Chapter 9 - Linguistic Anthropology and Language Study

The Nature of Language and Linguistic Research

• Definition and Function of Language

  • Language is a system for transmitting information and sharing collective and individual experiences.

  • It enables humans to translate concerns, beliefs, and perceptions into symbols understood and interpreted by others.

  • In spoken language, this is achieved by taking sounds—of which no language uses more than about $50$—and developing rules for combining them meaningfully.

  • Sign languages function similarly but use hand shapes, body movements, facial expressions, and mouthing instead of sound.

• Global Language Diversity

  • There are approximately $6,000$ distinctive languages in the world.

  • Despite their complexity and differences, language experts find all languages are fundamentally organized in similar ways.

• Evolution of Linguistics

  • Linguistics is the systematic study of all aspects of language.

  • Its roots trace back to ancient Indian language specialists more than $2,000$ years ago.

  • The European Age of Exploration ($1400s$ through $1800s$) significantly advanced linguistics as explorers, traders, and missionaries documented a vast diversity of languages.

  • Approximately $12,000$ languages existed when these early inquiries began.

  • In the $1800s$, linguists and anthropologists used comparative research to discover patterns, relationships, and systems in sounds and structures, formulating laws and principles concerning language.

• Case Study: Linguistic Research in Samoa

  • Dr. Alessandro Duranti (University of California, Los Angeles) has researched Samoan language and culture for about $35$ years.

  • His initial research took place in Falefa, a village on Upolu island.

  • Upolu was settled approximately $3,000$ years ago by seafarers.

  • Samoan is one of about $40$ closely related Polynesian languages.

  • These languages belong to the Oceanic language family, which comprises $450$ languages spoken by approximately $2 \times 10^6$ people across $25,000$ Pacific islands.

Branches of Linguistics

• Scientific Nature of Linguistics

  • Linguistics is considered a science because its theories and facts are verifiable by independent researchers examining the same materials.

  • The three main branches are descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, and the study of language in relation to social and cultural settings.

• Descriptive Linguistics

  • This involves recording, describing, and analyzing all features of a language, especially those that are undocumented or lack written materials.

  • It provides a deeper understanding of a language's structure, unique repertoire (figures of speech, wordplay), and relationships to other languages.

  • It requires the researcher to have a trained ear and a thorough understanding of how different speech sounds are produced, often requiring training in phonetics.

• Phonology

  • Phonology is the study of language sounds. It is rooted in the Greek word phone, meaning "sound."

  • Phonetics: The systematic identification and description of distinctive sounds in a language.

  • Researchers must isolate phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound that make a difference in meaning.

  • Minimal-Pair Test: A process where linguists find two short words exactly alike except for one sound (e.g., bit and pit in English). If substituting one sound for another changes the meaning, those sounds are distinct phonemes.

  • Sounds that are pronounced differently but carry no difference in meaning for native speakers (e.g., "butter" vs. "budder") are considered variants of the same phoneme.

  • Modern English speech distinguishes $44$ phonemes, despite having only $26$ letters in the alphabet.

  • International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): Developed to transcribe foreign sounds, it includes $107$ letters, $52$ diacritics (marks changing sound value), and $4$ prosodic marks (designating rhythm, stress, and intonation).

• Morphology, Syntax, and Grammar

  • Morphology: The study of patterns or rules of word formation, including verb tense, pluralization, and compound words.

  • Morphemes: The smallest units of sound that carry meaning in a language (e.g., "cow" is a morpheme; "s" is a morpheme added to indicate plural).

  • Syntax: The patterns or rules by which morphemes or words are arranged into phrases and sentences.

  • Grammar: The collective observations about a language's morphemes and syntax.

  • Descriptive linguistics emphasizes objectivity; for example, avoiding the assumption that a foreign language must have the same form classes (nouns, verbs, etc.) as English.

Historical Linguistics and Language Change

• Scope of Historical Linguistics

  • Investigates relationships between earlier and later forms of the same language.

  • Studies "dead" languages to track processes of change into modern ones.

  • Examines interrelationships among older languages (e.g., the development of Latin into Romance languages like Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Romanian).

• Language Classification

  • Language Family: A group of languages descended from a single ancestral language.

  • Indo-European Family: Includes approximately $140$ languages and is subdivided into $11$ subgroups (e.g., Germanic, Romance).

  • English belongs to the Germanic subgroup.

  • The ancestral unified language for this family is reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, which began diverging about $6,000$ years ago.

  • Comparative examples: The word for "father" starts with an f or v sound in Germanic languages (vader, vater, fadar), while Romance languages use a p sound (p3ere, padre), closer to the original Indo-European p’tēr.

• Processes of Linguistic Divergence

  • Selective Borrowing: Incorporation of words from other languages (e.g., French words in English or English words globally due to globalization).

  • Technological Breakthroughs: The electronic revolution (radio, television, computers, mobile phones) created new vocabularies (e.g., phishing, vlogging, netiquette).

  • In-Group Vocabulary: Specific groups (gangs, sororities, religious groups, soldiers) create unique vocabularies to communicate exclusively and exclude outsiders.

  • Professional Specialization: Leads to the coining of new technical terms.

Language Loss and Preservation

• Impact of Colonialism and Globalization

  • External rule and domination have led to linguistic erosion or total disappearance of indigenous languages.

  • Over the last $500$ years, about half of the world’s $12,000$ languages have become extinct due to warfare, epidemics, and forced assimilation.

  • Today, half of the world's remaining $6,000$ languages have fewer than $10,000$ speakers; the other half have fewer than $1,000$.

  • $50\%$ of the world’s languages are spoken by just $2\%$ of the global population.

  • In North America, only $150$ of the original $300$ indigenous languages remain.

• Case Study: N|uu Language

  • N|uu is a "click" language from the Kalahari Desert in South Africa with fewer than $10$ remaining speakers.

  • It is the only surviving member of the !Ui branch of the Tuu language family.

  • Researchers use portable ultrasound imaging to capture tongue movements and document how click sounds are made.

• Linguistic Nationalism

  • The purging of "foreign" terms from a vocabulary to maintain or reclaim unique identity (e.g., French substituting e-mail with courriel or resisting Americanisms like le hamburger).

• Preservation Efforts and the Digital Divide

  • More than $80\%$ of the world's $2.8 \times 10^9$ Internet users are native speakers of just $10$ languages.

  • Tech giants like Mozilla and Google use volunteer native speakers to translate systems and create culture-specific terms (e.g., for Fulah speakers in West Africa, "crash" became hookii, meaning a cow falling over but not dying).

Anthropology Applied: Preserving Indigenous Languages

• S. Neyooxet Greymorning's Work

  • Dr. Greymorning, a member of the Arapaho tribe, focused on revitalizing the Arapaho language.

  • He found that by $1993$, despite school instruction, students were not achieving fluency.

  • Language Immersion: He established Hinono’eitiino’oowu’ (the Arapaho Language Lodge), a full-day immersion preschool.

  • Bambi Translation: He translated the film Bambi into Arapaho to serve as a learning aid, chosen because it used simple language and echoed traditional stories where animals speak.

  • Accelerated Second Language Acquisition (ASLA)™): A methodology he developed to "retune" the brain to visualize language rather than constantly translating between languages.

  • He has provided workshops to over $1,200$ instructors from more than $60$ communities globally.

Language in Social and Cultural Settings

• Sociolinguistics

  • The study of the relationship between language and society.

  • Examines how categories like age, gender, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and class influence speech styles.

  • Language and Gender: Research explores gendered speech patterns (e.g., Robin Lakoff’s study on why North American women exhibited less decisive speech styles than men).

  • Social Dialects: Varieties of a language that are mutually intelligible but reflect regional or social differences.

  • Lingua Franca: A shared language used for communication (e.g., Standard Chinese based on a Beijing Mandarin dialect for a country with $1.4 \times 10^9$ inhabitants).

  • Code Switching: The process of changing from one mode of speech or language to another as the situation demands.

• Ethnolinguistics

  • The study of the relationship between language and culture and how they mutually influence each other.

  • Linguistic Relativity: The idea that the words and grammar of a language are linked to culture and affect how speakers perceive the world.

  • Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Proposed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, suggesting that language provides "grooves" of expression that predispose speakers to certain perceptions.

  • Hopi Example: Unlike English, Hopi verbs do not express past, present, and future tenses through form. Instead, they distinguish between statements of fact, expectation, and regularity.

  • Cultural Vocabularies: Aymara Indians have over $200$ words for potatoes; Tarahumara Indians use one word, siyoname, for both green and blue.

Beyond Words: The Gesture–Call System

• The System Components

  • Human speech is embedded in a gesture–call system shared with nonhuman primates to "key" speech and provide interpretive frames.

  • Research suggests over $60\%$ of total human communication is nonverbal.

• Kinesics

  • The study of nonverbal signals in body language, including facial expressions and postures.

  • Humans have about $50$ facial muscles and can make more than $7,000$ facial expressions.

  • Cross-cultural similarities exist (smiling, crying, shock), but some gestures vary (e.g., the "eyebrow flash" is a friendly greeting in many cultures but considered indecent in Japan).

  • Gestural expressions for "yes" and "no" vary (e.g., Greeks jerk the head back for "no").

• Proxemics

  • The cross-cultural study of social space, pioneered by Edward Hall.

  • Hall identified four categories of social distance:

    1. Intimate: $0$ to $0.45\,m$ ($18$ inches).

    2. Personal-casual: $0.45$ to $1.2\,m$ ($1.5$ to $4$ feet).

    3. Social-consultive: $1.2$ to $3.6\,m$ ($4$ to $12$ feet).

    4. Public: $3.6\,m$ ($12$ feet) and beyond.

  • Relative height is used in stratified societies to express status (e.g., high-ranked individuals on platforms).

• Paralanguage

  • Specific voice effects that accompany speech (giggling, sighing, volume, pitch, tempo).

  • Essential in determining credibility (e.g., witness testimony in courtrooms).

  • The rise of e-mail and text messaging lacks these cues, leading to a $56\%$ correct perception rate of intended tone.

• Tonal Languages

  • About $70\%$ of the world’s languages are tonal, where pitch changes the meaning of individual words.

  • Mandarin Chinese has $4$ tones (flat, rising, falling, falling-then-rising); the syllable ba can mean "uproot," "hold," "eight," or "harrow."

  • Yuehai (Cantonese) uses $6$ tones; some dialects use up to $9$.

Telecommunication and the Origins of Language

• Traditional Telecommunication

  • Talking Drums: Used in West Africa to transmit coded information up to $12\,km$ away.

  • Whistled Speech: A phonetic emulation of spoken voice used for long-distance communication. Silbo (La Gomera) includes $2,000$ whistled words. Siberian Yupik speakers also use whistled speech.

• Biological Basis of Speech

  • Speech is unique to humans due to the anatomical position of the larynx (voice box) and epiglottis.

  • In humans, the larynx and epiglottis shift downward as they mature, allowing for patterned sounds.

• Evolutionary Development

  • Neandertals ($30,000$ to $125,000$ years ago) likely had the neurological and anatomical capacity for speech.

  • Displacement: The ability to refer to events removed in time and space, a key feature of human language shared with great apes.

• Transition to Writing

  • Writing systems are sets of visible or tactile signs representing units of language.

  • Early evidence includes symbols on $8,600$-year-old tortoise shells in China.

  • Egyptian Hieroglyphics: Developed $5,000$ years ago, used for $3,500$ years.

  • Cuneiform: Developed in Mesopotamia (Iraq), led to the first phonetic writing system (alphabet).

  • Rosetta Stone: A stele inscribed in three scripts (Hieroglyphs, Egyptian cursive, and Greek) that helped decipher hieroglyphs.

• Modern Literacy

  • Nearly $1$ in $5$ adults ($775 \times 10^6$) are illiterate; $2/3$ are women.

  • There are over $4.5 \times 10^9$ mobile cellular users worldwide, providing survival tools for communication without requiring literacy.