Appreciating Human Diversity Fifteenth Edition Conrad Phillip Kottak University of Michigan A n t h r o p o l o g y McGraw-Hill © 2013 McGraw-Hill Companies. All Rights Reserved.

14-2 LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION C H A P T E R 14-2

14-3 LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION What Is Language? Nonhuman Primate Communication Nonverbal Communication The Structure of Language Language, Thought, and Culture Sociolinguistics Historical Linguistics

14-4 LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION What makes language different from other forms of communication? How do anthropologists and linguists study language in general and specific languages in particular? How does language change over short and long time periods?

14-5 WHAT IS LANGUAGE? Language: primary means of communication (spoken or written) Transmitted through learning as part of enculturation Based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent

14-6 WHAT IS LANGUAGE? Allows humans to: Conjure up elaborate images Discuss the past and future Share experiences with others Benefit from their experiences Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context

14-7 NONHUMAN PRIMATE COMMUNICATION Call Systems: use a limited number of sounds that are produced in response to specific stimuli Automatic and cannot be combined At some point in human development, our ancestors began to combine calls and to understand combinations

14-8 SIGN LANGUAGE More recent experiments show that apes can learn to use, if not speak, true language Washoe, a chimpanzee, eventually acquired vocabulary of more than 100 American Sign Language (ASL) signs Began to combine signs into elementary sentences

14-9 SIGN LANGUAGE Lucy, another chimpanzee, lived in a foster family and used ASL to converse with her foster parents Cultural transmission: transmission through learning, basic to language Washoe and Lucy tried to teach ASL to other animals

14-10 SIGN LANGUAGE Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and has used 700 at least once Cultural transmission of communication system through learning is fundamental attribute of language Productivity: combining two or more signs to create new expressions Displacement: the ability to talk about things that are not present

14-11 THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE A mutated gene, FOXP2, helps explain why humans speak but chimps do not Language offered an adaptive advantage Adaptation can occur more rapidly in Homo than other primates, because Homo’s adaptive means more flexible

14-12 RECAP 14.1: Language Contrasted with Call Systems

14-13 NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION Kinesics: study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions Linguists pay attention to what is said and how it is said Culture always plays role in how people communicate Body movements communicate social differences

14-14 THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE The scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization: Phonology: study of speech sounds Morphology: forms in which sounds combine to form morphemes Lexicon: dictionary containing all morphemes and their meanings Syntax: arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences

14-15 SPEECH SOUNDS Phoneme: a sound contrast that makes a difference or differentiates meaning Phonetics: the study of human speech sounds in general Phonemics: studies only the significant sound contrasts of a given language

14-16 Figure 14.1: Vocal Phonemes in Standard American English

14-17 LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND CULTURE Chomsky: human brain contains limited set of rules for organizing language, so all languages have common structural basis LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND CULTURE

14-18 THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: grammatical categories of different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways

14-19 FOCAL VOCABULARY Focal vocabulary: specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are important to certain groups Vocabulary is area of language that changes the most rapidly Language, culture, and thought are interrelated Semantics: language’s meaning system

14-20 MEANING Speakers of particular languages use sets of terms to organize their experiences and perceptions Ethnosemantics: study of lexical (vocabulary) categories and contrasts Kinship terminology and color terminology well studied

14-21 Table 14.1: Focal Vocabulary for Hockey

14-22 SOCIOLINGUISTICS Sociolinguistics: investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation, or language in its social context Focuses on features that vary systematically with social position and situation Linguistic change does not occur in a vacuum but in society

14-23 LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY Style shifts: varying speech in different contexts Diglossia: regular style shifts between “high” and “low” variants of same language We rank certain speech patterns as better or worse, because we recognize their use by groups that we also rank

14-24 GENDER SPEECH CONTRASTS Men and women have differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary as well as in body stances and movements that accompany speech Traditional Japanese women tend to adopt artificially high voice, for politeness North America and Great Britain women’s speech tends to be more similar to standard dialect than is men’s speech

14-25 LANGUAGE AND STATUS POSITION Honorifics: terms of respect; used to honor the recipients Americans tend to be less formal than other nationalities The British have more highly developed set of honorifics Japanese has several honorifics Kin terms associated with gradations in rank and familiarity

14-26 Table 14.2: Multiple Negation (“I don’t want none”) According to Gender and Class (in Percentages)

14-27 STRATIFICATION Mainstream Americans evaluate the speech of low-status groups negatively Labov: pronunciation clearly associated with prestige Speech habits help determine how others evaluate us and thus our access to employment and other material resources Bourdieu: linguistic practices symbolic capital that properly trained people convert into economic and social capital

14-28 BLACK ENGLISH VERNACULAR (BEV) Most linguists view Black English Vernacular (BEV) as a dialect of Standard English (SE) rather than as a separate language Complex linguistic system with its own rules

14-29 BLACK ENGLISH VERNACULAR (BEV) Phonological and grammatical differences exist between BEV and SE: BEV speakers less likely to pronounce r than SE speakers BEV speakers use “copula deletion” to eliminate verb “to be” from their speech SE is not superior in communicating ideas, but it is the prestige dialect

14-30 Table 14.3: Pronunciation of r in New York City Department Stores

14-31 HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS Historical linguistics: examines long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages Historical linguists can reconstruct many features of past languages by studying contemporary daughter languages

14-32 HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS Daughter languages: languages that descend from same parent language that have been changing separately for hundreds or even thousands of years Protolanguage: original language from which daughter languages descend Subgroups: languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related

14-33 LANGUAGE LOSS When languages disappear, cultural diversity is reduced Harrison: an indigenous language goes extinct as often as every two weeks as its last speakers die off Of approximately 7,000 remaining languages, some 20 percent endangered

14-34 Figure 14.2: PIE Family Tree