University:
Indiana University South Bend
Course:
ANTH-E 105 | Culture and Society
Academic year:

2024
Views:

158

Pages:

67
Author:

Rosalinda G.

LANGUAGE and COMMUNICATION Communication • Linguistic anthropology- the descriptive, comparative, and historical study of language, including its similarities and differences in time, space, and society • Linguistics also studies the origins of languages and how they are related Communication • Communication- the sending and receiving of signals • Communication is limited in regards to what it can send, especially in comparison to language • Both animals and humans communicate but only humans have language • Language pertains to unlimited transmission of information Communication • Language as we know it may be as recent as 40,000 years ago (i.e., the appearance of complex art and technology in the archaeological record) to as distant as 200,000 years ago (i.e., the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens) • Written language originated about 5,000 years ago in Sumeria (Iraq) [Google: cuneiform] Communication • Only humans speak (Do you agree?) • Other primates have call systems • Call systems- limited number of calls that are expressed in response to certain environmental stimuli • Some apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas have demonstrated the ability to learn sign language and displacement Communication • Displacement- the ability to talk about something that is not there • E.g., I would like to go to China one day. • Universal grammar- refers to the basic principles, conditions, and rules that form the basis of all languages • Language is transmitted through learning (enculturation) • Enculturation- the process of learning culture Communication • Productivity- the ability to produce and comprehend new utterances you have never spoken or heard before (Openness) • Conventionality (Arbitrariness) - language is based on arbitrary learning association between words and things for which they stand • e.g., melam- water; binbi- mosquito, bowlowopmosquito; lenten- mosquito, yokun-one; allolaychicken; doro-chicken, ganarr- chicken, buli bulivery hot Communication • Language- the primary (direct) means of communication in humans, includes spoken and written language • Language is important to anthropologists because it provides the vehicle in which culture is learned and transmitted • All languages are complex and have the same expressive power (no one language is better than another) Communication • Phonology- the study of speech sounds, considers which sounds are present and significant in a given language (e.g., Amharic- qat, Spanish- arroz) • Phoneme- the smallest meaningful unit of sound • E.g., Consider the English words bat, cat, hat, and rat. Notice how the meaning changes based on /b/, /c/, /h/, and /r/ Communication • Morphology- studies the forms in which sounds combine to form words and their meaningful parts (e.g., cats- “cat” a type of animal, “s” more than one) • Morpheme- the smallest unit of language that has meaning (In English, “s” to make words plural “un-” to mean not, “-er” one who does) • E.g., farmers [farm, er, s] Communication • Isolating Language- a language with few morphemes per word (English and Chinese) • Agglutinating Language- a language with several morphemes per word (German and Inuktitut, an Inuit language) • E.g., the word Inuktitut qasuirrarvigssarsingitluinarnarnarpuq means someone did not find a completely suitable resting place • • • • Communication Lexicon- a dictionary containing the vocabulary of a society (or language) Technologically and economically complex societies tend to have more words than other societies The English Dictionary has over 500,000 words1,2 Other languages: German has around 200,000 words while French and Spanish have less than 100,0002 Communication • English has over a million words if you count technological terms, slang, and obsolete words2 • The typical college graduate knows at least 20,000 words (this is several times more than a non-graduate) • We typically use no more than 800-1000 different words each day • This is about the same number of words you need to be able to speak another language Communication • Syntax- refers to the arrangement of and order of words (English has the adjective first then the noun, the opposite occurs in French [most of the time]) [i.e., sentence structure] • Syntax focuses on subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) order • Six possible combinations: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV, and OVS • The first three are the most common Communication • SVO: cows eat grass (English, Chinese, Finnish, Hausa, Italian, Malay, Russian, Swahili) (42%) • SOV: cows grass eat (Ancient Greek, Hindi/Urdu, Latin, Sankrit, Turkish, Japanese, Korean) (45%) • VSO: eat cows grass (Classical Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, Filipino, Samoan, Tuareg, Irish, Scottish, Welsh) (9%) • VOS: eat grass cows (Malagasy, Tzotzil-Mayan) (3%) • OSV: grass cows eat (Kabardian-Caucasian) (1%) • OVS: grass eat cows (Hixkaryana-Carib) (<1%) Non-Verbal Communication • Kinesics- the study of communication through body movements, gestures and facial expressions (i.e., body language) • A great deal (if not most) of the communication among humans is nonverbal. • Body odors, facial expressions, eye contact, handshakes, walking, sitting, etc. • Non-verbal communication is our most non-direct way of communicating (nonverbal communication is kinesics as well as its includes smell, taste, and touch). Communication • Ethnosemantics- the study of the meaning systems of various languages • Ethnosemantics is concerned with how people organize or categorize their experiences. • Examples: colors, kinship terms, ethnomedicine, ethnobotany, etc. Communication • Focal Vocabulary- specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups • e.g., the Inuit and Saami have many words for snow, Saami have many words for reindeer, Bedouin words for camel, terms for fish by fisherman, names for types of dogs by Westerners, etc. Communication • Sapir-Whorf hypothesis- the grammatical structure of language influences perceptions of time, space, and objects • e.g., The Hopi language has different tenses than English. This may reflect a different perception of time between the two groups. Communication • Sociolinguistics- studies the relationships between social and linguistic variation in its social context (i.e., looks at sex, class, ethnic differences within the same language) • Code Switching- the ability and action of moving between two languages in a social situation Communication Ebonics (African English Vernacular) • Common among rural and working class African Americans • Stresses that speech identifies the speaker’s background, social class, geographic location, etc. • Symbolic Capital- communicative competence to the level that provides access to linguistic and social power (Cultural Capital) Communication • Pidgins- languages that form in situations of acculturation (e.g., lingua franca) • Lingua franca- speech based on a mixture of languages • Lingua francas often develop in marketplaces and quite common in linguistically diverse and border areas Communication • Creole- a mature pidgin language which contains developed grammatical rules and serves as the primary means of communication (Jamaican English, Haitian French) • Dialect- subdivisions of a language (American English: Southern English, New England English, Black English, etc. • E.g., cola, soda, pop, etc. Communication • Languages change over time • There are two general ways that languages change • Internal change- language change that occurs due to the language speakers modifying their language over time • External change- language change that occurs through contact or borrowing between speakers of different languages Communication Internal Change: • Great Vowel Shift- the change in the pronunciation of the English language that occurred between 1400 and 1600. • OE: Swa swiđe he lufode ƥa headeor swilce he wære heora fæder (Lerer 2007:44). • ME: He loved the wild animals as if he were their father (Lerer 2007:44). Communication External Change: • 80-90% of all English words come from other languages (primarily Germanic languages, Celtic, Latin, Greek, and French) • Etymology- the study of the development and origin of a word (FYI- not on the exam) • Europe: Celtic: mostly place names in Britain, French: beef, pork, rogue, and garage; Germanic: dunk, egg, hamburger, husband, noodle, their, and ugly; Greek: atmosphere, comedy, history, and skeleton; Latin: circle, city, martyr, and paper Communication External Change: Borrowing in English : • Africa: Hausa: bogus; Kongo: funky; Mandinka: cola and jazz; and Wolof: banana, dig, hip, and juke; Bantu: banjo, gumbo • Americas: Algonguin: caucus, chipmunk, and pecan; Nahuatl: cocoa, coyote, and tomato; Taino: hurricane and savannah • Asia: Arabic: alcohol, algebra, algorithm, candy, and hashish; Hindi: avatar, shampoo, sugar, swastika, and thug; Japanese: tycoon; Mandarin: tea and typhoon; Persian: chess Communication • Comparative Linguistics- studies the relationships among languages; also classifies languages based on these relationships which helps us to understand the historical relationships between people (aka: Historical Linguistics) • Glottochronology- a statistical technique that estimates the date of separation between related languages Communication • Parent Language- the original language of the daughter languages (also called mother language, e.g., Latin) • Daughter Languages- languages that descend from a common language (e.g., Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian come from Latin) • This notion of proto-languages extends to the contemporary language families as well. Actual Language Language Family Language Branch Actual Language Actual Language Actual Language Italic Greek IndoEuropean IndoIranian BaltoSlavic Celtic Germanic IndoEuropean Italian Italic French Portuguese Spanish IndoEuropean Danish Germanic Dutch German English AfroAsiatic Amharic Semitic Arabic Hebrew Aramaic Communication Major Language Families of the World • Note: these are primarily language classifications not specific languages • Indo-European language branches/groups: Germanic, Italic (Romance), Celtic (Irish), Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Albanian, Armenian, etc. • Other language families: Sino-Tibetan, AfroAsiatic, Niger-Congo, etc. Communication The Indo-European Language Family • Germanic: German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, etc. • Celtic: Irish, Scottish, Welsh, etc. • Italic (Romance): Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc. Communication The Indo-European Language Family • Balto-Slavic: Baltic- Lithuanian, Latvian; Slavic- Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Slovak, Macedonian, etc. • Also: Greek, Albanian, Armenian, etc. • Extinct: Tocharian, Hittite, several others Communication The Indo-European Language Family • Indo-Iranian: Indic- Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Nepali, Kashmiri, Romany (Gypsy); Iranian(Aryan)- Farsi (Persian), Kurdish, Pashto, etc. • Sanskrit (pre-Hindi) considered similar to Lithuanian and Latvian Communication • Language classification is determined by similarities in lexicon (vocabulary) and syntax (word and sentence structure). • Linguists often focus on the most basic words of a language such as mom, dad, yes, no, numbers, colors, names of animals, etc. • Core Vocabulary- a list of 100 or 200 words that designate things, actions, and activities likely to be named in all languages Language Classification English one two three four five six seven eight nine ten French un deux trois quatre cinq six sept huit neuf dix German eins zwei drei vier fünf sechs sieben acht neun zehn Spanish uno dos tres quatro cinco seis siete ocho nueve diez Communication • Estimated 10,000 -15,000 languages about 17,000 years ago • Decrease due to development of agriculture which in turn lead to the development of state level societies, warfare, and cultural/linguistic assimilation • Today 7,100 living languages exist Communication • 90% will be dead or moribund in 100 years • Why?: Linguistic hegemony- economic, political, and social pressure to speak the most dominant language or languages in the region. • Some languages such as Hebrew have been restored • >95% of languages have less than a million speakers • 96% of the world’s people speak 4% of the world’s languages Communication • 90% will be dead or moribund in 100 years • Why?: Linguistic hegemonyeconomic, political, and social pressure to speak the most dominant language or languages in the region. • Some languages such as Hebrew have been restored • >95% of languages have less than a million speakers • 96% of the world’s people speak 4% of the world’s languages Communication Bilingualism and Multilingualism • Half of the worlds’ population is bilingual or multilingual • Quite common in the developing world and areas with a colonial past • People form these areas often speak a local language (the language of their ethnic group), a regional language, and the colonial language