intonation
Example: legalese involves words that are used by lawyers and in contracts and laws, but it also involves certain word orders “hereby, duress”
Registers are used in social indexing, they are linguistic behaviors that indexes types of person, activities, or relationships
Youth slang indexes youth and coolness
Business language indexes the start of a meeting
Social Asymmetries - not everyone learns all of the features of every repertoire, a lot of people recognize certain talks or accents but cannot replicate it
Ex - Wine talk is something thats recognized by middle class, but cannot be replicated
Enregistrement -
By studying the emergence of avaluative language, you can study how registers emerge and spread through society
Meta-Pragmatics (communication about communication)
Talk about language in context is meta-pragmatic
Meta just means at the level above or about something
“That’s not polite” is a metapragmatic statement because its talk about language in context - what should or shouldn’t be used
Institutions of replications are institutions that facilitate a certain type of language
Example: law school is dedicated to the propagation of legal language to future lawyers
American English - there is no single English
American English is often viewed as being different from varieties of British English
The features of this so-called American English come from:
Isolation from England
The mixing of English dialects in a new context
Migration: voluntary and forced
American English is also derived from Conservative and New Feature - new vocabulary is a result of contact with other languages
Conservative: some features of “American English” are the result of changes happening in England, but not the US
New Features: some features of pronunciation have changed since the 17th century
Studying American English as a register:
Meta-pragmatic Stereotypes of use
The context in the colonies was linguistically complex
Leveling - this chaotic new order led to a decrease in diverstiy
After the establishment of received pronunciation in England, the reports of English in America were less favorable
By the end of the 1800’s:
There was regional diversity in different states in how people spoke English
There were clear class commentaries about “educated English”
Language forms are viewed as divided among racial lines
Migration - played a large part in how people speak in the United States
Early dialectologists thought that exposure of immigration corrupted linguistic data so they would avoid studying cities
English is only spoken here because of colonial settlers
!! Dutch was widely spoken in NY at first!
France colonized large portions of the U.S., French Creole emerged as a language after the France-Indian war
Another example: creole is based on west-african language deep-rooted in slave history
African American English as a Dialect
Also called African American Vernacular English (AAVE)
Three theories of AAVE origins
It’s a pidgin language that originated out of language contact between West African languages and English in terms context of slavery, later became creole
Came from the influence of some African languages which were continuously spoken alongside English in communities of enslaved people
Features of AAE are often present to some extent in older varities of Southern English but came more prominent after migration of Black Americans to the South
There are shared features between Southern dialect and AAVE
The “color line” is a term by Fredrick Douglas to discuss the social distance between Black and White people in the U.S.
Socially crossing the color line: joining a stereotypically white profession
Physically crossing the color line: moving into a white neighborhood
Overall leads to two perceptions of the world that black people must contend with in order to survive in a white-dominated society
Double Consciousness - having to constantly think about how you perceive yourself and how others (white people) perceive you
Legally enforced segregation and structural/economic segregation have created a situation where the social divides of slavery continue to impact how people communicate
Like any dialect, AAVE has variants that are different from other speech varieties
Appropriation and appreciation debate between White people using AAVE
Habitual aspect - grammatical category that shows an action happens regularly/customarily
Studying AAVE and describing it reinforces power dynamics (like white supremacy) despite intentions of the linguist - there could be a bias, only looks at DIFFERENCES
MLK Jr Elementary School vs Ann Arbor District Board - school officials were accused for placing Black children in a “learning disabled and speech pathology class” and in lower grade levels because of their language and culture (study ruling of the king case)
Labov treated AAE speech community as a unified whole, leading to the use of a few interactions or trends as evidence for behavior for all AAE speakers
The underlying issue - Black language and culture when described by White sociolinguistics focuses on the things that the linguists find to be different
Raciolinguistics
Term coined by Samy Alim used by linguistic anthropologists to talk about how race is socially constructed through the use of language
All kinds of behavior can be enregistered through meta-semiotic behavior or metapragmatic stereotypes of use
Looking at metapragmatic commentaries about race, gender, and class can help study these social categories
There are no biological races, they are not biologically predetermined
Phenotypic evidence
Variation between people living in geographical locations changes slowly and not consisently over space
This indicates that the pattern of human physical variation represents range, rather than distinct groups
Genetic Evidence
The vast majority of human genetic variation occurs within racial groups, not between them (if you took everyone who’s culturally white, and you look at the genetic diversity, you would see more diversity than if you look between everyone who’s culturally white and black)
Basically: race is socially constructed, it’s not biologically determined - but just because it’s not biological, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter
There’s more difference inside of the groups than between the groups when you look at DNA, when you look at the way genetics manifest people don’t fall neatly into groups
Race can be studied as a product of economic inequality and political structures
If we think about race is a person, we can think about how it’s associated with physical signs through processes of enregisterment
We can study race as it is “enregistered” (socially constructed) through talk about race
Racialization is the process through which people, places, and things are ascribed racial categories
Ways to study race
Variationist - comparing features of language with racial identities to identify ethnolects
Register/ideologies: studying the way people associate speech varrities
Enregisterment - studying te way
Politeness
We can think about politeness and impoliteness as registers, certain kinds of behavior and speech index polite behavior
BUT! What is polite for one person, might be rude for another - as indexes are not universal
We can tell if something is polite by how people react to it or talk about it (META LANGUAGE)
It can vary between personal demographics
Politeness theory - discusses politeness as resulting from a need for negative and positive face
Positive politeness
A communication strategy designed to minimize threats and maintain a person’s “positive face” to protect an individuals self image
“I love your jacket!” “You’re so bubbly”
Negative politeness
A communication strategy that respects a person’s right to act freely and avoids imposing on them
“Would you mind closing the door” over “close the door”, “Sorry to bother, I have a question” - kind of giving them an out, giving them a sense of autonomy “If it’s possible” “no rush”
R: Face threat ranking
D: Social Distance - talking to a stranger is high on the D scale
P: Power - boss and employee
Class and coffee
Coffee was considered a working-class bevarage
As time goes on, fewer people were drinking coffee and associated it with their parents and grandparents
Different types of products could index different types of lifestyles, and thats how coffee began to gain traction again
Coffee companies went through a redesign where they used parts of wine language to appeal to non-working-class people
Discussion of flavor: earthy, bold, smooth
Discussion of place: where it originated from, where it was produced
The closeness of the relation between growers and the brand is often highlighted
Many hipster trends involved bivalent class indexing
Using mason jars (putting cocktails in these jars and selling at restaurants)
Craft beer (marketed w/ wine talk)
Flannel as fashion (associated w/ working class identities, then worn in style)
Anthropology history
Early anthropology was tied to categorizing people based on their biology and culture
Viewed different “races” as differently evolved species
Four Fields of Anthropology
Cultural
Archeology
Biological/physical
Linguistic
Cultures need to be studied and recorded before they are lost
People started getting an education to learn recieved pronounciation, in order to be middle-upper class you had to send your kids to get this type of education
Philosophers
Lewis Henry Morgan - founded “New Confederacy of the iroquois”
Franz Boas - curator of Pacific northwest objects, specifically Kwakiutl, practiced salvage anthropology and was against ethnocentrism
Known as the “Father of American Anthropology”, used anthropology to better society
Argued that cultural contact results in loss of culture
Argued that race is not biologically constructed but is instead a social construct
Controversy: Native Americans were not credited in his work
Argued speakers of different languages hear speech differently
Sapir - argued for proto-Native American Languages and use comparative linguistics to argue for the relation of different Native languages
Benjamin Lee Whorf (Sapir’s student) - argued categories of languages organized how we speak, and that created mental patterns of habitual thought
Sir William Jones - famous for noticing the similarities between Latin, Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit - and the idea that the languages come from the same place
Ferdinand De Saussure - noticed that in many ancient European languages, syllables that didn’t have a consonant at the end always contained a long vowel
Chomsky - believed all language systems share certain features and understanding those commonalities should be the goal of linguistics
William Labov - sociolinguistic who compared social variables (class, race, gender) wuth linguistic variants)
Also helped with destigmatizing AAE
Labov’s 1985 study found that Black Philadelphians spoke increasingly differently than white Philadelphians
Charles Sanders Peirce
“How do we get from the physical world to the concept of “the world” that we talk about, that is how do we abstract meaning and language from our interactions with the physical world
Georg Wenker - wanted to study language variation of different regions in Germany
Gumperz - argues that to understand eachother it requires cultural and linguistic knowledge
Thomas Sheridan - wrote the first prescriptive pronunciation dictionary
Created a phonetic notation to fix a standard of pronounciation
Civilize “provincial (rural) people’s speech and manners
Notes: native languages
Disease from Europeans created a genocide, Native population dropped by 75% - 90%
In comparison: the black plague in Europe killed 30-50% of Europeans
Assimilation was forced by the U.S. government and caused the elimination of native languages, the Civilization Fund of 1819 was enacted to “civilize” Native people with boarding/residential schools
Because of forced assimilation, land is lost and therefore the context where a language should be used is eliminated - causing language death
Cliff Palace and Cahokia are places that disprove the pristine myth
Languages belonging to different language families are a kind of genetic diversity
Structural: grammar
Culture: cultural impacts of diversity
Languages were lost by genocide of the US government, dying from starvation and exposure on reservations and the trail of tears
From content
300 mutually unintelligible languages were spoken in North America a the time of first contact with Europeans: loss of diversity
At the rate of its disappearance, only 20 languages will be left by 2050
Certain sounds are not in varieties of American Language, and instead of certain accents changing the way they say words, Boas argues that the reason why native speakers sound inconsistent is because the person listening is at fault due to inadequacy of the ear
Believed that Native Americans were “bad at language” because the same word would be pronounced in different ways
Sapir (society)
Society - a network of partial understandings, constantly animated and reanimated through communicative acts - PATTERN
Says republican party isnt “a group of people” because its membership, beliefs, and platforms are constantly changing
Republican party only exists because “its tradition is being added to and upheld by simple acts of communication” (tie it back to meaning of society)
Communication is pervasive, implicit or explicit - language is the most explicit in that you can refer to anything that is socially relevant in a society
Gesture is a parallel system to language, which is implicit
Example: sarcasm - is linguistic communication that involves a change in the speakers voice, that tone is a gesture
Most implicit form of communication is social suggestion, where youre not copying a direct gesture
Overall:
Language: explicit, uses words
Gesture: less explicit - often accompanies language to highlight aspects of language
Imitation of overt behavior - doing something other people do
Social suggestion - untold rules, more of a feeling
If psychology explains social behavior, then it is just as true for society as it is for an individual -
Things that don’t seem social may have social implications - ex: breathing - not social, breathing patterns - may have cultural backgrounds
Social behavior has a form and a function (way we do/reason we do)
Form - wearing green on fridays
Function - school spirit
Many people know the form, and not the function, which is the standard of many social norms
Language is often an unconscious social behavior
Learning a culture is not only learning words, we must study the conscious and unconscious patterns
Semiotics
Introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, the signifier is the physical form of a sign (like the word "tree" or a photo), while the signified is the mental concept it evokes
Used to inspire structuralist theories of meaning in different fields
Saussurian sign - the words are arbitrarily connected to their concept - there is no tie between the physical thing and the words ]
Peirce’s sign - “a sign or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity”
Representamen: sign vehicle (thing representing ex: image/word)
Object: thing being read
Interpretant - mental concept
Example:
Representamen: red octagon with word stop on it
Object: idea of needing to stop
Interpretant - the recognition that you need to stop
The relationship between representamen and object is called ground
Our ideas of objects and the meaning of signs changed based on new concepts and information
There are three types of things that could represent or stand for other things
Qualities (quali-sign)
Individual (sin-sign)
Types (legi-sign)
Example: A green scarf
Qualisign - “warm, wooly, homemade”
Sinsign - a single scarf
Legisign - type of clothing
There are three types of ground
Symbol - they are related by convention
Words, when they stand for concepts, are symbols
Anything that you have to memorize to know, is a symbol
Example: x marks the spot, stop sign
Index - they are linked
When the representamen is physically linked to the object but doesnt replicate its image
Example: smoke is associated with fire, but isn’t the fire
Icon - some aspect of the object is represented in the representsman
Cases where the representamen replicates some aspect of the object
Example: maps replicate geographic features, pictures replicate some image
Example: a pumpkin spice later does not have any pumpkin flavor because the pumpkin spice flavor is not an exact replica, making it an index instead of an icon
The relationship between the representamen and the object is often causal but not replication
A sign does not function as a sign unless it’s understood as a sign
Rheme: sign interpreted as an icon
Dicent: signs interpreted as indexes
Arguments: signs interpreted as symbols
Different interpretations of what a sign is, different people in different generations will interact with each other and the world through different lens’
Labov
In a correlational study you study the frequency of 2 variables or the frequency with which two variables co-occur to try to see what types of variables are somehow linked
Dependent variables
Pragmatic
Phonological
Lexical
Agha
Values are something that exists consistently throughout society
An accent not only indexes attributes of speaker it also ‘gives importance’ to message content and engages the respectful attention of the hearer
Marcyliena Morgan Chapter 2 Notes
Main idea: Morgan argues that African-American English (AAE) is not “bad” or incorrect English. It is a meaningful language variety connected to African-American history, culture, identity, and community.
Language = identity: The way people speak can show who they are, where they belong, and how they relate to others. AAE and American English (AE):
AAE can show community, identity, and solidarity.
AE is often expected in school, work, and other formal settings.
African Americans may use both, depending on the situation.
Using AE doesn't necessarily mean rejecting AAE or African-American identity.
Language and slavery: Morgan discusses the idea that AAE developed under the conditions of slavery and oppression. Some scholars see it as a form of resistance, while others have argued that it can represent the continuing effects of slavery.
Counterlanguage: AAE can work as a “counterlanguage”—a way for a community to communicate meanings, humor, irony, or identity that outsiders may not fully understand.
Speech community: There isn't one single way that all African Americansspeak. AAE varies by class, age, gender, location, education, and situation.
Class: AAE isn't only associated with poor or working-class African Americans. Middle-class and educated African Americans can use it too, especially in informal settings.
Gender: Morgan criticizes researchers for sometimes focusing too much onBlack men's street speech and treating those examples as if they represent the entire African-American community.
Language and power: “Standard” English is often treated as more educated or professional. Morgan argues that this isn't simply about grammar—it'sconnected to race, class, and social power.
Big takeaway: Morgan wants us to understand that language is social. AAE can represent identity, culture, solidarity, and resistance, while AE can help people navigate institutions like schools and workplaces. The meaning of a language variety depends heavily on context.
Morgan characterizes the models of AAE into 3 broad categories
Discussions of AAE’s expressive African character
Discussions of AAE as a symbol of resistance against slavery and oppression
Discussions of AAE as an indicator of slave mentality
Feeling more Black in Portland
73.8% of Portland is White
It’s extremely progressive “young, creative, environmentally conscious”
Diversity in universities is a commodity in that it is something that is sold as a part of the “college experience”
Often diversity is overrepresented in pictures on fliers
Black Women who live in portland often fill roles to solve “diversity problems,” theyre routinely called on to make public arguments about diversity Most black women also navigate the gap between the rhetoric
“Not in my back yard”
Betzaida highlights how many Black women are asked to be on boards and are overworked
White Portlanders simultaneously ignore their experiences and seek our their experience as black women
They are othered in their everyday lives by people who have had little experience with Black culture
Communication of Respect in inter-Ethnic Service Encounters
Tensions and misunderstandings between Korean shopowners and Black customers
Residents of Korea Town created their own security teams from shopkeepers, many of whom had fought in the Korean War
The damage of the riots was on Korea town, as the police officers decided to protect the White neighborhoods instead
Korean customer service
Short verbal interactions that focus only on the exchange of hoods
Negative politeness/face
Communicating needs without speaking
Black customer service
Being acknowledged verbally when entering the shop/greeted when entering
Positive politeness
Discussion section
Argument paper
Look for diction in the paper explicitly mentioning “purpose” or “one can argue”
Values are ideological concepts - Agha paper
10/1
It’s a pidgin language that later became creole
Came from the influence of some African languages which were continuously spoken alongside English in communities of enslaved people
Yes AAVE is a dialect, its similar to southern dialects because of the influence of african languages
Blaccent is not the same as AAE because it instead describes the appropriation of AAE by people who arent Black - and so no blaccent is not a dialect its kind of a register
performativism = tropic, awkwafina was using this in the video to appear funnier by using a blaccent