Language and Ways of Speaking

Many Different Languages 96% of the world speaks just 4% of the world’s languages The most common languages spoken are: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese. Over half of the world’s languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers; a quarter have less than 1,000 speakers.

Language as Symbolic Language is symbolic because a word refers to an object, event, person, action, or relationship These symbols are arbitrary: banana, kwadu These words exist in an arbitrary relationship to one another, within a symbolic universe: how is “push” different than “shove” and different than “nudge”?

Whiteriver Unified School District

Language Socialization Learned through interaction Grammatical and syntactic rules not consciously known or taught by adults Learning to be a member of a speech community with social rules about speech

Western Apache social rules about speaking?

Warm Springs Reservation, Oregon Teachers reported students weren’t speaking much in class Students did better in cooperative activities than individual activities Showing off and competition not okay

Portraits of the Whiteman, by Keith Basso (1979)

Why are there jokes about “the whiteman”? Why are the Apache concerned about maintaining some aspects of their tradition and not others ?

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Human beings do not live in the objective world alone... but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.... The fact... is that 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 as distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (1949: 162)

Kinds of Snow the Saami Recognize Related to Reindeer Hunting Firm, even snow that falls in mid weather Thickly packed snow caused by intermittent freezing/thawing and high winds Hard-packed snow formed by strong wind Dry, large-grained, water-holding snow at the deepest layers, closest to the ground, found in late winter and spring Snow that forms a hard layer after rain Ice sheet on pastures formed by rain on open ground that freezes A layer of frozen snow between other snow layers that acts as an ice sheet. Source: Jernsletten, 1997

Sociolinguistics Because speech varies by: social position, context, and social relationship, speech signals: the relationship between people, the social roles they are playing, and the social context.

Speech Genres, p. 49 What might be some equivalent speech genres that you are familiar with?

Narrative Genres, p. 49 What are different narrative genres that you are familiar with?