Linguistic Anthropology

ANTHROGURU
ANTHROPOLOGY MENTORSHIP MATERIAL
LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY
INDEX
1. SYLLABUS FOR THE WEEK

2. PREVIOUS QUESTIONS
3. CONTENT
SYLLABUS FOR THE WEEK
7. Culture, language and communication: Nature, origin

and characteristics of language; verbal and nonverbal
communication; social context of language use.
PREVIOUS QUESTIONS
1. Glottochronology. 10M---2023
2. Mention the major branches of linguistic anthropology and discuss language use in social
and cultural settings (15 Marks, 2021)
3. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. 10 M (2020)
4. Explain how variations in language usage related to social inequality. 20 M (2020)
5. Explain the difference between ‘Emic’ & ‘Etic’ and how does the difference derive from
the study of language? (10Marks 2015
6. The relationship between Linguistics and Social-cultural Anthropology. 10 M (2019)
7. Critically examine that the structure and content of language are influenced by culture. 15
marks (2018)
8. Short notes on Non-verbal communication. 10 M (2017)
9. State the theories regarding the origin of spoken languages in human societies both from
Biological and cultural points of view. (30 Marks —2010)
Join Telegram @ ANTHROGURU

: anthroguru@gmail.com
ANTHROGURU
7. Culture, language and communication: Nature, origin and

characteristics of language; verbal and nonverbal
communication; social context of language use
What is language?
"Language is a primarily human and non- instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and
desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols" (Sapir).
Language usually refers to the human system of units of sound (phonemes) compounded into words,
in turn combined through grammatical rules (syntactically) to form a mode of communication that
may be realized in both speech and writing.
Communication
Where language is a tool, communication is an experience. Communication is described as, “an act
of interchanging ideas, information, or messages from one person or place to another, via words or
signs which are understood to both parties.” It’s a crucial activity for any group of beings, because
it is the means by which members of the group cooperate together.
Communication is necessary for any group to function effectively. It is, at its core, a two-way
activity, consisting of seven major elements: sender, message, encoding, channel, receiver,
decoding, and feedback.
A message is encoded then sent from one individual (sender) to another (receiver), through
a channel. That message is then decoded and given feedback, if communicated effectively.
Today, there are a variety of communication channels available: face-to-face, phone calls, emails,
social media platforms, brochures, advertisements, television, signs, fliers, reports and more.
Feedback is essential, for it is then that the process of communication comes full circle.
The process of communication affects all sensory channels, as it can occur in a variety of ways.
Communication can be classified as:

 Verbal
 Non-verbal
 Written
 Visual (charts, graphs, etc.)
Language vs. Communication: Key Differences

1. Language is a system of communication that relies on verbal or non-verbal codes to transfer
information. Communication is a way of interchanging messages or information between
two or more people, focusing on the message.
2. Language is a tool of communication. Communication is a process of transferring
messages.
3. Language changes dynamically, as new words can be created. Communication is
considered static, as its basic steps remain unchanged.
4. The basics of communication do not change. However, new words are added to the
dictionary of language almost daily.
Communication, however, is somewhat limited in what it can transmit. Language, on the other hand,
is capable of transmitting unlimited kinds of information. In addition, communication seems limited
in what kinds of response it can evoke, while language appears capable of evoking an unlimited
range of responses. For example, vervet monkeys have three specific kinds of warning sounds: one
for leopard, one for eagle, and one for snake. If they hear the one for leopard, they drop what they
are doing and climb up in the trees; if they hear the one for eagle, they duck for cover; and if they

ANTHROGURU
hear the one for snake, they rise up and search the grass around them. But their responses are as
limited as their signals. Vervets can be said to have a communication system, but they don’t have a
language.
Linguistics
The scientific study of language structure. (Salzmann 1998: 4) – In regular speech, it’s the kind of
stuff people call “grammar”: verb conjugations, word order, case etc,
Linguistics and Anthropology

Linguistics and anthropology have a peculiar relationship, simultaneously intimate and estranged.
If anthropology is the study of man, then linguistics is concerned with a fundamental element of
man's existence, language.
In the first part of the 20th century the integral relationship of linguistics and anthropology was
taken for granted, and realized in the work of such figures as Franz Boas, A. L. Kroeber, Edward
Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and Clyde Kluckhohn.
Two celebrated examples of the techniques which anthropology borrowed from linguistics are
the use of etic-emic distinctions and of componential and distinctive feature analysis.
Etic and emic are fragments of the words phonetic and phonemic. The importance of this distinction
for language was made clear in a brilliant 1925 paper by Edward Sapir, which shows step by step
how two putative languages with exactly the same sounds may differ fundamentally in the uses to
which they put these sounds. Sapir's work sparked fruitful research in the phonemic analysis of
languages, especially in the 1930's and 1940's: Since then phonemic analysis has continued to be
one of an interrelated set of operations performed on data, and its principles have been generalized
beyond the study of sounds.
Consistent with this, an etic entity is one defined independently of a cultural system, whereas an
emic unit can be defined only according to dis tinctions within a bounded system. The relevance of
this concept to the structure of culture is easy to see, but how, in fact, to apply it is something else
again. It is a commonplace that different cultures treat the same etic phenomena in different ways,
but there are many realms of culture.
The logic of componential analysis (note its resemblance to binary computer logic, which grew
contemporaneously) is, however, easily adaptable, and has been widely used in anthropology, with
results which are most impressive in rather tightly structured semantic subsystems of culture, in the
analysis of kinship terms, for example, where its use was pioneered in America by Floyd G.
Lounsbury. Earlier, Claude Levi-Strauss in France had published a basic book on kinship and
social structure, integrating and extending a structural linguistic approach. Levi-Strauss is
particularly ambitious, for he evidently aims to account for all cultural data by con structing various
kinds of feature systems. Unfortunately, the definition of variables and their etic grounding is far
less straightforward for most cultural data than it is in the case of linguistic structure and,
correspondingly, Levi-Straussian analysis often looks circular and ad hoc, or at least odd, as it does
when he exhaustively trichotomizes the universe of cultural treatment of food into raw versus
cooked versus rotted. Such devices should have their validity tested by considerations of how well
they fit into a general theory of culture, and are not by themselves much help in anthropology.
A third area in which linguistic techniques have been borrowed into anthropology is newer, and
involves transformational theory as developed primarily by Noam Chomsky in the 1950's and
1960's. The general point, however, can be made again that, just as anthropologists are beginning to
experiment with transformational techniques, linguists are generally recognizing that they require
revision, and are, at the same time, incorporating them into linguistic theory as an essential device,
as was previously done with phonemics and distinctive feature analysis.
Leonard Bloomfield, a founding father of American structural linguistics, has been charged with
responsibility for the divorce of linguistic and anthropological (ethnological) concerns, and the

ANTHROGURU
charge has a certain credence, considering Bloomfield's concentration on descriptive methodology

in linguistics. Yet Bloomfield also understood well the crucial relationship of linguistics and
anthropology:
The science of language, dealing with the most basic and simplest of human social institutions, is a
human (or mental or, as they used to say, moral) science. It is most closely related to ethnology, but
precedes ethnology and all other human sciences in the order of growing complexity, for linguistics
starts at their foot, immediately after psychology, the connecting link between the natural sciences
and the human.
Current relationship
Two linguistically influenced approaches in current anthropology which have indeed been
successful: structural anthropology and ethnoscience.
Structural anthropology is indissolubly associated with the name and work of Claude Levi-Strauss
and is, like the other Levi-Strauss work mentioned, based on structural analyses of ethnographic
phenomena in terms of distinctive feature systems, often rather abstract and often difficult to
validate.
Ethnoscience is the name given by its practitioners to a system of ethnographic description in which
the main emphasis is on how members of a culture classify their universe, and which utilizes etic-
emic and other methods to make these matters precise.
There is now a growing area in which linguists and anthropologists can work truly and equally to
mutual profit. Dell Hymes has suggested anthropology of communication, but the two parts of
the new linguistic anthropology which is developing are more modestly referred to as
sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking. The crux of the problem, is the dilemma of an
autonomous linguistics which studies static systems. The difficulty arises when such systems are
applied in sociocultural contexts. What people actually say is complex and even contradictory, and
not to be accounted for on the basis of such systems alone. This has been an embarrassment to
linguists, but one which they have sloughed off by drawing a distinction between what they call a
speaker's competence and his actual performance, strongly implying that it is really competence
alone that matters and is systematic (and perhaps static). But one can scarcely evaluate such claims
without studying language in use, and it is in this direction that sociolinguistics and the ethnography
of speaking are leading, a direction which will, in short, put linguistics back into anthropology.
Linguistic Anthropology- a sub-field of anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is the study of language and linguistic diversity in time, space, and society.
Linguistic anthropology focuses on the structure and history of human languages and their relation
to social and cultural contexts. It shares data, theories, and methods with the more general discipline
of linguistics, but it also includes distinctly anthropological questions, such as, how does language
influence or reflect culture? And how does language use differ among distinct members of a society?
“Linguistic anthropologists view language in its cultural framework and are concerned with the
rules of its social use.” (Salzmann 1998:16)
An anthropological linguist is like a linguistic anthropologist in that they are interested in the social
meaning of language, but the former being a linguist would place a fair bit of emphasis on
linguistic structure (e.g. grammar). Basically, a grammar nerd is still a grammar nerd even if they
are interested in the human condition and social meaning.
In its early years, linguistic anthropology emphasized the documentation of languages of cultures
under ethnographic study—particularly those whose future seemed precarious due to colonization,
forced assimilation, population decimation, capitalist expansion, or other destructive forces. When
the first Europeans began to colonize the world five centuries ago, an estimated 12,000 distinct
languages existed. By the early 1900s—when anthropological research began to take off—many
languages and peoples had already disappeared or were on the brink of extinction. Sadly, this trend
continues, with predictions that nearly half of the world’s remaining 6,000 languages will become
extinct over the next hundred years.

ANTHROGURU
Linguistic anthropology has three main branches:
Linguistic anthropology
1.Descriptive linguistics (or) Ethnolinguistics/sociolinguistics

Structural linguistics
Historical linguistics
(Language in relation to social
and cultural settings)
1. Descriptive linguistics (or) Structural linguistics

2. Historical linguistics, and
3. Language in relation to social and cultural settings.
1. Descriptive Linguistics (or) Structural linguistics

The part of linguistics that focuses on the mechanics and patterning of language is called descriptive
linguistics. To describe a language, a linguist must first describe the sounds used in the language
under study.
Phonology
The general study of the sounds used in speech is called phonology; phonetics includes the
methods for describing the details of speech sounds. All of the sounds of human speech can be
identified and described using the methods of phonetic analysis.
Minimum units of sound are the building blocks of a language. English, for example, has forty-six
minimum units of sound — many letters in the English alphabet have more than one pronunciation.
The phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that will indicate a difference in meaning. Hence, in
English, p (as in pit) is a phoneme. Another phoneme is b (as in bit). Each of these minimum units
of sound when combined with the phonemes in the word it (which contains two phonemes) changes
the meaning of the words — pit and bit.
Different languages use some of the same sounds and many that differ from the ones you use.
Sounds can be described according to the anatomical parts that are used to create them, such as the
vocal cords, tongue, teeth, and lips. For example, a labiodental fricative is a sound made using lips
and teeth with friction created by passing the teeth over the lip. The English letters v and f are
formed in this manner. Because we learn the sounds of our own language from birth, the sounds of
other languages seem strange to us and are often difficult to copy.
Morphology and Syntax.
The other units of descriptive linguistics are morphology and syntax. The morpheme is the smallest
combination of sounds that carry a meaning (e.g., pit). Each language has rules that govern how
words are formed. In English, verbs must have a tense indicating when the action is occurring: past,
present, or future. Often the tense is indicated by the addition of a morpheme to a root word —
wash, washed, washing.
The sentence Dan wash Mary car does not sound correct to a native English speaker, though it is in
correct form for the sentence itself. That is to say, the subject, verb, and object are in the correct
order. If the sentence is altered to read Dan washed Mary’s car, it makes sense. English rules also
dictate that the relationship between Mary and the car be included. Each language has such
morphological rules about words that are often hard for nonnative speakers to learn. This is true
because most languages have exceptions to their usual morphological rules.

ANTHROGURU
Syntax is the manner in which minimum units of meaning (morphemes) are put together into
phrases and sentences. In other words, syntax is what we English speakers would call grammar.
Sentence structure in some languages will place verbs after nouns; in other languages the verb is
placed first. Still others place the verb at the very end of a sentence. Differences in syntax present
us with an interesting cross-cultural problem.
2. Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change and the historical relationships among different
languages in an effort to discover what kinds of changes occur in languages and why.
Research on this subject began in the late eighteenth century when Sir William Jones, a British
legal scholar, suggested that the linguistic similarities of Sanskrit, an ancient Indian tongue, to
ancient Greek, Latin, German, and English indicate that these languages were descended from a
common ancestral language. It was discovered that these languages are part of one family, the Indo-
European family, and share certain words and grammar. For example, the English word three is
trayas in Sanskrit, tres in Latin, treis in Greek, and drei in German. The similarity in Indo-
European languages led some early anthropologists to conclude that all current languages could be
traced to a single language family.
A language family is a group of languages descended from a single ancestral language. This family
is subdivided into some eleven subgroups (Germanic, Romance, and so on), indicating that there
has been a long period (6,000 years or so) of linguistic divergence from an ancient unified language
(reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European) into separate “daughter” languages. English is one of
several languages in the Germanic subgroup, all of which are more closely related to one another
than they are to the languages of any other subgroup of the Indo-European family.
Despite the differences between them, the languages of one subgroup share certain features when
compared to those of another. As an illustration, the word for father in the Germanic languages
always starts with an f or closely related v sound: Dutch vader, German Vater, Gothic Fadar.
Historical linguistics invented lexicostatistics and glottochronology methods to determine how

closely two languages are related. These can be used to reconstruct a tree for a language family
(lexicostatistics).
lexicostatistics and glottochronology
According to Swadesh, the more cognates two languages shared in their basic vocabulary, the more
closely related they were. Successively grouping the languages with the highest similarity would
therefore build a family tree of those languages. This approach became known as lexicostatistics.
Swadesh extended lexicostatistics into glottochronology – a system for inferring the ages of
language divergences. Libby’s radiocarbon method inspired Morris Swadesh, to extend its

ANTHROGURU
application to the development of languages. His goal was the absolute dating of the time of
divergence of related languages.
Swadesh thought that the replacement of words in languages is determined by exponential rule
similar to the disintegration of radioactive nuclei of isotope C14. He needed to calculate the rate of
this change. For this reason he established a testing word-list, consisting first of 215, later of 200
semantic units, which had to be universal and immune from borrowing.
Swadesh (1950) first applied this method to the Salishan languages spoken in the Pacific
Northwest.
The glottochronology has three fundamental premises,
In the first place different components of the vocabulary of a language have different degrees of
stability, recognizes that in each language, in addition to the broad vocabulary, which changes more
or less rapidly in accordance with the concrete cultural-geographical conditions under which it
functions, there is also a narrow, so-called basic vocabulary, reflecting universal and general human
concepts, which undergoes very slow change.
Secondly, it is assumed that the rate of change of this basic vocabulary, or the percentage of retention
of words in this category (index of retention, denoted by r), is approximately identical for all
languages over long periods of time.
In the third place, it is assumed that the index of retention of ingredients of the basic vocabulary -
i.e., the value of r - remains approximately constant in time. The maximum time period for which
observations have been made thus far is 2,200 years.
Significance of Glottochronology
By working out relationships among languages and examining their spatial distributions, these
specialists may estimate how long the speakers of those languages have lived where they do. By
identifying those words in related languages that have survived from an ancient ancestral tongue,
historical linguists can suggest not only where but also how speakers of an ancestral language lived.
Such work has shown, for example, how the Bantu family of languages spread from its origins in
western Africa (in the region of today’s Nigeria and Cameroon) to the majority of the continent.
Over the course of several millennia, Bantu-speaking peoples came to inhabit most of sub-Saharan
Africa, bringing the language, farming technology, and other aspects of their culture with them.
Glottochronology serves as a useful tool for tracing human migrations, understanding cultural
evolution, and reconstructing past societies. It complements archaeological and ethnographic data
by filling in gaps and offering a temporal dimension to cultural relationships.
3. Language in Its Social and Cultural Settings

Some linguistic anthropologists study the social and cultural contexts of a language. The study of
the relationships between language and culture, and how they mutually influence and inform each
other, is the domain of ethnolinguistics. In this type of research, anthropologists may investigate
how a language reflects the culturally significant aspects of a people’s traditional natural
environment. For example, Aymara Indians living in the Bolivian highlands depend on the potato
as their major source of food, and their language has over 200 words for this vegetable, reflecting
the many varieties they traditionally grow and the many different ways that they preserve and
prepare it.
The idea that the words and grammar of a language are directly linked to culture and affect how
speakers of the language perceive and think about the world is termed linguistic relativity. This
theoretical concept is associated with the pioneering ethnolinguistic research carried out by
anthropologist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf during the 1930s. Focusing on
the interplay of language, thought, and culture, their research resulted in what is now known as the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that each language provides particular grooves of linguistic
expression that predispose speakers of that language to perceive the world in a certain way.
For example, observing that the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest have no words for the
concept of past, present, and future led early proponents of linguistic relativity to suggest the Hopi
people had a unique conception of time (Whorf, 1946).

ANTHROGURU
Linguistic anthropologists also focus on the socialization process through which individuals become
part of a culture. Children take on this fundamental task as they develop, but it can be seen in adults
as well.
Sociolinguistics, the study of the relationship between language and society, examines how social
categories— such as age, gender, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and class—influence the use and
significance of distinctive styles of speech.
Applied Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic anthropologists put their research to use in a number of settings. Some, for example,
collaborate with recently contacted cultural groups, small nations (or tribes), and ethnic minorities
in preserving or reviving languages suppressed or lost during periods of oppression by dominant
societies. Their work includes helping to create written forms of languages that previously existed
only orally. This sort of applied linguistic anthropology represents a trend toward mutually useful
collaboration that is characteristic of much anthropological research today.
LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY
The field of linguistic anthropology has grown and changed in its 100-plus years of existence. In
the earliest days of the field, the emphasis was on collecting and cataloging languages. Working to
move beyond racist theories of language evolution, linguistic anthropologists stressed the
differences among language, race, and culture. In the United States especially, they strove to
document many of the Native American languages that appeared—in many cases because of U.S.
government policies—to be in danger of dying out.
Linguistic anthropologists collected texts and word lists, analyzed phonological and syntactic
systems, and published dictionaries and grammars. Although it was clear that language and culture
could be separate entities, linguistic anthropologists also recognized the complex relationships
between the two. Of special interest was learning how grammatical systems might influence ways
of thinking about the world and how semantic systems might reflect particular cultural foci.
Over time, linguistic anthropologists have turned their attention even more intently to the social and
cultural contexts in which language is used, studying the complex ways that words (and speech acts
in general) derive meanings from the situations in which they are uttered. Questions of identity,
power, and access have become the focus of much research. The act of speaking has come under
increased scrutiny as linguistic anthropologists work to understand how language is learned and
used in different speech communities. To whom are we speaking? When and where? Using which
variety of language? With what goals in mind? With what effect?
Linguistic anthropologists have worked to uncover many of the subtle and unconscious ways in
which language, both spoken and signed, is learned and used in different cultures and in different
social situations (see, for example, Jaffe 1999; Kroskrity 2000; Monaghan et al. 2003; Schieffelin,
Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Woolard 1989). Linguistic anthropologists see language not only as
an entity but as a practice, with constantly shifting boundaries and complex, individually determined
boundaries.
Renewed attention to the origins of language, to the potential role of language in the evolution of
humans, and to historical, genetic, and typological relationships among languages has brought
important new insights into the ways that language changes over time and space. In turn, these new
understandings of language origins and change have brought increased clarity to understanding how
the possession of a writing system, and the ability to read and write, can affect the chances that any
particular language has to survive and spread, as well as to language ideologies and the choices that
people make about language loyalty and identity. Understanding the sources and implications of
these decisions has become as important to linguistic anthropology as describing and analyzing the
actual words that people use when they speak.
Today, language is understood to be a cultural resource with economic, historical, and political value
and speaking is understood to be a cultural practice, learned and used in specific speech
communities and in specific situations. Because it is the branch of anthropology that focuses its lens
on language, linguistic anthropology addresses all these issues. It is, in the deepest sense, an
anthropology of language.

ANTHROGURU
Nature, origin and characteristics of language

The Nature of Language
Language, which is found in all cultures of the world, is a symbolic system of sounds that, when
put together according to a certain set of rules, conveys meanings to its speakers. The meanings
attached to any given word in all languages are totally arbitrary; that is, the word cow has no
particular connection to the large bovine animal that the English language refers to as a cow. The
word cow is no more or less reasonable as a word for that animal than would be kazunk. The word
cow does not look like a cow, sound like a cow, or have any particular physical connection to a cow.
The only explanation for the use of the word is that somewhere during the evolution of the English
language the word cow came to be used to refer to a large, milk-giving, domesticated animal. Other
languages use different, and equally arbitrary, words to describe the same animal.
To capture the nature of language and define it, linguists attempt to study language structure (form)
as well as language use (function). Studies may reveal things in single languages or singular
situations or may uncover things by comparison of one language to another language or other
languages. Those who look at the structure of languages do so to establish a foundation for exploring
distinct parts and compositions of specific languages in order to see what might be common among
them.
Van Valin explains that from the beginning of the 20th century, those who were curious about
“linguistic science,” such as Boas and his contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913),
were especially focused on identifying language systems to support the further study of language
use. This positioned the definitions of language within a construct that came to be known as
structural linguistics. In the 1930s, Leonard Bloomfield reinforced the idea of structuralism,
claiming that the main object of linguistic study should involve grammatical principles that have
little or nothing to do with observations of what individuals know or think about their language.
In the second half of the 20th century, as researchers from fields such as psychology, cognitive
science, and sociology began to take interest in language studies, definitions of language could be
distinguished as representative of one of two major linguistic areas, formalism or functionalism.
The former area involves linguistic study of the systematic, organized ways that language is
structured. The latter area is more concerned with language use and the reasons why individuals
choose to speak in certain ways and not in others.
Formal Linguistics
Franz Boas, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Leonard Bloomfield are among those who are
acknowledged as formal linguistic researchers in the first half of the 20th century. Their theories
and the field of structural linguistics led the way to expanded ideas about language study. Boas is
considered to be the father of American anthropology, and as stated above, his use of linguistic
analyses was only as a tool to get to culture. Although Saussure did not write down his ideas in
articles or books, his lecture notes distributed among his students became a text after his death titled
Course in General Linguistics. Language researchers give recognition to Saussure for the growth
of linguistics as a science, and his work has been a central one for the development of the subfield
of sociolinguistics. Bloomfield is best known as a linguist, although some classify him as an
anthropologist. Of his many writings, his book Language was revered for its discussions of
structural linguistics and comparative work to characterize languages.
The work of these three scholars—Boas, Saussure, and Bloomfield—left an indelible imprint on the
field of linguistics. In their wake, there began a strong desire among young language researchers to
pursue studies in formal linguistics. However, none was to compare to Noam Chomsky who moved
formal linguistics into a new home, that of generative transformational grammar.

ANTHROGURU
Functional Linguistics
The second area of focus from which we might posit definitions of language is that of functionalism.
Individuals who are involved in this particular area propose theories of language use that may or
may not allow for grammatical connections.
Dell Hymes (1996), credited with naming the linguistic subfield of anthropological linguistics,
commented on the nature of language and provided a functionalist perspective of grammar in which
he criticized Chomskian theories of formal generative grammar. This perspective demonstrates the
thinking of the moderate functional linguist:
The heart of the matter is this. A dominant conception of the goals of “linguistic theory” encourages
one to think of language exclusively in terms of the vast potentiality of formal grammar, and to think
of that potentiality exclusively in terms of universality. But a perspective which treats language only
as an attribute is unintelligible. In actuality language is in large part what users have made of it.
(Hymes, 1996, p. 26)
One important functional linguist and anthropologist who had studied under Boas, and whose work
was particularly vital in the latter half of the 20th century, is Joseph Greenberg (1915–2001). He
is credited with providing the first thorough classification of African languages. Greenberg looked
for language universals through language performance, rather than through formalistic analyses
such as those of Chomsky. Since his work resulted in characterizing languages in this way,
Greenberg is also mentioned in discussions of typological universal grammar.
Theories of Origin of language

We suspect that some type of spoken language must have developed between 100,000 and 50,000
years ago, well before written language (about 5,000 years ago). Yet, among the traces of earlier
periods of life on earth, we never find any direct evidence or artifacts relating to the speech of our
distant ancestors that might tell us how language was back in the early stages. Perhaps because of
this absence of direct physical evidence, there has been no shortage of speculation about the origins
of human speech.
In Charles Darwin’s vision of the origins of language, early humans had already developed musical
ability prior to language and were using it “to charm each other.” This may not match the typical
image that most of us have of our early ancestors as rather rough characters wearing animal skins
and not very charming, but it is an interesting speculation about how language may have originated.
It remains, however, a speculation.
1. The divine source theory
In the biblical tradition, as described in the book of Genesis, God created Adam and “whatsoever
Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof ”
Alternatively, following a Hindu tradition, language came from Sarasvati, wife of Brahma,
creator of the universe. In most religions, there appears to be a divine source who provides humans
with language. In an attempt to rediscover this original divine language, a few experiments have
been carried out, with rather conflicting results.
The basic hypothesis seems to have been that, if human infants were allowed to grow up without
hearing any language around them, then they would spontaneously begin using the original God-
given language.
The Greek writer Herodotus reported the story of an Egyptian pharaoh named Psammetichus (or
Psamtik) who tried the experiment with two newborn babies more than 2,500 years ago. After two
years of isolation except for the company of goats and a mute shepherd, the children were reported
to have spontaneously uttered, not an Egyptian word, but something that was identified as the
Phrygian word bekos, meaning “bread.” The pharaoh concluded that Phrygian, an older language
spoken in part of what is modern Turkey, must be the original language. That seems very unlikely.
The children may not have picked up this “word” from any human source, but as several
commentators have pointed out, they must have heard what the goats were saying. From this type
of evidence, there is no “spontaneous” language.

ANTHROGURU
If human language did emanate from a divine source, we have no way of reconstructing that original
language, especially given the events in a place called Babel, “because the Lord did there confound
the language of all the earth,” as described in Genesis (11: 9).
2.The genetic source theory

Even children who are born deaf (and do not develop speech) become fluent sign language users,
given appropriate circumstances, very early in life. This seems to indicate that human offspring are
born with a special capacity for language. It is innate, no other creature seems to have it, and it isn’t
tied to a specific variety of language. Is it possible that this language capacity is genetically hard-
wired in the newborn human?
As a solution to the puzzle of the origins of language, this innateness hypothesis would seem to
point to something in human genetics, possibly a crucial mutation, as the source. The investigation
of the origins of language then turns into a search for the special “language gene” that only humans
possess.
A mutated gene known as FOXP2 helps explain why humans speak and chimps don’t (Paulson
2005). The key role of FOXP2 in speech came to light in a study of a British family. Those who
have the nonspeech version of the gene cannot make the fine tongue and lip movements necessary
for clear speech, and their speech is unintelligible (Trivedi 2001).
Comparing chimp and human genomes, it appears that the speech- friendly form of FOXP2 took
hold in humans around 150,000 years ago. This mutation conferred selective advantages (linguistic
and cultural abilities) that allowed those who had it to spread at the expense of those who did not
(Paulson 2005).
Language offered a tremendous adaptive advantage to Homo sapiens. Language permits the
information stored by a human society to exceed by far that of any nonhuman group. Language is a
uniquely effective vehicle for learning. Because we can speak of things we have never experienced,
we can anticipate responses before we encounter the stimuli. Adaptation can occur more rapidly in
Homo than in the other primates because our adaptive means are more flexible.
3.The natural sound source theory
A quite different view of the beginnings of language is based on the concept of natural sounds. The
human auditory system is already functioning before birth (at around seven months). That early
processing capacity develops into an ability to identify sounds in the environment, allowing humans
to make a connection between a sound and the thing producing that sound. This leads to the idea
that primitive words derive from imitations of the natural sounds that early men and women heard
around them.
Among several nicknames that he invented to talk about the origins of speech, Jespersen (1922)
called this idea the “bow-wow” theory. The “bow-wow” theory. In this scenario, when different
objects flew by, making a Caw-Caw or Coo-Coo sound, the early human tried to imitate the sounds
and then used them to refer to those objects even when they weren’t present.
Jespersen identified five theoretical frameworks that had been used in the past to explain language
origins. He designated them as follows:
a. The Bow-Wow Theory
According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds
around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic—marked by echoic words such as moo, meow,
splash, cuckoo, and bang.
b.The Ding-Dong Theory
This theory, favored by Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the essential
qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were supposedly in
harmony with the world around them.
c.The La-La Theory
The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds
associated with love, play, and (especially) song.
d.The Pooh-Pooh Theory
This theory holds that speech began with interjections—spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"),
surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!").

ANTHROGURU
e.The Yo-He-Ho Theory

According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy
physical labor.
4. The tool-making source theory

In the physical adaptation view, one function (producing speech sounds) must have been
superimposed on existing anatomical features (teeth, lips) previously used for other purposes
(chewing, sucking). A similar development is believed to have taken place with human hands and
some believe that manual gestures may have been a precursor of language.
By about two million years ago, there is evidence that humans had developed preferential right-
handedness and had become capable of making stone tools. Wood tools and composite tools
eventually followed. Toolmaking, or the outcome of manipulating objects and changing them using
both hands, is evidence of a brain at work.
5.Charles Hockett theory on Origins and Acquisition of Human Language
No one really knows how human language originated, but in the early 1970s, Charles Hockett
suggested that language evolved in two steps.
The first step, which he called blending, occurred when human ancestors began to produce new
calls by combining old ones. Although a communication system based on blending greatly increases
the number of possible messages in a call system, it is still limited compared with modern language.
Hockett called the second step in the evolution of language “duality of patterning.” At this stage,
human ancestors acquired the ability to produce different arrangements of blended sounds and to
combine these sounds into a virtually limitless number of utterances (Hockett 1973:106).
Although early language sounded nothing like modern language, we can use current day English to
get a sense of blending and duality of patterning. Blending would be like combining two words to
make a third word (for example, combining breakfast and lunch to make brunch). Duality of
patterning would be like combining the sound units that compose the words breakfast and lunch to
make a great many different new words, such as bench, bunch, chest, fun, less, lust, and so on
(Salzmann 1993:84).
6.Biological adaptation theory or biology of language or Language Is a Biological Adaptation
Most of the research to date on this aspect of our question has focused on two key areas: the human
brain and the human vocal apparatus. Research on the brain has made it clear that the ability to
handle complex symbol systems such as language resides in this organ.
Language and the Brain
Lateralization and Language

One of the most striking aspects of the human brain is its division into two somewhat symmetrical
hemispheres, or halves. Sometimes these are called cerebral hemispheres. The two hemispheres,
one on the left and one on the right, are joined in the middle by the corpus callosum, a membrane
made up of more than two million fibers connecting the cells of the two hemispheres. An interesting
thing about these two hemispheres is that each one controls the side of the body opposite to it.
Language and spatial perception are also controlled by the two hemispheres, with language handled
by the left hemisphere and perceptual pattern recognition handled by the right hemisphere.
Language Areas of the Brain

Broca’s area, an area of the frontal region of the left cerebral hemisphere, is named for Paul Broca,
Our initial understanding of the role this area plays in language rested on the fact that damage to
Broca’s area affects clarity of speech. In particular, the area seems to be responsible for the motor
movements that are required for coordinating facial, tongue, palate, and larynx movement. People
with damage to Broca’s area have difficulty pronouncing words clearly, they pause a lot while trying

ANTHROGURU
to compose and produce words, they seem to have difficulty with function words (e.g., of, and, if,
but), and sometimes they even have difficulty with correct word order.
In 1874, Carl Wernicke
presented the results of autopsy
dissections of patients who had
had different kinds of speech
disturbances than the ones that
Broca had observed.
In contrast to Broca’s patients,

Wernicke’s patients could
pronounce words clearly but
they couldn’t put their words
together into meaningful
sentences. Their sentences were garbled, and they also had difficulty understanding spoken
language. The affected area, Wernicke discovered, was also in the left hemisphere but in the
temporal lobe, farther back than Broca’s area. The area is now known as Wernicke’s area, and it
appears to control the understanding of words and the ability to converse with others.
Language and the Human Vocal Apparatus

We mentioned earlier that nonhuman primates can be taught to use simple sign language, but that
they are unable to reproduce human speech.
In the 1960s, linguistic

anthropologist Philip
Lieberman showed that
the main reason for this is
the difference in shape of
the human vocal tract.
In particular, the larynx

(where your vocal cords
are located) is lower in
humans than in other
primates. What’s
especially important about this is that a lower larynx makes for a longer pharynx (the space above
the vocal cords in which air resonates on its way to the mouth and nose). As Lieberman’s research
demonstrated, having a longer pharynx makes it possible to produce a greater variety of vowels.
Much of this is done by moving the tongue backward and forward in the space available, thus
changing the shape of the pharynx as well as the shape of the oral cavity.
Changing the shape of the pharynx, which is the resonating chamber for vowels, allows us to
produce such different sounding vowels as [i], [u], and [a]. The more flexible human tongue also
produces a wider variety of consonants than most other animals are capable of. The human
configuration of larynx, pharynx, and tongue has advantages and disadvantages. Humans can talk,
breathe, and swallow at the same time, but we also run an increased risk of choking or inhaling our
food, as you know if you have ever “swallowed something wrong.” Animals with higher larynxes
and flatter tongues don’t have these problems.
Hyoid Bone
A potentially more direct source of evidence about the speech abilities of Neandertals has come with
the discovery of a Neandertal hyoid bone from Kebara Cave, Israel, dating to about 60,000 years
ago (Arensburg et al., 1990). The hyoid is a small, free-floating bone (that is, it does not articulate
with any other bones) that sits in the throat in front of the larynx and in close association (via muscles
and ligaments) with the mandible, larynx, and other structures. Arensburg and colleagues argue
that the Kebara hyoid is essentially human-like in its size and shape and very distinct from that of a
chimpanzee.

ANTHROGURU
According to Arensburg and colleagues, its position was human-like within a neck that was similar
in length to human necks. Thus they conclude that the larynx was also in a human-like position and
that Neandertals were fully capable of producing speech.
In contrast to the Neandertal hyoid, the recently discovered A. afarensis juvenile from Dikika,
Ethiopia (dated to 3.3 MYA) possesses a hyoid bone that is much more similar to those of the great
apes than to modern humans (Alemseged et al., 2006). If the hyoid is indeed a marker of speech
ability, then this hyoid suggests that A. afarensis did not possess human-like speech. However, this
is a hypothesis that still remains to be fully tested; at this point, it is reasonable to say that A.
afarensis retained the primitive condition of the hyoid as seen in the great apes.
HOW AND WHEN IS LANGUAGE POSSIBLE? PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Putting all of this material together can be a daunting task. But it is an excellent exercise in drawing
from all four branches of anthropology.
From physical anthropology, we learn that language was possible, in terms of brain structure, for
Homo habilis, 2 million years ago. We also learn that the language areas of the brain appear to
develop in response to the presence of linguistic signals (Deacon 1998). From contemporary
research in sign language, we know that signing is controlled by the same regions in the brain as
spoken language. So we can infer that signed language, at the very least, could have been possible
2 million years ago in Homo habilis groups.
From linguistic reconstructions of fossil vocal tracts, we learn that articulate speech was possible,
by means of a lowered larynx and a larger more flexible tongue, approximately 125,000 years ago
with early Homo sapiens, although partially lowered larynxes appeared as early as 300,000 years
ago, in Homo erectus. We must conclude that the transition—from the time when signed language
was possible to the time when speech became the dominant form of linguistic communication for
our human ancestors—had to have been a long slow process.
From cultural and linguistic anthropology, we know that language and culture are intimately
connected in complex ways, both in how language is learned and how it is used. We know that
children learn language as members of a speech community. We know that each speech community
lays down “rules” for appropriate use of language. We also know that language, culture, thought,
and perception are interrelated in complex ways. Because language and culture are so elaborately
intertwined, it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that language and culture would have evolved
together. This means that evidence for one should indicate the presence of the other. For the origins
of culture, we generally turn to archaeology.
Archaeological analyses of early tools indicate that right-handedness (which indicates the
development of dominance in the left—or language—side of the brain) was likely present at early
Homo habilis sites in Ethiopia 2.5 million years ago. Marking the beginning of the Paleolithic (or
Old Stone Age), these early tools include choppers, which appear to have been used for butchering
meat. Similar tools have also been found in eastern and southern Africa.
Early evidence of fire appears with early Homo erectus at 1.6 million years ago in Koobi Fora in
Kenya, and early evidence of more complex and sophisticated tools appears by 1.5 million years
ago. Sometime after 1 million years ago, Homo erectus began to spread out of Africa. By 800,000
years ago, cleavers, scrapers, and flake tools were being used in Africa, Southeast Asia, China, and
Europe, suggesting that Homo erectus groups were clearly beginning to use culture—and probably
language—to adapt to differing environments.
Putting everything together, it appears that some sort of signed language must have been possible
some 2 million years ago and that an early form of fully articulated spoken language must have been
developed and refined by 125,000 years ago. There seems no doubt that “real” language, with
duality of patterning, was in use among our ancestors by 70,000 years ago. As Lieberman notes, “A
hypothetical archaic hominid that was able to produce human speech would have had both a
functional, human-like Broca’s area and a human-like supralaryngeal vocal tract” (1994, 119). How,

ANTHROGURU
then, did early Homo habilis change a closed sign system into the open system that we call language?
And how was duality of patterning finally discovered?
Recall that Hockett was thinking primarily of spoken language when he suggested that a closed call
system had to become open through the process of blending. But it is entirely possible—indeed it is
likely—that the same process took place for signed language as well as for spoken language. In fact,
it is even possible that the transition from closed to open signs took place before spoken language
was fully developed.
Recent research into infant signing and into the development of sign language in populations for
which there is no spoken-language context suggests that the mental ability to create a fully structured
language is a human capability and that whether it is exhibited in signed language or in spoken
language is not as important as the fact that it exists. The difficulty is in developing a reasonably
plausible scenario for the occurrence of the breakthrough to signs that can be endlessly combined
and recombined in the way that Hockett described as duality of patterning. When did our ancestors
first figure out that the signs and sounds that their companions were producing represented
something more than simple “closed calls”? Given that children generally learn language in existing
speech communities, the questions are: What might that first community have been like? From
whom might those first language comprehenders have learned? What materials, such as sounds or
signs, were available to them, and what manipulations were necessary to transform the available
material into language?
Hockett suggested that situations that required uttering two different calls at the same time might
have focused attention on the possibility of blending distinct calls; he thought that the act of blending
calls could have helped open up the call system. Another possibility is that children could have been
play-mimicking the calls of their elders, thus developing the ability to have a sound (or perhaps a
gesture) stand as a token of the real thing but not be the real thing at all. In this way, a sound that
pretends to be a closed call becomes an open call, or a symbol of the closed call. Likewise, a
movement that pretends to be a closed gesture becomes an open sign.
Characteristics of Language
In the 1960s linguistic anthropologist Charles F. Hockett (1916–2000) helped to clarify the debate
by listing and defining what he called the design features of language, or the features by which
human language could be identified and distinguished from the more general category of animal
communication (Hockett 1960).
Hockett listed thirteen features and noted that all human languages contain all thirteen. Various
animal communication systems might have one or more features, but no animal communication
system could be shown to have all thirteen of the basic design features of language.
Four of these features in particular are unique to human language, and Hockett suggested that if
scholars could pinpoint how these had emerged, then we might be able to describe how human
language itself had developed.
Here is a brief discussion of each feature and its importance in defining human language.
1. The vocal-auditory channel refers specifically to the use of speaking and hearing as key features
of language, reflecting an ideology of orality that persists to this day. Other animal communication
systems that make use of the vocal-auditory channel include those of birds, whales, dolphins, and
nonhuman primates. Bee dancing, in contrast, uses space and movement for communication.
Unlike Hockett, we now know that sign languages are fully developed human languages using
manual and visual channels for communication, and we will insert observations concerning Sign
throughout this discussion. We can even think about writing here as a form of human language using
something other than the vocal auditory channel. The great strength and durability of Hockett’s
design features owes much to the fact that they are open to adaptation as scholars think about and
work with them.
2. Broadcast transmission and directional reception means that the sounds of human language
are sent out in all directions but that listeners perceive those sounds as coming from a specific
direction. When one of us lectures, everyone in the room can hear her, and each student can tell, just

ANTHROGURU
by listening, where in the room she is standing. If she walks to the back of the room and continues
talking, the students can tell, from the sound of her voice, that she is speaking from behind them.
Some will actually turn around to watch as well as listen. With sign language, everyone who can
see the signer is within broadcast range of a potential transmission. Broadcast transmission and
directional reception appear to be characteristic of just about every kind of animal communication,
so it is not particularly useful for defining human language as opposed to animal communication.
Still, it is a feature of human language, so Hockett noted it and included it in his list.
3. Rapid fading (or transitoriness) means that language signals don’t last very long. Speech in
particular fades quickly, and when it’s gone, it’s gone (unless, of course, you’ve made a recording
of it). Even when you play back a recording, the sounds of speech disappear almost as soon as you
hear them. This is also true for signed language. You see signs while they are being made, but then
they are gone unless you’ve videotaped them. Rapid fading seems to be a phenomenon that is
characteristic of all kinds of communication, not just human language. As with broadcast
transmission, however, it is a feature of human language, so Hockett included it in his list.
4. Interchangeability refers to the fact that a speaker can send and receive the same signal. Some
animal communication systems permit only certain individuals to send certain signals. A stickleback
fish, for example, can produce only the visual signal that goes with his or her specific gender. On
the other hand, any human can repeat anything that any other human says, with no limitations. You
can say, or sign, “I’m a boy” or “I’m a girl,” for example, even if that isn’t your true gender.
5. Total feedback means that speakers can hear themselves talk (and signers can feel themselves
sign) and that they can monitor what they say as they say or sign it. It is possible that this feature is
present in most forms of animal communication, but this is difficult to test.
6.Specialization means that language sounds are specialized for communication. In other words,
when humans speak, it is generally in order to transmit information. In contrast, when dogs pant, it
is primarily to cool themselves off. The sound of panting is not intended to transmit information.
The dog’s owners may realize that the dog is hot because they hear it panting, but that is a secondary
matter. This feature could be extended to include signed language in the sense that the primary
purpose of a sign is to transmit information
Over the years some scholars have modified the term “specialization” to refer to the idea that human
speech organs are specially adapted for speaking or that parts of the human brain have been specially
adapted for language. It is true that the human vocal apparatus and brain are uniquely able to produce
language, and in particular spoken language, but this is not what Hockett was referring to.
7.Semanticity means that specific sound signals (and specific signed signals) can be directly linked
to specific meanings. For example, as Hockett pointed out, the English word salt refers specifically
to salt and not to sugar or pepper or some other substance. Semanticity is present in other forms of
animal communication, too.
The example of vervet calls shows that three different signals have three different specific meanings
and elicit three different specific responses in vervets. However, animal calls are limited in what
they can stand for, rarely seem to change, and are not combined in new and different ways, while
human language sounds and signs are not limited in what they can describe, can change over time,
and can combine in a multitude of ways.
No animal appears to be able to combine the signals for food and danger, while human language
can combine words or signs to communicate that the food you are about to eat might be rotten, or
poisoned, or likely to induce an allergic reaction, or otherwise potentially dangerous. It is not just
the feature of semanticity but the way in which that semanticity is applied that helps to establish a
difference between human language and animal communication.
8.Arbitrariness means that there is no necessary or causal connection between a signal and its
meaning. In other words, any signal can be used to refer to anything. The English word salt, for
example, is neither salty nor granular. Nor does the sound of the word salt have any particular
connection with the sound or taste of salt. The English word salt does not resemble actual salt in
any way. Such arbitrariness can be further seen in the fact that different languages can assign very
different words to the same substance.

ANTHROGURU
The Shinzwani word for ‘salt’, for example, is munyo. And there are several different ways to sign
‘salt’ in American Sign Language (ASL). While some sign language signs are iconic, most are quite
arbitrary, just as spoken words are arbitrary. Bee communication, in contrast, is not arbitrary. A bee
moves in a specific direction and pattern to communicate a specific food location and distance from
the hive. The farther the food is from the hive, the slower the movement.
9.Discreteness means that the units used for communication can be separated into distinct units that
cannot be mistaken for one another. Nor do these units blend into one another. In English, the [b]
sound is clearly differentiated from the [p] sound. No matter how similar they may sound to speakers
of some other language, English speakers will perceive [b] and [p] as discrete, different sounds.
In ASL, hand shapes, placements, and locations function similarly as discrete, different signed
phonemes. Different languages may differentiate different spoken or signed phonemes, but all
languages rely on the ability to separate those phonemes into discrete categories. Bee
communication, in contrast, is continuous; decreased speed indicates increased distance.
As Hockett saw it, these first nine design features were shared by all contemporary primates,
including humans. This means that they were probably present in the prehistoric communication
system from which human language emerged. He theorized that this early pre-language
communication system must have been made up of a dozen or so distinct vocal calls, each one likely
to be uttered in response to a specific situation, such as the discovery of food or the presence of a
predator.
Hockett proposed four additional features,
 Displacement,
 Productivity,
 Traditional transmission, and
 Duality of patterning
10.Displacement refers to the fact that you can talk (and here, talk includes sign) about things that
are not present. You can talk about things that are physically absent, such as the planet Mars, or your
cousin who lives in another country, or a place you would like to visit someday. You can talk about
different time frames, such as the past or the future or the wished-for or the ought-to-be. You can
even talk about things that don’t exist, like purple people-eaters.
Interestingly, although most animal communication systems lack displacement, bee communication
appears to make use of this feature, signaling the existence and location of food that is at a distance
from the hive. On the other hand, chimpanzee vocalizations tend to occur only when the relevant
item is present. For example, the sight of food can evoke a ‘food found’ call, but if there is no food
present then there is no ‘food found’ call. Hockett suggested that displacement is one of the four
features that separates human language from the communication of other primates.
11.Productivity is the feature that allows you to produce and comprehend entirely new utterances
that you’ve never spoken or heard or seen before. These utterances can be serious or playful, just as
long as you follow the rules that your particular language provides for combining units in ways that
“make sense” to other members of your community. Productivity lets you write poetry and song
lyrics and imaginative answers to questions on exams.
Productivity let Noam Chomsky write, “Colorful green ideas sleep furiously.” It let Lewis Carroll
write, “‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves. . . .” It let Groucho Marx say, “Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.” And it let us write this book. If you think about it, most of what you say
in ordinary conversation is not memorized material. Instead, productivity allows you to create
utterances as you need them.
Productivity is a key feature in human language, whether it is spoken or written or signed. Not
surprisingly, this is one feature that sets human language apart from most other animal
communication. Gibbons and baboons have a generally unchanging set of about a dozen calls, but
each call has a specific meaning, relating to such things as danger or the presence of food, and the

ANTHROGURU
calls do not seem to be combined into novel utterances. New calls are not invented; existing calls
are not combined. It does not seem possible, for example, for a gibbon to communicate that there is
food present but that the situation is dangerous. The chimpanzee Washoe is said to have combined
signs occasionally to create new signs for items; she signed water and bird, for example, to sign
‘duck’, and sweet plus drink to sign ‘watermelon’, but this did not seem to result in a flurry of new
sign combinations for additional items.
12.Traditional transmission refers to the fact that language is learned in social groups. Although
humans are probably born with an ability to learn language, the learning takes place within social
groups. The debate is still raging over what and how much linguistic capacity humans are born with,
from a basic grammatical blueprint to simply the capacity to learn language. In any case, it is clear
that whatever is learned is learned in social settings. It is also clear that appropriate ways of using
language are also learned in social settings.
Although in a few cases insects or animals appear to learn or refine bits of their communication
systems after birth, these cases are relatively rare and are not always clear cut. Many of the primates
that have been the subject of language acquisition experiments have been raised in social settings,
and this is intriguing. It is possible that being raised in a cultural context in which speaking, signing,
and using human language are routine has changed the way that bonobos such as Kanzi relate to
language (Sue Savage- Rumbaugh, personal communication). So, traditional transmission is another
feature that helps to set human language apart from animal communication.
13.Duality of patterning is one of the most important features of a language system. It appears to
be a combination of the features of discreteness and productivity. Hockett developed the phrase
“duality of patterning” to express the fact that discrete units of language at one level (such as the
level of sounds) can be combined to create different kinds of units at a different level (such as
words). For example, the discrete English sounds [k], [æ], [t], and [s] can be combined to produce
the English words cat, act, tack, scat, acts, tacks, task, cast, cask, and more. Sign languages also
appear to make use of duality of patterning in the ways that they arrange and combine primes.
Every language has rules for which spoken or signed phonemes can combine with which other ones
and in which orders. Spoken English does not allow, for example, a word like tka or kta, and it
generally doesn’t use the combination [ts] at the beginnings of words, even though other languages
allow words to start with that combination. In American Sign Language, you don’t combine a
straight movement with a circling movement, or an arcing movement with a straight movement.
According to Hockett, duality of patterning was probably the last feature to emerge in human
language, and it was critical in separating human language from other kinds of primate
communication.
HUMAN- NON HUMAN COMMUNICATION
All animals communicate and many animals make meaningful sounds. Others use visual signs, such
as facial expressions, color changes, body postures and movements, light (fireflies), or electricity
(some eels). Many use the sense of smell and the sense of touch. Most animals use a combination
of two or more of these systems in their communication, but their systems are closed systems in that
they cannot create new meanings or messages.
Human communication is an open system that can easily create new meanings and messages. Most
animal communication systems are basically innate; they do not have to learn them, but some
species’ systems entail a certain amount of learning. For example, songbirds have the innate ability
to produce the typical songs of their species, but most of them must be taught how to do it by older
birds.
Great apes and other primates have relatively complex systems of communication that use varying
combinations of sound, body language, scent, facial expression, and touch. Their systems have
therefore been referred to as a gesture-call system.
Humans share a number of forms of this gesture-call, or non-verbal system with the great apes.
Spoken language undoubtedly evolved embedded within it. All human cultures have not only verbal

ANTHROGURU
languages, but also non-verbal systems that are consistent with their verbal languages and cultures
and vary from one culture to another. We will discuss the three most important human non-verbal
communication systems.
Verbal and nonverbal communication

Verbal communication
The Structure of Language
Every language has a structure: an internal logic and a particular relationship among its parts. The
study of the structure and content of specific languages is called descriptive or structural linguistics.
Descriptive or structural linguists assume that language can be separated from other aspects of
culture and studied without any direct reference to the social context in which speaking takes place
(Hickerson 1980:3). Their work suggests that the structure of any language consists of four
subsystems:
 Phonology (a system of sounds),

 Morphology (asystem for creating words from sounds),
 Syntax (a system of rules for combining words into meaningful sentences), and
 Semantics (a system that relates words to meaning).
Phonology
People use hundreds of different sounds in their various languages. The total set of sounds that are
used in all of the world’s languages are called the set of phones. Although you may have experienced
great difficulty in correctly producing the sounds of a language you are learning, all humans are
biologically capable of making all of the sounds of the world’s languages.
However, any particular language uses only a relatively small number of phones and those are the
ones its speakers learn to make and recognize. Sounds used in one language may be absent in other
languages. English, for example, does not use the click sound of the language of the Ju/’hoansi
(!Kung) of southern Africa or many of the tonal sounds of Chinese.

ANTHROGURU
Furthermore, combinations of sounds are used in different ways in different languages. For example,
an English speaker can easily pronounce the ng sound in thing at the end of an utterance but not at
the beginning; how people ever, this sound is used in the initial position in Bambara, a language of
Africa (compare the ease of saying thing with the difficulty of saying ngoni, the name of a musical
instrument in Bambara). The set of phones used in a particular language is referred to as the
phonemes of the language.
A phoneme is the smallest sound unit that distinguishes meaning within a given language. An
example will help to make this clear. In Standard Spoken American English (SSAE), the English
accent you generally hear on network news broadcasts, the sound /d/ in the English word den and
/th/ in then are phonemes. The words den and then have different meanings, and this difference in
meaning is indicated by the initial consonant sound (/d/ or /th/). Spanish also uses these sounds, but
in Spanish these two sounds are allophones; that is, both phones indicate only one phoneme. In
Spanish, the sounds /d/ and /th/ may be slightly different, but they do not distinguish words from
one another. Rather, these sounds are used in different contexts (/d/ at the beginning of a word and
/th/ in the middle of a word).
A person who says nada using the consonant sound in día (the Spanish “d”) will still be understood
to be saying “nothing,” although people may think the accent is “wrong” or “foreign.” English has
many cases in which a single phoneme may be indicated by many phones; as in Spanish, different
sounds do not necessarily serve to distinguish words.
For example, the English phoneme /t/ includes at least six different phones (Ladefoged 1982).
Consider the /t/ sounds in stick, tick, and little. The /t/ sound in each of these words is different. As
you say the /t/ sound in one word after another, you can feel your tongue change position. Now, hold
your hand in front of your mouth and say stick and then tick. Although the /t/ in each of these words
might sound the same to you, you will feel a puff of air as you say the /t/ in tick but not when you
say stick. This demonstrates that the sounds are different, even though you may have a difficult time
hearing the difference. Most languages use only about 30 phonemes in their structure.
By an unconscious process, a speaker not only learns to make the sounds used in his or her native
language but also to differentiate between sounds that are significant (phonemes) and those that are
not. The ordinary person does not consciously think about the phonemic pattern of his or her
language. Only when trying to learn another language, or hearing someone with a thick foreign
accent speak our own, do we become aware of the variation in sounds and phonemes.
Morphology
The smallest unit of a language that has a meaning is called a morpheme. In English, -s, as in dogs,
means “plural”; un- as in undo, means “negative”; -er, as in teacher, means “one who does.” Because
-s, un-, and –er are used not by themselves but only in association with another unit of meaning,
they are called bound morphemes.
A morpheme that can stand alone, such as giraffe, is called a free morpheme. A word is the smallest
part of a sentence that can be said alone and still retain its meaning. Some words consist of a single
morpheme. Giraffe is an exam example of a single-morpheme word. Teacher has two morphemes,
teach and -er. Unlocks has three morphemes: un-, lock, and -s. Languages differ in the extent to
which their words tend to contain only one, several, or many morphemes, as well as in their rules
for combining morphemes.
Synthetic languages such as Mohawk or Inuktitut (an Arctic Canadian language) have words with a
great many morphemes and complex, highly irregular rules for their combination. In agglutinating
or synthetic languages, translating a single word may require an entire English sentence.
For example, the Inuktitut word qasuirrsarvigssarsingitluinarnarpuq contains 10 morphemes and is
best translated as “someone did not find a completely suitable resting place” (Bonvillain 1997:19).
Syntax
Syntax is the arrangement of words to form phrases and sentences. Languages differ in their
syntactic structures. In English, word order is important because it conveys meaning. The syntax of
the English language gives a different meaning to these two sentences: “The dog bit the man.” and
“The man bit the dog.” However, word order is not equally important in all languages. In Latin, for
example, the subject and object of a sentence are indicated by word endings rather than word order.

ANTHROGURU
When they analyze the syntactic structure of a language, descriptive linguists establish the different
form classes, or parts of speech, for that language.
All languages have a word class of nouns, but different languages have different subclasses of nouns,
frequently referred to as genders. Gender classification can apply to verbs, indefinite and definite
articles, and adjectives, all of which must agree with the gender classification of the noun. The use
of the term gender seems appropriate in the Romance languages (Spanish, French, and Italian), as
well as in many others, because nouns are divided into masculine and feminine subclasses. In
addition to these, German and Latin have a neuter subclass. However, some languages have a great
many different subclasses. For example, Kivunjo, a language spoken in East Africa, has 16
subclasses (Pinker 1994:27).
Although the word gender may be used to describe these classes, they have nothing to do with sex
roles. Papago, a Native American language, provides another example of a linguistic gender division
that has nothing to do with sex roles. The Papago divide all the features of the world into two
genders, or classes: “living things” and “growing things.” Living things include all animated objects,
such as people and animals; growing things refer to inanimate objects, such as plants and rocks.
Applying the rules of grammar turns meaningless sequences of words into meaningful utterances,
but sometimes grammar seems to have a meaning of its own. We can recognize a sentence as
grammatical even if it makes no sense. To use a now classic example (Chomsky 1965), consider the
following sentences: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” “Furiously sleep ideas green
colorless.” Both sentences are meaningless in English. But the first is easily recognized as
grammatical by an English speaker, whereas the second is both meaningless and ungrammatical.
The first sentence has the parts of speech in English in their proper relation to each other, so it seems
as if it should make sense. The second sentence does not.
Semantics: The Lexicon
The total stock of words in a language is called a lexicon. The relationship between culture and
language is clearly seen in a lexicon. In industrial societies, the lexicon contains many words
reflecting technological complexity and specialization. In technologically simpler societies, the
lexicon has few such words. The lexicon of any culture reflects what is most important in that
culture.
For example whereas the average American can name only about 50 to 100 species of plants,
members of societies based on hunting and gathering or on gardening can typically name 500 to
1000 species of plants (Harris 1989:72). Such lexical specialization is not limited to nonindustrial
societies. Germans in Munich have a vocabulary of more than 70 words to describe the strength,
color, fizziness, clarity, and age of beer (Hage 1972, cited in Salzmann 1993:256). Because
vocabulary reflects the way people with a certain culture perceive their environment,
anthropologists use it as a clue to understanding experience and reality in different cultures.
Through vocabulary, anthropologists attempt to get an insider’s view of the world less influenced
by the anthropologist’s own classification system. This perspective has long been used in studying
the vocabulary for kinship, which gives good clues to the nature of family relations in a culture. In
English, for example, the term brother-in-law can include my sister’s husband, my husband’s
brother, and the husbands of all my husband’s sisters. The use of a single term for all of these
relations reflects the similarity of a woman’s behavior toward all the men in those different kinship
statuses. Hindi, a language of North India, has separate terms for my sister’s husband (behnoi), my
husband’s elder brother (jait), my husband’s younger brother (deva), and my husband’s sisters’
husbands (nandoya). The variety of words in Hindi reflects the fact that a woman treats the members
of each of these categories differently.

ANTHROGURU
Nonverbal communication
In addition to speaking, all humans use a variety of other methods to communicate. Birdwhistell,
one of the pioneers of research in nonverbal communication, argued that in any social situation,
almost two-thirds of communicated meaning comes from nonverbal cues (1955). To quote
Edward Hall (1959), another influential analyst of nonverbal behavior, “time talks” and “space
speaks.”
The term nonverbal communication, taken literally, refers to the transmission of signals
accomplished by means other than spoken words. Used broadly, the term includes bodily
gestures, facial expressions, spacing, touch, and smell, as well as whistle, smoke-signal, and drum
“languages,” and such optional vocal effects as those that accompany spoken utterances and can be
considered apart from actual words.
Nonverbal systems of communication may be divided into
 those that are derived from spoken language and
 those that are independent of it.
With only a few exceptions, writing systems belong to the first category, representing as they do the
sounds of speech. In turn, writing systems may serve as the source of other systems. The English
word written as tree can be transmitted in the International Morse Code by audible or visual signals
as –·–· · ·, with –, ·–·, and · representing, respectively, the letters t, r, and e.
Some sign languages are independent of speech. Because some are independent, it was possible for
the Plains Indians to use sign language as a means of effective communication among tribes
speaking different, and many times even unrelated, languages.
The study of nonverbal communication is divided into numerous fields—among them, artifacts,
haptics, chronemics, proxemics, kinesics etc.
1.Artifacts refers to understanding the messages sent by clothing, jewelry, tattoos, piercings, and
other visible body modifications. For example, among the Tuareg, a people of the Sahara whose
men are veiled, the position of the veil is an important part of nonverbal communication (R. Murphy
1964). A Tuareg man lowers his veil only among intimates and people of lower social status. When
he is engaged in an encounter in which he does not wish to commit himself to a particular course of
action, he wears the veil very high on the bridge of his nose so that the other party can read as little
as possible from his facial expression.
In the United States, we are very aware of the use of artifacts to send messages about ourselves. A
pierced ear means something different from a pierced lip or tongue. Some students come to class in
torn jeans and T-shirts; others wear designer labels or a white shirt and tie. All are trying to send
messages about who they are.
2.Haptics refers to the study and analysis of touch. Touch carries important meaning in all societies.
Handshakes, pats on the back or head, kisses, and hugs are all ways we communicate by touch.
Many American males, for example, believe that much is communicated by the particular quality
of a handshake. Strong, firm handshakes are taken to indicate power, self-confidence, and strength
of character, whereas weak or limp handshakes may be interpreted as suggesting lack of interest,
indecisiveness, or effeminacy.
Americans generally feel free to use their left hands for virtually anything, but in many cultures,
particularly in the Middle East, people scrupulously avoid the use of their left hands for eating,
handling money, and many other social interactions. The left hand is considered unclean, and using
it is generally unacceptable.
Analysts have frequently divided the world’s societies into “contact” cultures and “noncontact”
cultures (E. Hall 1966; Montagu 1978). Contact cultures are found in the Middle East, India, the

ANTHROGURU
Mediterranean, and Latin America. In these regions, people interact at very close distances and touch
one another frequently. In “noncontact” cultures, including those of northern Europe, North
America, and Japan, people generally avoid physical contact.
The contact/noncontact dichotomy is simplistic and does not accurately reflect the variability and
complexity of actual interaction. For example, people in Western “noncontact” cultures in certain
instances may expect relatively high degrees of contact when conversing, even with strangers
(Burgoon, Buller, and Woodall 1996). In many cultures, there is a strong relationship between touch
and power.
In public social relationships, the person who touches another is likely to have more power than the
person who is touched. Thus, bosses touch their subordinates, but workers are not likely to touch
their bosses. Research shows that in the United States touchers are likely to be perceived as more
assertive, strong, and dominant than nontouchers (Leathers 1997:126).
3.Chronemics
Researchers interested in chronemics study the different ways that cultures understand time and use
it to communicate. People in different cultures are likely to have different notions of the importance
of time. For example, in North American culture, what are we saying to a person when we show
up for an appointment 40 minutes late? Are we saying something different if we show up 10 minutes
early? Is a Latin American who shows up late for an appointment saying the same thing? The
American concern with the precise measurement of time is suggested by the prominence of clocks
in public places such as town squares and on banks and other commercial buildings.
Most Americans wear watches and make sure that they are set accurately. Ferraro (1994) notes that
the American obsession with accurate timing and schedules is often viewed negatively by members
of other cultures. Keeping to a schedule often means rushing through appointments and thus
sacrificing meaningful interpersonal relations to the rigors of timing.
Edward Hall (1983) divided cultures into those with monochronic time (M-time) and those with
polychronic time (P-time). The United States and northern European countries exemplify M-time
cultures. Hall argued that people in M-time cultures think of time as inflexible and organize their
lives according to time schedules; in P-time cultures, time is understood as fluid; much more
emphasis is placed on social interaction than on schedules, and human activities are not expected to
proceed like clockwork.
According to Victor (1992), time in P-time cultures simply exists. Being late for an appointment
conveys virtually none of the unspoken messages that the same action would in an M-time culture.
Like the contact/noncontact dichotomy, the division of cultures into M-time and P-time seems to
capture a basic truth about cultural variation but is overly simplistic. There is enormous variability
within cultures. For example, how long an individual is kept waiting for an appointment may have
more to do with power than with either polychromic or monochronic perceptions of time. People
may be on time for their superiors but keep their subordinates waiting.
4.Proxemics is the study of social space, which is understood differently in different cultures.
Americans, for example, tend to focus on objects and think of the space between them as empty,
whereas Japanese tend to focus more on space and assign specific meanings to it. For example,
Americans name streets in their cities, whereas Japanese name the intersections (Leathers 1997).
Researchers in proxemics identify three different sorts of space (E. Hall 1968, Rapoport 1982).
First is the built environment: homes, buildings, parks, and how they are arranged. Such
arrangements are referred to as fixed-feature space. For example, the number of rooms it is
appropriate to have in a house and the relation of these rooms to one another are aspects of fixed
space that vary from culture to culture.
The second type, semi-fixed-feature space, refers to the placement of furniture, equipment, and
decoration within an environment. Furniture, for example, has very clear communicative functions.
Consider the placement of a desk within a professor’s office. The office may be arranged so that the

ANTHROGURU
professor sits behind the desk and the student in front, or the desk may be off to the side so that the
student and professor sit much closer to each other.
The third type, non-fixed-feature space, refers to the space that individuals maintain around their
bodies.
Hall (1968) identified three different ranges of personal communicative space: intimate distance,
from 1 to 18 inches; personal distance, from 18 inches to 4 feet; and social distance, from 4 to 12
feet. He suggested that communication among friends ideally happened at personal distance,
whereas lovers and very close friends communicated at intimate distance, and relative strangers at
social distance.
However, interpersonal communication distance is clearly affected by circumstances, culture,

gender, and aspects of individual personality. We speak to strangers at a much closer distance in a
movie or a classroom than we would in an unconfined space. In the United States, women talk to
each other at closer distances than men, as do mixed-gender pairs. In Turkey, on the other hand, men
and women talk at close distances with members of their own sex but at very large distances with
members of the opposite sex (Leathers 1997).
5.kinesics
kinesics is the study of body position, movement, facial expressions, and gaze. Birdwhistell (1955)
identified eight parts of the body that could be used to send messages: total head, face, neck, trunk,
shoulder-arm-wrist, hand, hip-jointleg-ankle, and foot. In other words, virtually all body movements
can have significance. But, of course, not all do. We use our posture, our visual expression, eye
contact, and other body movements to communicate interest, boredom, and many additional things.
However, it is clear that not all the movements of our body carry social meaning. Clifford Geertz
(1973b) famously suggested that the job of an ethnographer was learning to tell the winks from the
twitches— that is, to tell the meaningful communication from the meaningless. Geertz meant this
metaphorically, but those who study kinesics do it literally.
The case of smiling is a particularly interesting example of kinesic research. There is very good
evidence that smiling, and some other facial expressions, are biologically based human universals.
There are no societies in which people do not smile. In fact, smiling is characteristic not only of
human beings; our nearest nonhuman relations, chimpanzees and gorillas, smile as well. Moreover,
smiling is a reasonably good indicator of happiness or nonviolent intent among all peoples. In any
society, social interactions are more likely to have a positive outcome if people are smiling than if
they are frowning or scowling. However, it is also true that a smile does not mean the same thing in
all cultures.
Americans generally equate smiling with happiness, but anthropologists report that people in many
cultures smile when they experience surprise, wonder, or embarrassment (Ferraro 1994). A recent
book on international business advises American managers that in Japan, happiness hides behind a
straight face and that the Japanese often smile to make their guests feel comfortable rather than
because they are happy (R. Lewis 1996:267). However, researchers Matsumoto and Kudoh (1993)
found that despite substantial differences between American and Japanese interpretations of smiles,
members of both cultures agreed that smiling faces were more sociable than neutral faces.
Nagashima and Schellenberg (1997) found that similarities far outweighed differences in
interpretation of smiles by American and Japanese college students.
6.Paralanguage
Paralanguage includes the vocal features that shape the delivery of spoken language, such as tone,
pitch, speed, rhythm, and volume. Saying the same thing rapidly or slowly, or in a highor low-
pitched voice, can change its meaning. We can also communicate emotion and sincerity through
voice qualities, as well as advanced skills like irony and sarcasm. Other paralinguistic features
include sounds that are not strictly linguistic but that convey meaning; called vocalizations, some
examples are “um” and “shhh” and “tsk tsk.”

ANTHROGURU
The most common paralinguistic features are usually assigned to three categories.
Voice qualifiers have to do with the tone of voice and pacing of speech, and they include variations
in volume or intensity (for example, overloud, oversoft), pitch (noticeably high, noticeably low),
tempo (overly fast, overly slow), and articulation (for example, drawling, clipping, or rasping).
Besides these and other voice qualifiers, there are various voice characterizers that accompany
speech or, more precisely, through which one talks. These range from laughing and giggling to
crying and sobbing to yelling, moaning, groaning, whimpering, and whining.
And then there are the so-called vocal segregates, represented for the most part by such
extralinguistic sounds (that is, sounds not part of the phonemic system) as the ones graphically
represented in English texts as uh-huh to indicate agreement or gratification, uh-uh to indicate
disagreement, tsk-tsk to express mild disapproval, and other graphic approximations of different
kinds of snorts and sniffs.
Here are some concrete examples of paralinguistic behavior: highly controlled articulation
produces the crisp, precise pronunciation expected of formal pronouncements addressed to large
audiences; by contrast, speech so relaxed as to become slurred is heard from those who are very
tired, sleepy, or under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. Speakers of English and other
languages tend to associate extreme pitch variation with happiness and surprise; high pitch level or
fast tempo with fear, surprise, or anger; and low pitch level or slow tempo with boredom and
sadness. The rounding of lips imparts to the voice the cooing quality that is frequently used by adults
when talking to a baby.
As an additional example, consider whispering. A person may whisper to avoid waking up others
who are napping or sleeping (an example of thoughtful behavior); to avoid being overheard
(consideration of privacy); to convey a secret or a conspiracy; or to spread rumors of an intimate
nature about someone (hence the phrase “whispering campaign”). In the discussion of speech, one
may be tempted to consider silence, or forbearance from speech, not worth mentioning. However,
that would be a mistake.
Depending on the context, silence can indicate a variety of meanings or feelings. In a tense situation,
silence can be threatening if it is used deliberately instead of an appeasing remark; by contrast, it
may help to lessen tension by withholding a comment that could worsen a situation. Silence may
also express one’s uncertainty about an issue or help to avoid an argument. It may be a gentle
substitute for saying “no,” as when a young man asks “Will you marry me?” and no response is
forthcoming. Some of these and other uses of silence are by no means universal; they may vary
somewhat, or even quite deeply, from culture to culture.
7.WRITING
Writing is very new in the course of human history. Of course, “writing” itself is hard to define. For
example, there are pictures and pictographs from the famous Ice Age caves in France that go back
some 20,000 years. Although many of these designs are apparently intentionally abstract, we
probably would not consider them writing as we usually use the term.
Any definition of writing will be arbitrary, as John DeFrancis points out (1989:4), because there
will always be inclusivists who claim that writing is any system of graphic symbols that conveys
some thought—like a mathematical formula—whereas exclusivists will say that writing must be a
set of symbols that can convey any and all thought—like an alphabet for a language. Others claim
that a writing system must not be independent of a particular language. We will not debate the issue
here and will just say that for our purposes, writing is some form of “visible speech.”
It is really impossible to say exactly when and where writing first began, but it appears to have
diffused more than having been created independently. That is, writing systems developed in many
parts of the world, but more cultures borrowed them than invented them. This shows that the
connection between spoken sound and some arbitrary symbol placed on some medium is quite an
abstraction, one not readily apparent to our distant ancestors, no matter how much we take it for
granted today.

ANTHROGURU
Language in Its Social and Cultural Settings

Ethnolinguistics / Language and culture
Ethnolinguistics (cultural linguistics) is the field of linguistic anthropology that studies the
relationship between language and culture. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand
a culture without first understanding its language, and it would be equally impossible to understand
a language outside of its cultural context. For this reason, any effective language teacher will go
beyond vocabulary and grammar by teaching students something about such topics as the eating
habits, values, and behavior patterns of native speakers.
Beginning with Franz Boas (the father of American anthropology) in the early twentieth century,
the relationship between language and culture was recognized as critical and raised interesting
questions. Did language influence culture, or did culture influence language? How did each
influence people’s perceptions (worldviews) and customs?
How Culture Influences Language

Although little research has been conducted to explore how culture influences the grammatical
system of a language, there is considerable evidence to demonstrate how culture affects vocabulary.
As a general rule, the vocabulary in any language tends to emphasize the words that are considered
to be adaptively important in that culture. This concept, known as cultural emphasis, is reflected
in the size and specialization of vocabulary.
In standard American English, a large number of words refer to technological gadgetry (such as
microchip and intake valve) and occupational specialties (such as teacher and pediatrician) for the
simple reason that technology and occupation are emphasized in our culture. Thus the English
language helps North Americans adapt effectively to their culture by providing a vocabulary well
suited for that culture. Other cultures have other areas of emphasis.
The Nuer
A particularly good example of how culture influences language through the elaboration of
vocabularies is provided by the Nuer, a pastoral people of the Sudan, whose daily preoccupation
with cattle is reflected in their language (Evans-Pritchard 1940). The Nuer have a large vocabulary
to describe and identify their cattle according to physical features such as color, markings, and horn
configuration. The Nuer have ten major color terms for describing cattle: white (bor), black (car),
brown (lual), chestnut (dol), tawny (yan), mouse-gray (lou), bay (thiang), sandy gray (lith), blue and
strawberry roan (yil), and chocolate (gwir). When these color possibilities are merged with the many
possible marking patterns, there are several hundred combinations. And when these several hundred
possibilities are combined with terminology based on horn configuration, there are potentially
thousands of ways of describing cattle with considerable precision in the Nuer language.
How Language Influences Culture

A major concern of linguistic anthropology since the 1930s has been whether language influences
or perhaps even determines culture. There is no consensus on this topic among ethnolinguists, but
some have suggested that language is more than a symbolic inventory of experience and the physical
world, and that it actually shapes our thoughts and perceptions—the very way in which we see the
world.
Edward Sapir stated this notion in its most explicit form: The real world is to a large extent
unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently
similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different
societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (1929:
214)

ANTHROGURU
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Drawing on Sapir’s original formulation, Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir, conducted
ethnolinguistic research among the Hopi Indians to determine whether different linguistic
structures produced different ways of viewing the world. Whorf’s observations convinced him that
linguistic structure was in fact the causal variable for different views of the world. This notion
has come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Both Sapir and Whorf were suggesting that language is more than a vehicle for communication; it
actually establishes mental categories that predispose people to see things in a certain way. For
example, if my language has a single word— aunt—that refers to my mother’s sister, my father’s
sister, my mother’s brother’s wife, and my father’s brother’s wife, it is likely that I will perceive all
of these family members as genealogically equivalent and consequently will behave toward them in
essentially the same way.
Sapir and Whorf were primarily concerned with the effects of language on perception, and they
suggested that both perception and the resulting behavior are determined (or at least influenced) by
the linguistic categories we use to group some things under one heading and other things under
another heading. Although Sapir and Whorf did not conduct systematic scientific research with
empirical evidence on the relationship among language, thought, and culture, subsequent linguistic
scholars did. These later scholars focused on two main ideas:
(1) A theory of linguistic determinism that states that the language you speak determines the way
you perceive the world around you. Each language provides particular grooves of linguistic
expression that predispose speakers of that language to perceive the world in a certain way.
In Whorf ’s own words, “The structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner
in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.”
Whorf gained many of these insights while translating English into Hopi, a North American Indian
language still spoken in Arizona. Doing this work, he discovered that Hopi differs from English not
only in vocabulary but also in terms of its grammatical categories such as nouns and verbs.
For instance, Hopi use numbers for counting and measuring things that have physical existence, but
they do not apply numbers in the same way to abstractions like time. They would have no problem
translating an English sentence such as, “I see fifteen sheep grazing on three acres of grassland,”
but an equally simple sentence such as, “Three weeks ago, I enjoyed my fifteen minutes of fame”
would require a much more complex translation into Hopi.
(2) a weaker theory of linguistic relativism states that your language merely influences your
thoughts about the real world.
Among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, for instance, we find numerous words for different types
of snow, whereas Americans in a city like Detroit most likely possess a rich vocabulary allowing
them to precisely distinguish between many different types of cars, categorized by model, year, and
manufacturer. This is an example of linguistic relativity—the idea that distinctions encoded in one
language are unique to that language.
Another example concerns cultural categories of color. Languages have different ways of dividing
and naming elements of the color spectrum, which is actually a continuum of multiple hues with no
clear-cut boundaries between them. In English we speak of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
and violet, but other languages mark out different groupings. For instance, Indians in Mexico’s
northwestern mountains speaking Tarahumara have just one word for both “green” and “blue”—
siyoname.
Criticism
For decades, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was not generally accepted, although most scholars
were intrigued by the idea that language shapes thought. One reason for skepticism is that if
language significantly shapes the way its speakers perceive and think about the world, then we

ANTHROGURU
would expect a people’s perceptions and worldviews to change only at a rate roughly comparable
to the rate at which their language changes. But worldviews typically change much more rapidly
than language. In the past century, the English language has changed little compared with the
dramatic alteration in the worldviews of most of its speakers.
Despite the enormous economic and political changes that have swept Asia in the past several
decades, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Vietnamese, and other indigenous languages are firmly
in place.
The fact that linguistic change or replacement is usually far slower than changes in worldviews
suggests that language and culture are not tightly integrated.
Neo-Whorfianism
In the years following World War II, the metalinguistic writings of Sapir and Whorf attracted a great
deal of attention. The linguist Harry Hoijer created an industry among anthropologists, linguists,
and psychologists when he boiled these ideas down to what he called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The expression is a misnomer since Sapir and Whorf did not collaborate and had different agendas.
Furthermore, neither approached the linguistic relativity principle as a scientific hypothesis.
Nevertheless, Hoijer proposed that if anthropologists hypothesized that language has an impact on
thought, it would be important to “test” the hypothesis. Crude but testable versions began to circulate
as linguistic determinism based on the formulation that language governs thought rather than
influencing it. In a truly Whorfian fashion, this misleading label has sparked a great deal of activity
in the names of Sapir and Whorf, who probably would not have recognized the resulting
formulations.
Harry Hoijer (1964) applied it to the Navajo. Many aspects of Navajo grammar (such as the
conjugation of active verbs and the reporting of actions and events) emphasize movement. Hoijer
found parallels to this linguistic emphasis on motion in many aspects of Navajo culture. In Navajo
mythology, for example, gods and cultural heroes restlessly move from one place to another, seeking
by their motion to perfect the universe. However, this sort of evidence is quite weak. Consider that
like their Navajo counterparts, Greek cultural heroes such as Odysseus move restlessly from place
to place, but the Greek language is utterly different from Navajo.
Bowerman (1996) argued that space is understood differently in English and Korean, and, more
recently, Gordon (2004) reported that members of the Brazilian tribe he studied have difficulty
understanding and recalling numbers for which they have no words. However, these examples are
all controversial. The relationship between language and thought seems both fairly weak and related
primarily to the vocabulary rather than the structure of language.
Assume for a moment that language does, in fact, significantly affect how people perceive and think
about the world. Then if some given language were to become truly global, that language’s ways of
perceiving and thinking would also dominate. Would this be a bad thing in that it reduces the cultural
diversity of humanity? Or would it be a good thing in that it would potentially allow better
communication between nations?
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics have investigated how speakers of
different languages talk about space and location. (Here, we simplify their complicated and technical
findings.) English speakers talk about space in multiple ways. Space can be relative to the location
of the speaker or hearer—for example, “on my left” or “above you.” We also talk about space using
absolute locations, especially when we discuss long distances—for example, “head north to get
there” and “south of town.” These “cardinal directions” do not depend on which way an individual
is now facing. When we provide someone with directions, we often combine relative and absolute
references—for example, “turn left on Main Street and go west for about two miles.”
Other languages speak about directions differently. One Australian aboriginal language called
Guugu Yimithirr uses only absolute references, comparable to English’s cardinal directions. Thus,
they might say, “There’s a fly on your northern knee” (quoted in Brown 2006, 109). If you are a
longtime resident of Hawaii, you probably know that directions are sometimes given with the
Hawaiian words mauka (toward the mountains) and makai (toward the ocean). These words are not

ANTHROGURU
equivalent to cardinal directions because the direction of mauka relative to you depends on which
side of the island you are on.
In southern Mexico, a community of Mayans speaks a language called Tzeltal. Their main spatial
reference is in terms of “uphill” and “downhill,” but these are more like cardinal directions to them
because the overall slope of the land is consistent and they are seldom on the other side of
mountaintops. So Tzeltal speakers describe movements on the landscape in terms of “ascending,”
“descending,” or “going across.” If an object is on the ground, something else is located “uphill,”
“downhill,” or “across ways” from it. They have no left/right distinction, so a translation of the
location of a house might be “to the downhill of you.”
Apparently, language does affect their perceptions: when shown two mirror image photographs,
Tzeltal speakers usually say they are exactly the same. Research on linguistic relativity is ongoing.
Perhaps someday it will uncover unexpected and important effects of language on perception and
even on worldviews.
Conclusion
There are ways in which language can be considered as a phenomenon of culture, thus blurring
the assumed distinction between the two. Both language and culture are historically cumulative and
locally conventional sets of behaviors that are emblematic of commonality, and of difference, among
human groups.
From a Le´vi-Straussian perspective, culture is just like language understood in structuralist terms:
arbitrary, abstract, semiotic, relational, paradigmatic, synchronic. Or from a Geertzian perspective,
both language and culture are complicated and mutually constitutive ensembles of practices,
conventions, values, tools, and so forth. Many sociocultural anthropologists see things in this latter
way, i.e., culture not as structure but as webs of signification, and so see culture as inherently
semiotic, and language as just one particularly important, and closely related, semiotic system.
Social context of language

Sociolinguistics OR Pragmatics
Pragmatics (from the root pragma for “practical” or “practice”) or sociolinguistics (literally,
“society” + “language”) refers to the rules or conventions for using language appropriately in social
situations—that is, for saying the right thing to the right person in the right circumstances. The point
is that a language is a “code” not only for factual information, but for social information as
well. The kinds of social information encoded, and how, will depend upon the society and the
distinctions it makes between different kinds of people and situations. There is no society in which
all individuals are exactly equal in status or in which all situations are exactly the same in meaning
and value. William Labov launched the subfield of sociolinguistics with his classic study of accents
among mainly Euro-American people of different socioeconomic classes in New York City (1966).
The field of sociolinguistics investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation
(Romaine 2000; Trudgill 2000). How do different speakers use a given language? How do linguistic
features correlate with social diversity and stratification, including class, ethnic, and gender
differences (Tannen 1990, 1993)? How is language used to express, reinforce, or resist power (Geis
1987; Lakoff 2000)? Sociolinguists focus on features that vary systematically with social position
and situation.
To study variation, sociolinguists observe, define, and measure variable use of language in real-
world situations. To show that linguistic features correlate with social, economic, and political
differences, social attributes of speakers must be measured and related to speech (Fasold 1990;
Labov 1972a). Variation within a language at a given time is historical change in progress. The same
forces that, working gradually, have produced large- scale linguistic change over the centuries are
still at work today. Linguistic change doesn’t occur in a vacuum but in society.

ANTHROGURU
1. Group in Sociolinguistics
The notion of group is important to sociolinguistics. “Group” is used to describe people who are
geographically bound, who fraternize for social, religious, political, cultural, familial, or vocational
reasons and share similar speech norms. People live in groups, organize their existence in groups,
and, in a stratified society, identify with a certain group either as minority, majority, marginalized,
or dominant. Group membership may be permanent or temporary, and members use the variety of
speech of their group.
Different levels of groups conceptualized for research purposes by sociolinguistics include a speech
community (people who use a specific language or its varieties), a community of practice (a group
of people who are closely knit, who engage in similar functions and share a similar language, e.g.,
biologists, linguists, or tennis players), a linguistic community—which among other definitions
can refer to the collective speech of a political unit (e.g., the United States), and social networks,
including online and offline social relations in a society. As people move between groups or social
networks, they configure their speech to conform to and reflect their group membership. The speech
pattern within a group is presumed to be uniform because members adhere to the linguistic features
of their group to be identified with it and be set apart from other groups.
Through these conceptual levels, sociolinguistics accounts for the use of language within the
community, and sociolinguists study the social motivation for the choices that people make in their
use of language as they go about their daily lives Sociolinguists also study speakers’ view of their
language, their attitude to the way they sound, who they consider linguistic insiders, and how they
maintain language boundaries.
For example, people in the United States, Nigeria, and Great Britain all say they speak English.
However, there are obvious differences in the way they speak, such that most English-speaking
listeners can tell which of these countries they come from. To most people in these three countries,
American and British English have more prestige than Nigerian English. It is within groups that
stereotypes, values, norms, desires, and attitudes of people toward self and others take their roots
and find expression.
The linguistic behavior of individuals, according to the sociolinguist William Labov, cannot be
understood without knowledge of the community to which they belong. The society of one’s
primary orientation provides the context in which the linguistic codes derive their meaning and
references.
2. Language and Gender

A major interest of sociolinguists is determining whether men and women speaking the same
language use it differently. Comparing men and women, there are differences in phonology,
grammar, and vocabulary, and in the body stances and movements that accompany speech (Eckert
and McConnell- Ginet 2003; Lakoff 2004; Tannen 1990).
In phonology, American women tend to pronounce their vowels more peripherally (“rant,” “rint”
when saying “rent”), whereas men tend to pronounce theirs more centrally (“runt”). In public
contexts, Japanese women tend to adopt an artificially high voice, for the sake of politeness,
according to their traditional culture. Women tend to be more careful about uneducated speech. This
trend shows up in both the United States and England. Men may adopt working- class speech
because they associate it with masculinity. Perhaps women pay more attention to the media, in which
standard dialects are employed.
According to Robin Lakoff (2004), the use of certain types of words and expressions has been
associated with women’s traditional lesser power in American society (see also Coates 1986;
Romaine 1999; Tannen 1990, 1993). For example, “Oh dear,” “Oh fudge,” and “Goodness!” are
less forceful than “Hell” and “Damn.” Watch the lips of a disgruntled male athlete in a televised
competition, such as a football game. What’s the likelihood he’s saying “Phooey on you”? Women
also are more likely to use such adjectives as adorable, charming, sweet, cute, lovely, and divine
than men are.

ANTHROGURU
And Peter Trudgill has observed phonetic differences in Gros Ventre, a Native American language
in the United States, in which men use djatsa and women kjatsa for bread. John Fischer noted that
in New England more boys than girls engage in “g” dropping in words such as running and jogging
, mostly in informal situations.
Differences in the linguistic strategies and behavior of men and women are examined in several
books by the well- known sociolinguist Deborah Tannen (1990, 1993). Tannen uses the terms
“rapport” and “report” to contrast women’s and men’s overall linguistic styles. Women, says
Tannen, typically use language and the body movements that accompany it to build rapport—social
connections with others. Men, on the other hand, tend to make reports, reciting information that
serves to establish a place for themselves in a hierarchy, as they also attempt to determine the relative
ranks of their conversation mates.
3.Language and Status

The style of language employed by an individual is relative to the particular person and his or her
place or situation. While there are variable styles that a speaker can employ to convey an intended
message, there are linguistic markers that potentially could confer prestige or stigma on the speaker,
thereby indexing his or her social class. Whether one says mmh , what , or pardon does not change
the content of the message; however, to a listener which of these is said implicates the social
standing of the speaker.
Class or social status gained particular salience in sociolinguistics with the work of Labov, who
originally recognized that the attention given by speakers to speech was variable and depended on
the goal of discourse and the degree of formality. For instance, the level of attention or care to speech
correlates with the degree to which the speaker sought overt prestige. Speakers will emulate the
speech pattern of those they want to resemble. Trudgill noted that men adopt “covert prestige” by
using a more local dialect, whereas women use a more “standard dialect,” thus displaying overt
prestige.
4. Language and Ethnicity

Language is a very salient marker for ethnic identification. The dominant group in Western nations
rarely sees itself as having ethnic affiliation; consequently, the United States, in spite of being home
to many ethnicities and different (native) languages, considers itself monolingual, with English as
its official language. This is, however, not the case in South Africa and Canada, with 11 and 2 official
languages, respectively; neither is it the case in India, which implements a multilingual policy.
To speak two languages is to be bilingual, and to speak more than two languages is to be
multilingual. In most African countries, multilingualism is the norm. To Africans, the ability to use
different languages is cultural and linguistic capital that enables people to freely move for labor.
This is not so in the United States, especially in the South, where an increase in the use of the
Spanish language is seen as threatening to the English-only view and multilingualism is viewed
somewhat negatively.
Sociolinguistics studies the various attitudes of people to the existence of more than one language
in their society. Sociolinguistics studies the intersection of language and society because of the
centrality of language to individual and communal goals. The field can be defined following Labov,
who sees the significance of language in what it allows us to do. We can use it to exercise or resist
power, gain influence, or diminish others. Whether we use language to argue with our spouse, joke
with friends, or deceive enemies, the study of these usages is the appropriate focus of
sociolinguistics.
5. Language Mixtures
The concept of language mixtures is one that has been identified through sociolinguistic research.
It includes areas of oral communication accommodation between people who speak different native
languages as well as the use of new “half-languages,” as McWhorter calls them—that is, pidgins
and creoles. As people migrate, voluntarily or as a consequence of a historical situation (e.g., the

ANTHROGURU
great potato famine, the slave trade), they have a need, to a greater or lesser extent, to communicate
with those who do not speak their language.
For example, the United States experienced large waves of immigration from the mid- 1800s to the
1920s. As these new Americans populated cities on the East Coast and continued to settle throughout
the United States, they maintained their original cultures in ethnic neighborhoods and were
comfortable speaking their native languages. Schools accommodated these immigrants, providing
instruction in English as well as in dominant European languages. Across the neighborhoods,
individuals tried to communicate for economic reasons and for socialization. Sometimes, the elderly
preferred to speak only their mother tongue, even insisting that their children or grandchildren do
so whenever in their presence.
Regardless, these new citizens created what linguists call an interlanguage, which includes words
and expressions from both the new language and their mother tongues. Inter language is defined in
one of two ways. It may be that an individual creates or mixes terms between the native language
and the target language. A Polish immigrant might use an expression such as “Ja be˛de˛ is´ do
marku” (“I will go to the market”), substituting the first syllable of the English word, market, in the
Polish word, rynku, and retaining the final syllable of the Polish word. (Rynku is the Polish word
for market.)
A second way that inter language occurs is in situations where each individual in a conversation
uses clever verbal manipulations. It may be that the speaker imposes the syntax of the native
language on the order of words in the new language. For example, Larry Selinker, an expert in inter
language, gives an example where an Israeli says, “I bought downtown the postcard.” As individuals
become bilingual, they will switch between the two languages in their attempts to be understood or
to clarify for the listener what they mean. This behavior is called code-switching, and over time,
individuals who are in constant communication may create new words and expressions that possess
characteristics of each or both languages.
Studies of interlanguage and code-switching provide information regarding the development of new
languages but especially new words.
Researchers such as Joshua Fishman have observed a special form of language mixture that
evolves slowly within speech communities—that is, groups or societies that use one variety of their
native language. An example of this situation, called diglossia, is a language vernacular. Some
languages have one formal language variety and one or more informal ones. Vernaculars are often
called the “common language” of the people. What is very interesting about diglossia is that in some
places in the world, as in some parts of Africa, two speech communities may live side by side and
never mix. Speakers of one language will continue to use their mother tongue when addressing
individuals who speak another language. Yet the latter will understand the former but never adopt
any of the morphology, phonology, or grammar of those speakers.
6.SOCIAL DIALECTS
Sociolinguists are also interested in dialects—varying forms of a language that reflect particular
regions, occupations, or social classes and that are similar enough to be mutually intelligible.
Distinguishing dialects from languages and revealing the relationship between power and language,
the noted linguist-political activist Noam Chomsky often quoted the saying that a dialect is a
language without an army. Technically, all dialects are languages—there is nothing partial or
sublinguistic about them—and the point at which two different dialects become distinctly different
languages is roughly the point at which speakers of one are almost totally unable to communicate
with speakers of the other.
Boundaries may be psychological, geographic, social, or economic, and they are not always very
sharp. In the case of regional dialects, there is frequently a transitional territory, or perhaps a buffer
zone, where features of both are found and understood, as between central and southern China. The
fact is that if you learn the Chinese of Beijing, you will find that a Chinese person from Canton or
Hong Kong will understand almost nothing of what you say, although both languages—or dialects—
are usually lumped together as Chinese.
A classic example of the kind of dialect that may set one group apart from others within a single
society is one spoken by many inner-city African Americans. Technically known as African
American Vernacular English (AAVE), it has often been referred to as “black English” and
“Ebonics.” Unfortunately, there is a widespread misperception among non-AAVE speakers that this

ANTHROGURU
dialect is somehow substandard or defective. A basic principle of linguistics is that the selection of
a so-called prestige dialect—in this case, what we may call Standard English as opposed to AAVE—
is determined by social and historical forces such as wealth and power and is not dependent on
virtues or shortcomings of the dialects themselves.
Language usage & Social inequality

Critical discourse analysis is an approach within linguistic anthropology that examines how power
and social inequality are reflected in and reproduced through verbal language (Blommaert and
Bulcaen 2000).
Critical discourse analysis reveals links between language and social inequality, power, and stigma.
It also provides insights into agency and resistance through language.
Language and social inequality
William Labov observed with his classic study of accents among mainly Euro-American people of
different socioeconomic classes in New York City (1966). For example, pronunciation of the
consonant “r” in words such as car, card, floor, and fourth tends to be associated with upper-class
people, whereas its absence (caw, cawd, flaw, fawth) is associated with lower-class people. Labov
used informal observations of sales clerks’ speech in three Manhattan department stores of different
“class” levels: Saks (the highest), Macy’s, and S. Klein (the lowest).
Most languages contain gender differences in word choice, grammar, intonation, content, and
style. Early studies of language and gender among white Euro-Americans revealed three general
characteristics of female speech (Lakoff 1973):
• Politeness
• Rising intonation at the end of sentences
• Frequent use of tag questions (questions seeking affirmation and placed at the end of sentences,
such as, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”)
In English, male speech, in general, is less polite, maintains a flat and assertive tone in a sentence,
and does not use tag questions. Related to politeness is the fact that, during cross-gender
conversations, men tend to interrupt women more than women interrupt men. They intentionally
use strongly masculine language forms, openly talk about sex, and rework taboo sexual terms into
new meanings.
Language and political power
One thing that gets a leader elected in a democracy is the ability to give a good speech; sometimes
it is the main thing. Pericles in ancient Athens and Marc Anthony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
swayed the crowd with skillful oration. Language is central to obtaining, exercising, and challenging
power in many societies. Masterful use of political speaking is a path to power in many societies.
From the holistic perspective of anthropology, it is clear that the style and substance of political
speaking would be related to the general quality of politics and to the hierarchies or lack thereof in
the society.
Wana society on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia was acephalous (i.e. without a head or leader)
and mostly egalitarian, in which no enduring political roles or groups existed. When Wana men met
for the purpose of public speaking, they practiced kiyori, an extremely stylized poetic form broken
into stanzas with rigid principles about syllabification, emphasis, and rhyme. They might also use
specialized terminology, especially as part of religious or legal occasions. It was ordinarily
addressed to one man by one man, and the listener might repeat the speech several times as if
memorizing it. Sometimes the receiver of the kiyori would answer with his own, setting off an
exchange of lines.
The intentions of speaking kiyori varied from establishment of alliances to advice to strong
criticism. One of the key features of kiyori, however, was the use of ambiguous or conventional
references, like aphorisms and metaphors. In fact, it was “an expressive form well suited for
speaking in oblique and clever ways” (Atkinson, 1984: 57), and skillful speakers took full advantage
of the potential for ambiguity.

ANTHROGURU
VALUE ADDITION TOPICS
Language, Race, and Ethnicity

Linguistic anthropology as a field owes its origins to ideas about race and language that were
developed by American anthropologists. Working alongside sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois,
anthropologist Franz Boas rejected the racist beliefs of his time that some races were inferior to
others and that certain languages were “primitive.” In particular, he showed that scholars’ inability
to hear distinctions in Native American languages reflected their habits of perception rather than
deficiencies of the language being studied (Hill and Mannheim 1992). For Boas, language alone
thus provided a privileged window into cultural patterns that were otherwise distorted by “secondary
explanations” (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Documentation of the linguistic practices of populations
threatened by racism was an important focus of early work in linguistic anthropology that continues
today.
Scholarship on race in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics has reflected varied assumptions
about what language is and where language is to be studied. The Distinctive Ethnoracial Language
perspective attends primarily to linguistic patterns that distinguish ethnoracial groups. It locates
language as an abstract system of communication shared by group members that can be
characterized in terms of linguistic features or discourse strategies. The Acts of Ethnoracial Identity
(cf. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) perspective shifts attention to the moment-to-moment
construction of ethnoracial identities within speech events, treating linguistic elements not as
features of groups but as resources for achieving interactional ends. Here, too, language remains a
relatively abstract object, but one recruited by speaking subjects who creatively and performatively
exercise agency.
A final Racialization approach expands the focus to include the “listening subject” (Inoue 2006):
language is an object only insofar as it has come to be understood as such; it is necessarily subject
to situated interpretation, cultural production, and regimes of power, emerging and circulating over
various scales of space and time in interactional events and cultural institutions. While our
identification of three trends may misleadingly suggest discrete theoretical ruptures, we emphasize
that most studies are, at least peripherally, concerned with the full range of analytical objects and
sites mentioned here
ETHNOSEMANTICS
Ethnosemantics, sometimes called “ethnoscience,” is the scientific study of the ways in which
people label and classify the social, cultural, and environmental phenomena of their world.
Beginning in the 1960s, ethnosemantics continued the Boasian tradition of focusing on linguistic
relativity and the importance of native language terms, with a focus on developing theories of
particular cultures, rather than an overarching theory of culture in general. Nevertheless,
ethnosemantic studies have contributed to the latter by making it possible to find universal
constraints on the ways in which humans deal linguistically with their environments.
One of the best examples of this is the terminology people use for naming colors. Studies have
shown that while color-naming systems vary, the different systems can be organized into an
implicational scale. All languages appear to have terms for black/dark,white/light, and red. If a
language has four terms, it adds either green or yellow; the fifth term added is the missing yellow
or green; the sixth is blue; and so on. Because color varies continuously along a spectrum, the
boundaries between colors tend to be arbitrary: For example, the boundary between English green
and blue is not the same as the boundary between Spanish verde and aula. The scope of red, however,
is relatively uniform, a result of the biology of color perception that makes the wavelengths in the
red area of the spectrum the most neurologically salient part of the spectrum.
Many ethnosemantic studies have focused on folk taxonomies, especially folk biology and botany.
In taxonomy, the dominant relationship between categories is hyponymy. For example, animal is a
hypernym or superordinate category; mammal, fish, and bird are hyponyms, or kinds of animal. One

ANTHROGURU
interesting find is that folk biological taxonomies tend to correspond fairly well to the Linnaean
system at the level of genus and species.
A related problem in ethnosemantics involves the ways in which people classify other people and
themselves into putative biologically based “racial” categories; these categories may be relatively
crisp (the U.S. hypodescent rule) or fuzzy (as in most of Latin America). Another important domain
of ethnosemantic study is kinship, the way in which people who are considered relations are
classified and labeled. At their extremes of complexity, kinship terminologies may be minimally
descriptive, as in Hawaiian, in which aunts and uncles are lumped with “mothers” and “fathers,”
and cousins are “sisters” and “brothers.” Or they may be maximally descriptive, as in the Sudanese
system, where each position has a unique label.
A technique sometimes used in ethnosemantics is componential analysis, which analyzes the
meaning of a term into its components. For example, a componential analysis of the Aymara
(Bolivia) pronoun system would take the speaker and the hearer as separate components, with each
being either present or absent: Ethnosemantic studies continue to be relevant as anthropologists and
linguists investigate the relationships between language, thought, and behavior.
Development of Linguistic Anthropology

For linguistic anthropology, Alessandro Duranti (2003) sees the discipline as having gone through
three paradigms since the turn of the twentieth century.
(1) the “first paradigm” of anthropological linguistics,

(2) the “second paradigm” of linguistic anthropology or sociolinguistics, and
(3) the “third paradigm” of social constructivism.
In addition, there will be a fourth possible paradigm: cognitive linguistic anthropology.
1. Americanist Anthropological Linguistics

As for linguistic anthropology, the “first” Americanist paradigm was initially proposed by Franz
Boas as he developed his vision of anthropology in the United States. Boas saw linguistics as a tool
for cultural and historical analysis, and, indeed, a necessary component of the kind of “salvage
linguistics” and “salvage anthropology” he felt was also a mission of the new fledgling field. Thus,
a high level of technical linguistic ability was expected of practitioners so all the data could be
gathered correctly (in some cases, for the last time).
Much of the early work by both structural linguists and “anthropological linguists” (the preferred
term of the day) was on Native American languages. This emphasis on description implied that, in
a sense, language is culture, and “therefore one can be assumed to be doing something
anthropological by studying grammar” (Duranti 2003:325). Indeed, the categories of descriptive
linguistics often determined the units of analysis for the anthropological linguists of this period. One
important theoretical issue that arose in this climate was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that
“languages provide their native speakers with a set of hard-to-question dispositions (e.g., to hear
only certain sound distinctions, to favor certain classifications, to make certain metaphorical
extensions) that have an impact on their interpretation of reality, and consequently, on their
behavior” (Duranti 2003:326).
2. Linguistic Anthropology and Sociolinguistics

This first paradigm lasted from about 1900 to 1960, when the “second,” sociolinguistic or linguistic
anthropology “paradigm” was developed. This approach was largely due to the scholarship of two
important linguistic anthropologists working in the 1960s and 1970s, Dell Hymes and John
Gumperz. Their approach—sometimes called the ethnography of communication or the
ethnography of speaking—was seen as a major alternative to Chomsky’s generative grammar,
which largely dismissed language-in-use. At this time Hymes strongly advocated the use of the term
linguistic anthropology to stress that the work he and others were doing was not just a kind of
linguistics that happened to be done by anthropologists, but rather a legitimate research project
within anthropology itself. Hymes and Gumperz said that language should be studied in ways very
different from those of the Boasians and Chomskyans.
Language must be studied within a social context or situation and go beyond the study of grammar.
Ethnographers need to examine and describe the patterns of the spoken “speech activity” in the

ANTHROGURU
“speech community.” The unit of interest, then, is not the ideal speaker-listener informant, but the
speech community and its speech events. Language performance is to take precedence over
knowledge of a language. Language became not so much a way to get at cognition (which both Boas
and Chomsky believed), but a way to express social phenomena and social relationships. Language
register and language variation—as a means of seeing how speech practices organize culture and
society—came to take precedence over grammar as a way of seeing how people organize the world.
3. Social Constructivism
The “third” paradigm began in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is the one that guides most of the
current research in linguistic anthropology. Duranti calls this trend “social constructivism” because
this work focuses on the role language plays in constituting social encounters. Although speech
events and speech communities are not dismissed, many people working in this tradition are acutely
aware of the interactionism and improvisational aspects of language use. There has been a shift
away from looking at language forms to looking at the way language is involved in symbolic
domination, identity construction, power relations, and other issues of ideology. Some of the areas
of interest are language and gender; performativity; race and racism; language and space;
temporality; and language use in gay, lesbian, and transgendered communities.
As Duranti says (2003:332), “The interest in capturing the elusive connection between larger
institutional structures and processes and the ‘textual’ details of everyday encounters (the so-called
micro-macro connection)” has produced a whole range of projects; whereas earlier generations of
students who were interested in “linguistic forms and languages (in the first paradigm) or from their
use in concrete and culturally significant social encounters (in the second), students today typically
ask questions such as ‘What can the study of language contribute to the understanding of this
particular social/cultural phenomena (e.g., identity formation, globalization, nationalism)?’” This
means, then, that linguistic anthropologists today are “using language as a tool for studying what is
already being studied by scholars in other fields” and the rest of anthropology (2003:333).
4. A Cognitive Linguistic Anthropology?

that a cognitively informed linguistic anthropology may be considered an upcoming fourth
paradigm. In this “cognitive linguistic anthropology” we see that some of the insights from the new
discipline of cognitive science are influencing research by those working in the linguistic
anthropology tradition.
A cognitive linguistic anthropology could be seen as a way of trying to connect the mentalism of
current Chomskyan autonomous linguistics; the earlier work in cognitive anthropology of the 1970s;
the conceptualizing of speech events of the “second paradigm”; and the interest in social life, social
justice, and social constructivism found in the “third paradigm.”
A cognitive linguistic anthropology attempts to find patterns of shared cultural knowledge within
and across societies: what people from different groups know and how this knowledge is conceived,
organized, and transmitted linguistically. Both language (and its formal properties like grammar)
and society (and it manifestations like social structure) are understood as conceptualizations and
mental representations. Cognitive linguistic anthropology interprets language use in terms of
concepts—sometimes universal, sometimes culturally specific. In short, cognitive linguistic
anthropology uses language as the doorway to enter the study of cognition and the study of
language-in-use: how people perceive the real physical world, the constructed social world, and the
imagined conceptual world.
Endangered Languages and Language Revitalization

Today, anthropologists and other scholars, as well as descendant language communities themselves,
are still concerned about the rapid loss of languages (Fishman 1991, Maffi 2005). The task of
documenting declining languages is urgent. It is often accompanied by applied work aimed at
preserving and reviving endangered and dying languages Scholars have proposed four phases or
degrees of language decline and loss (Walsh 2005):
• Language shift, or language decay, is a category of language decline when speakers have a limited
vocabulary in their native language and more often use a new language in which they may be semi
fluent or fluent (Hill 2001).
• Language endangerment exists when a language has fewer than 10,000 speakers.

ANTHROGURU
• Near-extinction is a situation in which only a few elderly speakers are still living.
• Language extinction occurs when the language has no competent speakers.
Keeping track of endangered and dying languages is difficult because no one is sure how many
languages have existed in the recent past or even how many exist now (Crystal 2000).Estimates of
the number of living languages today range between 5,000 and 7,000. Part of the explanation for
the fuzzy numbers is the problem in separating languages from dialects. The largest number of
languages of any world region is found on the island of New Guinea, which comprises the country
of Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian territory of West Papua, and several neighboring small
islands (Foley 2000). Over 1,000 languages exist in this area, many from completely separate
language families.
Language extinction is especially acute in the Australia– Pacific region, where 99.5 percent of the
indigenous languages have fewer than 100,000 speakers (Nettle and Romaine 2000:40). The
situation of indigenous languages in the Americas, Siberia, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia is
becoming increasingly serious. Over half of the world’s languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers,
and one-fourth have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Efforts to revive or maintain local languages face
many challenges (Fishman 2001).
Political opposition may come from governments that fear local identity movements. Governments
are often averse to devoting financial resources to supporting minority language programs. Deciding
which version of an endangered language to preserve may have political consequences at the local
level (Nevins 2004). Notable achievements have been made, however, with perhaps one of the most
robust examples of language maintenance occurring in French-speaking Québec. Approaches to
language maintenance and revitalization must respond to local circumstances and to factors such as
how serious the degree of loss is, how many living speakers there are, what version of the language
should be maintained or revived, and what resources for maintenance and revitalization programs
are available.
Major strategies include the following (Walsh 2005):
• Formal classroom instruction
• A master–apprentice system in which an elder teaches a non speaker in a one-onone situation
• Web-based tools and services to support language learning
Each method has both promise and pitfalls. One thing is key: It takes living communities to activate
and keep alive the knowledge of a language (Maffi 2003).
Should Dying Languages Be Revived?

The Western media often carry articles about endangered biological species, such as certain frogs
or birds, and the need to protect them from extinction. The reasons for concern about the loss of
biological species are many. One major factor is simply that biological diversity is a good thing to
have on the earth. Opponents of taking special measures to protect endangered species find support
for their position in a Darwinian view that progress involves competition and the survival of those
species that can make it. Economic progress might mean building a new shopping center or airport
with a massive parking lot. If that means the extinction of a particular species of nonhuman primate,
bird, flower, or worm, so be it, in the name of “progress.” Some parallels exist between the survival
of endangered languages and that of endangered biological species (Maffi 2005).
Supporters of language preservation and revitalization can point to the sheer fact of diversity on
earth as a good thing, a sign of a culturally healthy planet with room for everyone’s language. They
will argue that apeople’s language is an intrinsic part of their culture. Without language, the culture,
too, will die. Others take the Darwinian view that languages, like species, live in a world of
competition. Language survival means that the strong and fit carry on while the weak and unfit die
out. They may point out that preserving linguistic heritage is useless because dying languages are
part of a past that no longer exists. They resist spending public funds on language preservation and
regard revitalization programs as wasteful.


Linguistic Anthropology

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Linguistic Anthropology

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Linguistic Anthropology

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ANTHROGURU

ANTHROPOLOGY MENTORSHIP MATERIAL

1. SYLLABUS FOR THE WEEK

SYLLABUS FOR THE WEEK

7. Culture, language and communication: Nature, origin

Join Telegram @ ANTHROGURU

7. Culture, language and communication: Nature, origin and

Communication can be classified as:

Language vs. Communication: Key Differences

Join Telegram @ ANTHROGURU

Linguistics and Anthropology

Join Telegram @ ANTHROGURU

charge has a certain credence, considering Bloomfield's concentration on descriptive methodology