How Do Anthropologists Study Language?

• Language is one of the most rule-bound, yet least conscious, aspects of culture. It is also dynamic and closely related to social hierarchies.

• Like cultural anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists work with informants or research subjects through fieldwork.

• Early anthropologists such as Franz Boas recognized language as central to understanding culture. Early studies focused on understand the categories and concepts encoded in Native American methods and stories.

  • These and other studies started anthropological linguistics—the study of language from an anthropological point of view.

  • Anthropological linguists of this period conducted analyses that focused on the structure and patterns of languages, using methods of descriptive linguistics.

• Later linguistic anthropologists developed a different set of methods called sociolinguistics, which focused on language in social contexts.

Where Does Language Come From?

• Language is a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and grammar. This definition emphasizes three features:

  1. Language consists of sounds organized into words according to some sort of grammar.

  2. Language is used to communicate.

  3. Language is systematic.

• We can address this question in two ways: (i) evolutionary (our biological heritage) and (ii) historical (how languages have changed through time).

Evolutionary Perspectives on Language

• Our ability to produce sounds with meaning suggests two biological abilities:

  • (i) the ability to make linguistic sounds using the mouth and larynx and (ii) the ability to reproduce these sounds in an infinite variety of ways to express a range of thoughts. Do we share these capabilities with animals?

• Most animals can’t talk because they don’t have a larynx. But, they do use sound gestures, and bodily movements to communicate.

  • Anthropologists call these call systems: patterned forms of communication that express meaning.

  • These systems are not considered language for four reasons:

    1. Animal call systems are limited in what and how much they can communicate.

    2. Call systems are stimuli-dependent, which means an animal can communicate only in response to a real-world stimulus.

    3. Among animals each call is distinct, and these calls are never combined to produce a call with a different meaning.

    4. Animal call systems tend to be nearly the same within a species, with only minor differences between call systems used in widely separated regions.

  • The human brain and larynx combine to form the biological basis of our extraordinary linguistic ability.

  • Ape vocal tracts limit spoken language, so for decades researchers have probed the limits of ape communication by teaching them signed languages.

    • For example, a chimpanzee named Washo and a gorilla named Koko have demonstrated the ability to produce hundreds of signs and even combine them into simple sentences.

Historical Linguistics: Studying Language Origins and Change

• Historical linguistics focuses on how and where the languages people speak today emerged. This process uses historical analysis of long-term language change.

• Historical linguistics began in the 18th century as philology: the comparative study of ancient texts and documents.

• It was clear to early philologists like Jacob Grimm that European languages have patterned similarities and differences. Grimm hypothesized that these patterns were a result of shared ancestry. In other words, many modern languages evolved from a few (or even one) languages, what linguists now call a proto-language: a hypothetical common ancestral language of two or more living languages.

• Contemporary historical linguists call this approach “genetic” because it explores how modern languages derived from an ancestral language.

• Historical linguists search for clues in cognate words: words in two languages that show the same systematic sound shifts as other words in the two languages, usually interpreted by linguists as evidence for a common linguistic ancestry.

  • As speakers become geographically, politically, or culturally separated, pronunciations diverge until linguistic communities are speaking mutually unintelligible languages.

    • For example, English, German, and Dutch are descended from a proto-Germanic language. Today, being fluent in one of these “daughter” languages does not provide much help in learning the others (see Table 4.1).

  • Languages also change in nongenetic ways (not based on descent). Nongenetic changes most often occur where people routinely speak multiple languages.

  • When people are multilingual, their use of each language subtly influences the other languages’ sounds, words, syntax, and grammar.

    • For example, the pronunciation of “r” (trilled or flapped) in southern Europe varies depending on location. Pronunciations move across language boundaries from community to community like a wave (see Figure 4.5).

How Does Language Actually Work?

• All languages that have been studied are complex and highly structured.

• Most people have little awareness of the formal structure of their language until they hear a mistake. They may not always be able to articulate what the error even was.

• Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished langue (language) from parole (speech). Langue is the technically correct manner in which people should speak. Parole is language in its living, breathing sociocultural context—that is, language as it is actually used by people.

  • We now call the study of the formal structure of language (langue) descriptive linguistics: the systematic analysis of a language’s sound system and grammar. Linguists divide language structure into three aspects or levels:

  • Phonology: the structure of speech sounds

  • Morphology: how words are merged into meaningful units

  • Syntax: how words are strung together to form sentences and more complex utterances, such as paragraphs.

  • All languages have predictable phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures.

  • An intricate combination of moving parts is necessary for us to produce the sounds of language; the glottis, tongue, teeth, lips, and many other parts moving in concert are required to utter the simplest words and sentences.

• Linguists identify the sounds of language (phonology) marking the contrasts between pairs or groups of sounds. Most sounds and contrasts exist in all languages, yet each language has its own unique pattern of sounds.

• Not all languages have the same sounds. For example, the Kung people in South Africa use a click sound that does not occur in English.

• Though most speakers of a language don’t know how they form the sounds that they use when speaking, linguists recognize that sound systems are highly systematic.

• Also under the purview of phonology are Accents and Dialects: regional or social varieties of a single language.

  • Prior to the 1970s linguists assumed that American English would become increasingly homogenous, owing to schools or the spread of mass media and its standardized, “unaccented” English.

  • Instead, regional dialects and sound changes between generations within communities are greater than ever. This suggests that, despite mass homogenization, peer groups play a much stronger role in the transmission of linguistic forms.

• Grammatical elements like tense, word ordering within sentences, and gender markings are structured according to patterned rules.

• The patterns learned in one cultural context can feel quite natural and “normal” to a native speaker but unusual or illogical to speakers of other languages. For example,

  • In contrast to the past, present, and future tenses of English, the Ningerum language of Papua New Guinea features five tenses and Indonesian has no regular tense markings.

  • In English, the pronoun you may refer to one person or many people. French features the informal tu and formal vous. The Awin language of Papua New Guinea includes equivalents of you (one person), you (two people), and you (more than two people).

Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguists study how context and cultural norms shape language use and the effects of language use on society. Sociolinguists accept whatever form of language a community uses (parole) as the form of language they should study.

• Though people may be using the same language system (langue), their actual sentences (parole) may carry different meanings. This is because meaning isn’t given. It is produced through social interaction.

• Sociolinguists focus on the use of signs, symbols, and metaphors in daily life.

  • Signs are the most basic way of conveying simple meaning. Stop signs in the United States capitalize on the fact that Americans identify red as a “dramatic,” attention-getting color.

  • Symbols are elaborations on signs, with a wider range of meanings. College sports mascots and team colors may become symbols of the school—or region—as a whole (one reason the Native American mascots discussed in Chapter 2 are so emotionally provocative). Anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1971) distinguished between:

    • Summarizing symbols such as the American flag, democracy, free enterprise, hard work, competition, progress, and freedom.

    • Elaborating symbols like the cow among the Nuer and Dinka peoples of southern Sudan; food, wealth, symbol of society and its parts.

    • Key scenarios imply how people should act. An American key scenario is the Horatio Alger myth; the idea that anyone can go “from rags to riches” with hard work and perseverance.

  • Metaphors are comparisons that emphasize the similarities between things. In our culture, for example, we metaphorize ideas about food: “This textbook gives you food for thought, and some things to chew over.”

• Language makes use of signs, symbols, and metaphors to continually reinforce cultural values in the community.

Does Language Shape How We Experience the World?

• According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the language we speak does affect our perception of the world.

• In the 1920s, linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir (1929) argued that a language inclines its speakers to think about the world in certain ways because of its specific grammatical categories.

  • Sapir’s work was an early expression of linguistic relativity: the idea that people speaking different languages perceive or interpret the world differently because of differences in their languages.

  • Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) later expanded on Sapir’s work. Whorf’s research of the Hopi language led him to argue that people who speak different languages perceive and experience the world differently.

    • This is a stronger position than Sapir’s idea that language promotes a tendency to see the world differently.

    • Regardless of their subtly different positions, by the 1950s, scholars had begun referring to the combined research of Sapir and Whorf as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.”

• Whorf concluded that the Hopi language lacked past, present, and future tenses as used in English. In contrast, Hopi employs mutually exclusive “assertion categories”: statements of general truth.

  • Whorf suggested that translating Hopi into English fundamentally altered its meaning because when people translated Hopi into English they used English tenses. In other words, it was not effectively translatable.

  • There is still disagreement over Whorf’s interpretation of Hopi, with some scholars (Malotki, 1983) arguing that it does, in fact, include tenses comparable to those in English.

• In the 1960s, anthropologists continued to explore language and perception with ethnoscience: the study of how people classify things in the world, usually by considering some range or set of meanings.

  • Early ethnoscientific studies proceeded from the assumption that differences in classification were simply different ways of mapping categories onto empirical reality.

  • For example, Berlin and Kay (1969) analyzed the color terms of more than 100 languages and found that basic color terms are consistent across languages.

    • Some anthropologists suspect that these may be universal patterns related to the way our optic nerve responds to light of different wavelengths.

  • Speakers of vastly different languages did not appear to perceive colors differently; they just classified them differently.

    • Findings like this do not necessarily disprove the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity more generally, but they do argue against linguistic determinism.

• Today most anthropologists accept a weak (or nondeterministic) version of the linguistic relativity argument: the language habits a community create tendencies to think about the world in certain ways and not others.

If Langauge Is Always Changing, Why Does It Seem So Stable?

• Like culture as a whole, language constantly changes, yet most people experience their own language as stable and unchanging.

• Increased global communication, migration, and commerce over the past few centuries have spurred language change. Societies blended by colonialism developed dynamic new languages, such as creoles and pidgins.

  • In the Americas, local colonized societies developed hybrid languages called creole languages: a language of mixed origin that has developed from a complex blending of two-parent languages and that exists as a mother tongue for some part of the population.

  • For example, the Haitian language combines several African languages with Spanish, Taíno (a naive Caribbean language), French, and English.

  • In Asia and the Pacific Islands, similar hybrid forms are usually called pidgin languages: a mixed language with a simplified grammar, typically borrowing its vocabulary from one language and its grammar from another.

    • Pidgins have historically been developed for the purpose of business and trade.

  • For example, in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, pidgins that combine local languages and English have become national languages along with the colonial languages of French and English.

• Despite the reality that countries have found it nearly impossible to dictate their populations’ language practices, there are many historical examples of national language policies which attempt to prescribe language use from the top down.

  • Twice during the 20th century, Dutch monarchs altered the official spelling of words to match contemporary pronunciations, formally recognizing choices made by speakers of the language.

  • French Canadians in the province of Quebec have been successful at preserving Quebecois (local dialect of French) against Canadian anglicization (the creeping influence of English).

    • Government business in the province of Quebec is conducted in French, and public signs must be written in French.

• The connection between cultural stability and language use is critical for many indigenous peoples. Indigenous groups around the world are facing language death: when a language no longer has any native speakers.

  • It’s possible that as many as half of the world’s languages face extinction within the next century as thousands of small languages are gradually replaced by fewer, bigger ones.

  • See “Doing Framework: Helping Communities Preserve Endangered Languages” with linguistic anthropologist Lise Dobrin.

  • In light of linguistic relativity, language is a primary way that people experience the richness of their culture, and loss of language represents the loss of a culture’s fullness.

How Does Language Relate to Social Power and Inequality?

• Language ideology refers to the beliefs people have about the superiority of one language or dialect and the inferiority of others. It links language with identity, morality, and aesthetics, shaping our image of who we are as individuals and members of social groups and institutions.

  • Language ideologies are viewed as truths. These truths are reflected in social relationships as a group’s assumption of the superiority of its language justifies its power over others.

  • There is no universally correct way to speak English or any other language. From an anthropological perspective of language ideology, there are only more and less privileged versions of language use.

• A class study in sociolinguistics (Lakoff, 1975) explored how gendered expectations of how women speak English in our culture can reflect and reinforce the idea that women are inferior to men.

  • According to Lakoff’s research, female speech patterns were expected to express hesitation, repetition, and uncertainty more than male speech. Unfortunately, the appearance of uncertainty can be detrimental in many professional settings.

• Language ideologies are closely tied to the creation and maintenance of social status.

• Nineteenth-century European colonial powers often introduced their own language as the official language in places like sub-Saharan Africa. They viewed indigenous languages as socially inferior and sought to replace them with European languages.

• Newly independent nations had to decide which language or languages to choose as official. In Zambia, for example, the government recognized seven of its 73 languages as well as English as its official language.

  • But, patterns in radio broadcasts reveal that English is privileged above all others.

• Linguistic hierarchies such as the one in Zambia can be used to exclude or marginalize some people.

• Language is also a marker of position in local, regional, national, and international contexts.

Key Terms

1. Accent - a regional or social variation in the way a language is pronounced (e.g., an Alabama accent)

2. Anthropological linguistics - the study of language from an anthropological point of view

3. Call system - patterned sounds, utterances, and movements of the body that express meaning

4. Cognate words - words in two languages that show the same systematic sound shifts as other words in the two languages, usually interpreted by linguists as evidence for a common linguistic ancestry

5. Creole language - a language of mixed origin that has developed from a complex blending of two parent languages and exists as a mother tongue for some part of the population

6. Descriptive linguistics - the systematic analysis and description of a language’s sound system and grammar

7. Dialect - a regional or social variety of a language in which the vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation differ from those of the standard version of the language (e.g., African American Vernacular English)

8. Ethnography of speaking - the study of how people actually use spoken language in a particular cultural setting

9. Ethnopoetics - a method of recording narrative speech acts—including oral poetry, stories, and ritual use of language—as verses and stanzas in order to capture the format and other performative elements that might be lost in written prose.

10. Ethnoscience - the study of how people classify things in the world, usually by considering some range or set of meanings

11. Language - a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and grammar

12. Language ideology - widespread assumptions that people make about the relative sophistication and status of particular dialects and languages

13. Linguistic relativity - the idea that people speaking different languages perceive or interpret the world differently because of differences in their languages

14. Morphology - the structure of words and word formation in a language

15. Philology - comparative study of ancient texts and documents

16. Phonology - the systematic pattern of sounds in a language, also known as the language’s sound system

17. Pidgin language - a mixed language with a simplified grammar, typically borrowing its vocabulary from one language but its grammar from another

18. Proto-language - a hypothetical common ancestral language of two or more living languages

19. Sociolinguistics - the study of how sociocultural context and norms shape language use and the effects of language use on society

20. Syntax - the pattern of word order used to form sentences and longer utterances in a language