Language and Culture Flashcards

The Importance of Human Language to Human Culture

• Language is crucial to human culture; complex human culture could not exist without it.
• Language encodes culture and facilitates its transmission between generations.
• Humans think and conduct cultural activities through language, constantly immersed in it.
• Without language and culture, humans would be similar to great apes.
• Anthropologists require linguistic skills to study languages and cultures.
• Human languages are symbolic systems where symbols convey meaning arbitrarily.
  • Arbitrariness: Lack of obvious connection between a symbol and its referent.
  • Color symbolism varies across cultures (e.g., black for death in the West, white in China).
  • Word meanings are language-specific, requiring learning (e.g., key in English, qui in French, ki in Japanese).

The Biological Basis of Language

• Language development is linked to human anatomical evolution, starting with bipedalism 6-7 million years ago.
• Bipedalism freed forelimbs, leading to complex hand use and skull-spine adaptations.
• Skull attachment shifted towards the center, influencing mouth and throat anatomy.
• The larynx is lower in humans, creating a longer pharynx that amplifies speech sounds.
• Tongue and palate shapes allow for a wider range of sounds compared to great apes.
• Speech is produced by exhaling air through the larynx, vibrating the vocal folds.
• Articulators (tongue, lips, jaw) manipulate sound waves to produce different speech sounds.
• Brain enlargement and compartmentalization were crucial for processing language.
• Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area in the left brain are dedicated to language processing.

Language Acquisition in Childhood

• Noam Chomsky proposed Universal Grammar (UG), a genetic template for language acquisition.
• Children possess an innate ability to acquire languages without formal instruction.
• They master language basics by age three or four, including signed languages.
• The Critical Age Range Hypothesis suggests that without language exposure, natural acquisition ability diminishes.
• After puberty, attaining native fluency becomes difficult; evidenced by cases like "Genie."
  • Genie: A girl isolated until age 14, never developed language beyond a two-year-old level.

The Gesture Call System and Non-Verbal Human Communication

• Animals communicate through sounds, visual signs, and other sensory means.
• Animal systems are closed, limiting new meanings. Human communication is open, allowing new meanings.
• Great apes use gesture-call systems with sound, body language, scent, facial expression, and touch.
• Humans share gesture-call elements but also possess culture-specific non-verbal systems.

Kinesics

• Kinesics: Study of human body language, including gestures, body position, facial expressions, and eye contact.
• Cultural rules dictate appropriate usage (e.g., eye contact as respect in America versus avoidance in Japan).
• Facial expressions and hand gestures convey attitudes/emotions and deliberate messages.

Proxemics

• Proxemics: Study of social use of space and personal distance.
• "Space bubble" size depends on factors like relationship, status, gender, age, and culture.
• Close physical space with touching in Brazil versus greater distance in Japan.
• Violating space can convey emotional distance, threats, or desire for closeness.

Paralanguage

• Paralanguage: Speech characteristics beyond words, including pitch, loudness, and tempo.
• Pitch variations convey questions, sarcasm, confidence, etc.
• Loudness indicates emotions like anger or urgency.
• Lengthened syllables emphasize impact (e.g., "It’s beauuuuu-tiful!").
• Non-verbal sounds (chuckles, sighs) accompany speech.
• Violations of non-verbal norms can convey meaning.
• Deliberate gestures (thumbs up, OK sign) vary in meaning across cultures.

Human Language Compared with the Communication Systems of Other Species

• Human language differs qualitatively and quantitatively from animal communication systems.
• Charles Hockett’s design features distinguish human language.

Hockett’s Design Features

• Shared features:
  1. Mode of communication (vocal-auditory, visual, tactile, kinesic).
  2. Semanticity: Signs carry meaning.
  3. Pragmatic function: Signs serve a purpose.
• Additional features in some systems (including humans):
  4. Interchangeability: Ability to send and receive messages (except honeybees, mockingbirds).
  5. Cultural transmission: Learning through interaction.
  6. Arbitrariness: Sign form not logically related to meaning.
• Unique human language characteristics:
  7. Discreteness: Language consists of isolatable, meaningless sounds.
  8. Duality of patterning:
     • First level: phonemes combine into morphemes (meaningful units).
     • Second level: morphemes recombine into phrases/sentences via syntax.
  9. Displacement: Ability to communicate about non-present things.
  10. Productivity/creativity: Ability to produce/understand novel messages and create new words.
• Great apes can learn sign languages but have limited linguistic abilities due to cognitive constraints.

Universals of Language

• Similarities exist across all studied human languages.
• Properties of Universal Grammar (Chomsky).
  1. All cultures have and use human language.
  2. Languages evolve.
  3. Languages are systematic, rule-driven, complex, and capable of expressing any idea.
  4. Languages utilize symbolic systems.
  5. Languages have basic word order (subject, verb, object).
  6. Languages share grammatical categories (nouns, verbs).
  7. Spoken languages consist of vowels and consonants.
  8. Duality of patterning allows speakers to create and understand messages.

Descriptive Linguistics: Structures of Language

• Descriptive linguistics: Study of language structures including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

The Sounds of Language: Phonemes

• Phoneme: Minimal sound unit that changes word meaning when substituted.
  • Substituting /p/ for /b/ in bit changes meaning to pit.
• Languages have fewer than 100 phonemes; English has 36-37.
• International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): Written system representing sounds; each symbol represents one sound regardless of language.

The Units That Carry Meaning: Morphemes

• Morpheme: Minimal meaningful unit in a language.
  • Unbound morpheme: (dog, happy, go, educate) can stand alone.
  • Bound morphemes: (un-, re-, -ly, -s) attach to other morphemes.
• Some languages (Chinese) have few bound morphemes; others (Swahili) have many.

The Structure of Phrases and Sentences: Syntax

• Syntax: Rules governing morpheme combination.
  • Word order rules: In English, "The cat chased the dog" has a specific meaning based on word order.
  • Morpheme usage rules: dictate the use of specific morphemes that preform a grammatical function.
• Russian uses bound morphemes to indicate subject/object, allowing flexible word order.
  • koshka [chased] sobaku means "the cat chased the dog" regardless of order.

Conveying Meaning in Language: Semantics and Pragmatics

• Semantics: Study of word and morpheme meanings and how these create phrase/sentence meanings.
  • Example: multiple meanings and uses of "like" in American youth language.
• Pragmatics: Study of social and cultural aspects of meaning and how context affects it.
  • Speech act: Utterance's intended accomplishment which may not be interpretable by dictionary meanings alone.
  • "Can you pass the salt?" is a request, not an inquiry about ability.
  • Politeness often entails indirect syntax.

Language Variation: Sociolinguistics

Languages Versus Dialects

• Language vs dialect is tricky to define.
• Language is a named speech variety, dialects are subordinate variations.
• Mutual incomprehensibility often distinguishes languages.
• China considers hundreds of mutually incomprehensible dialects as one language.
• Sweden, Denmark, and Norway consider mutually intelligible languages as separate.
• Linguistic continuum exists across populations.
• Catalan is closer to southern French languages than to Spanish or French.
• Colonization influences language distribution.
• "Standard" language variety has social/political prestige.
• Speech indicates identity, origin, and social group affiliation.

How Does Language Variation Develop?

• Factors influencing dialect variation:
  • Settlement patterns: Early settlers brought diverse dialects.
  • Migration routes: Movement westward established dialect boundaries.
  • Geographical factors: Isolation due to rivers, mountains, and islands.
  • Language contact: Borrowing from Native Americans, French, Spanish, Germans, and African-Americans.
  • Region and occupation: Rural vs. urban speech.
  • Social class: Reflects education and income.
  • Group reference: Ethnicity, origin, age, and gender influence speech.
  • Linguistic processes: Simplification of pronunciation/syntax.

What Is a “Standard” Variety of a Language?

• Standard language variety: prestigious form spoken by the powerful/wealthy.
• English standardization: facilitated by the printing press and grammarians.
• Grammatical decisions favored aristocracy and sometimes Latin/mathematics.
• Non-standard varieties (vernaculars) include stigmatized features (multiple negatives).
• Standard language variety: is an artificial construct learned in school.

Linguistic Relativity: The Whorf Hypothesis

• Whorf Hypothesis/Linguistic Relativity: Language influences thinking and behavior.
• Whorf studied Native American languages like Hopi.
• Workers were cautious around gasoline drums labeled with warnings, but less so around "empty" drums, workers behaved accordingly.
• Hopi language has no past, present, or future tense; manifested and unmanifest domains.
• Concepts of time can be conditioned by language.

Language in its Social Settings: Language and Identity

• Speech marks identity and group affiliation, including region, class, ethnicity, and gender.

Social Class

• Language reflects social class via proximity to standard dialect.

Ethnicity

• Language use may mark solidarity within ethnic groups.
• African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a distinctive dialect with a unique history among oppressed ethnic groups.
• AAVE evolved from pidgin languages used by slaves.
• Pidgin: simplified language used when people cannot communicate effectively across languages.
• Shared features with Southern dialects due to historical influence.

Language and Gender

• Gender role expectations influence speech patterns.
• Men expected to speak in a low, monotone pitch.
• Women use a wider pitch range and minimal responses in conversations.
• Tannen: women use cooperative styles, men use competitive styles.

The Deaf Culture and Signed Languages

• Deaf people form linguistic minorities with shared culture.
• Deaf culture includes beliefs, attitudes, and communication via sign languages.
• Sign languages are true languages with unique units, morphemes, and grammar.
• American Sign Language (ASL) is distinct from English.

Language Change: Historical Linguistics

• Languages inevitably change over time.
• Historical linguistics: studies language evolution.
• Languages classified into taxonomies/family trees.
• Romance languages derived from Latin.

Globalization and Language

• Globalization spreads languages, cultures, and information, colonization led to language suppression.
• English is widespread due to colonization and North American pop culture.

Language Shift, Language Maintenance, and Language Death

• Many languages are threatened with extinction and are being replaced by dominant languages.
• Language survival depends on speaker decisions and societal attitudes.
• Language shift: occurs when a community stops using their old language in favor of a new one.

Revitalization of Indigenous Languages

• Wampanoag tribe successfully revived their language through historical documents and community efforts.

How Is the Digital Age Changing Communication?

• Technology transforms communication, but digital divide persists.
• Social media aids political activism and indigenous language preservation.