L

4. language

  • communication → speech, system of symbols that convey meaning, body language, writing. it’s taught, learned, and a part of enculturation. it is arbitrary associations. we assign meaning to what we want to express.

  • how do anthropologists study language?

    • study language in it’s social and cultural context

    • how people actually talk

    • speech reflects social differences

  • we are the only animals that have language, we have a genetic variation in our vocal chords that allows us to speak. FOXP2- if you don’t have the variation you’ll have a severe speech impediment.

  • primates use call systems

    • consist of a limited number of sounds that are produced after stimuli (food, danger, etc.) reflexive and cannot be combined to make new sounds.

    • taught american sign language. there was a chimp that learned up to 100 words. another chimp learned 100s of different signs. a gorilla learned up to 400-700. they display some human-like language capacity.

  • nonverbal communication - kinesics

  • structure of language

    • phonetics - all sounds, system sounds

      • phonemes (small sounds) → compare minimal pairs

        • words same except for one sound.

    • morphology - forms and words

    • syntax - clauses and sentences

    • semantics - meanings of various kinds

    • pragmatics - language use

    • lexicon - dictionary

  • language thought and culture

    • universal grammar (noam chomsky)

      • rules organize all language (limited set)

        • structural basis

      • sapir wharf hypothesis

        • grammar, categories of different languages → speakers to think in certain ways

      • focal vocabulary

        • lexical elaboration → cultural activities and experiences

        • changes in culture produce changes in language, changes in language produce changes in thought

    • ethnosemantics - categories in language that make a meaningful difference, classificationship system

      • some cultures call what we call aunts or uncles additional mothers and fathers.

  • sociolinguists

    • language performance in its social contexts

      • social economic and political differences

        • social position (ex. upper class, inner city)

        • situational

  • linguistic diversity

    • globally, there are more people who are multilingual/bilingual than people who are singular lingual. in europe, when countries are closer together, its more common to learn other languages because they’re spoken closer.

    • style shifting - common in black vernacular english

    • variants of the same language → diglossia

      • formal - high

      • informal - low

  • gender speech contrast

    • differences in how women and men speak with each other and in groups

    • stratification - a hierarchy/ranking system based on wealth and power

      • the people with wealth determine what is proper english

      • bourdieu called this “symbolic capital” because they are the ones who are “properly trained” and they can turn it into economic and social capital

      • symbolic domination

  • historical linguistics

    • daughter languages

      • ex. germanic languages → english, dutch, german, etc.

        • protolanguages

      • looks at how we can interpret and understand events of the past 5,000 years.

  • language loss

    • when we lose a language, we use a culture. we lose the way they think about time, seasons, species, mathematics, myths, music, the unknown, the everyday.

    • linguistic diversity has been cut in half and its expected that half of the current languages will disappear by the end of this century.