Living Language

An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

Laura M. Ahearn

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444340549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Accessible and clearly written, Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology introduces readers to the study of language in real-life social contexts around the world through the contemporary theory and practice of linguistic anthropology.

• A highly accessible introduction to the study of language in real-life social contexts around the world
• Combines classic studies on language and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship and assumes no prior knowledge in linguistics or anthropology
• Provides a unifying synthesis of current research and considers future directions for the field
• Covers key topics such as: language and gender, race, and ethnicity; language acquisition and socialization in children and adults; language death and revitalization; performance; language and thought; literacy practices; and multilingualism and globalization

Part I

Language: Some Basic Questions

1

The Socially Charged Life of Language

All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life...

Bakhtin 1981:293

Words do live socially charged lives, as Bakhtin observes in the epigraph that opens this chapter. Language is not a neutral medium for communication but rather a set of socially embedded practices. The reverse of Bakhtin’s statement is also true: social interactions live linguistically charged lives. That is, every social interaction is mediated by language – whether spoken or written, verbal or nonverbal. Consider the following three examples.

Example 1: Getting Stoned in San Francisco

During the 1995–1996 school year, a special anti-drug class was run as an elective in a large high school in the San Francisco Bay Area.¹ Students were trained as peer educators in preparation for visiting other classes to perform skits about the danger of drugs and tobacco. The class was unusually diverse, with boys as well as girls and with students from many different class ranks, ethnicities, and racial groups. On the day that the students were preparing to perform their skits in front of an audience for the first time, they asked the teacher, Priscilla, what they should say if someone in the audience asked whether they themselves smoked marijuana. Priscilla recommended that they say they did not. Then the following exchange took place between Priscilla and the students:

Figure 1.1 Cartoon demonstrating how certain styles of speech can both reflect and shape social identities.

Source: Jump Start © 1999 United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

Priscilla: Remember, you’re role models.

Al Capone: You want us to lie?

Priscilla: Since you’re not coming to school stoned – (students laugh)

Calvin: (mockingly) Stoned?

Priscilla: What do you say?

Calvin: I say high. Bombed. Blitzed.

Brand One: Weeded.

Kerry: Justified.

Brand One: That’s kinda tight.

Example 2: Losing a Language in Papua New Guinea

In 1987, the residents of the tiny village of Gapun in Papua New Guinea (a country north of Australia) were some of the last speakers of a language called Taiap, which at the time had at most 89 remaining speakers.² Adult villagers were almost all bilingual in Taiap and in Tok Pisin, one of the three national languages of Papua New Guinea, and all children were exposed to rich amounts of both Taiap and Tok Pisin in their early years. By 1987, however, no child under the age of ten actively spoke Taiap, and many under the age of eight did not even possess a good passive knowledge of the language. The usual theories about how and why so many of the world’s languages are becoming extinct did not seem to apply to Taiap. Material and economic factors such as industrialization and urbanization were not sufficiently important in the remote village of Gapun to explain the language shift away from Taiap. Why, then, was Taiap becoming extinct? According to linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick, the adults in Gapun claimed that the shift was occurring because of the actions of their (often preverbal) children. Kulick writes: “ ‘We haven’t done anything,’ one village man explained when I asked him why village children don’t speak the vernacular, ‘We try to get them to speak it, we want them to. But they won’t … They’re bikhed [big-headed, strong-willed]’ ” (Kulick 1992:16).

Example 3: The Pounded Rice Ritual in Nepal

On a warm February afternoon in 1993, a wedding procession made its way down a steep hill in Junigau, Nepal. Several men carefully maneuvered the bride’s sedan chair around the hairpin turns. At the foot of the hill, under a large banyan tree, the wedding party settled down to rest and to conduct the Pounded Rice Ritual.³ The bride, Indrani Kumari, remained in her palanquin, while some members of the wedding party, including the groom, Khim Prasad, approached her. Taking out a leafplate full of pounded rice, a popular snack in Nepal, Indrani Kumari’s bridal attendant placed it in her lap. Khim Prasad, coached by his senior male kin, tentatively began the ritual, holding out a handkerchief and asking his new wife to give him the pounded rice snack. He used the most polite, honorific form of “you” in Nepali (tapāi), and so his remark translated roughly as a polite request to someone of higher social status: “Please bring the pounded rice, Wife; our wedding party has gotten hungry.”

But this first request was not very effective. Indrani Kumari and her bridal attendant poured just a few kernels of the pounded rice into the handkerchief Khim Prasad was holding. Upon further coaching from his elders, Khim Prasad asked a second time for the rice, this time in a more informal manner using “timi,” a form of “you” in Nepali that is considered appropriate for close relatives and/or familiar equals. This time, Khim Prasad’s request could be translated roughly as a matter-of-fact statement to someone of equal social status: “Bring the pounded rice, Wife; our wedding party has gotten hungry.” But again, the bridal attendant and Indrani Kumari poured only a few kernels of pounded rice into Khim Prasad’s waiting handkerchief. One last time Khim Prasad’s senior male kin instructed him to ask for the rice, but this time he was told to use “tã,” the lowest form of “you” in Nepali – a form most commonly used in Junigau to address young children, animals, and wives. Khim Prasad complied, but his words were halting and barely audible, indicating his deeply mixed feelings about using such a disrespectful term to address his new wife. This third request translated roughly as a peremptory command to someone of greatly inferior social status: “Bring the pounded rice, Wife! Our wedding party has gotten hungry!” Hearing this, Indrani Kumari and her attendant finally proceeded obediently to dump all the remaining rice into the groom’s handkerchief, after which he handed out portions of the snack to all members of the wedding party.

Figure 1.2 Khim Prasad (left) during the Pounded Rice Ritual, with the bride, Indrani Kumari (seated at the right, completely covered by a shawl), and the bridal attendant (standing in the center).

Source: Laura M. Ahearn, Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

As different as these three examples are, they all describe situations in which neither a linguistic analysis alone nor a sociocultural analysis alone would come close to providing a satisfying explanation of the significance of the events. The purpose of this book is to show how the perspectives and tools of linguistic anthropology, when applied to events as wide-ranging as an anti-drug class in a San Francisco high school, language shift in Papua New Guinea, or a ritual in Nepal, can shed light on broader social and cultural issues as well as deepen our understanding of language – and ourselves. As we move through the chapters that follow, we will be addressing a number of questions, including:

• What can such situations tell us about the ways in which language is enmeshed with cultural values and social power?
• How do dimensions of difference or inequality along lines such as gender, ethnicity, race, age, or wealth get created, reproduced, or challenged through language?
• How can language illuminate the ways in which we are all the same by virtue of being human as well as the ways in which we are incredibly diverse linguistically and culturally?
• How, if at all, do linguistic forms, such as the three different words in Nepali for “you” or the various slang words for “stoned,” influence people’s thought patterns or worldviews?
• How might people’s ideas about language (for example, what “good” language is and who can speak it – in other words, their “language ideologies”) affect their perceptions of others as well as themselves?
• How does the language used in public rituals and performances both differ from and resemble everyday, mundane conversations?
• What methods of data collection and analysis can we use to determine the significance of events such as those described above?

The starting point in the search for answers to all of these questions within linguistic anthropology is this fundamental principle: language is inherently social. It is not just a means through which we act upon the social world; speaking is itself a form of social action, and language is a cultural resource available for people to use (Duranti 1997:2). We do things with words, as the philosopher J.L. Austin (1962) reminded us decades ago. Even when we speak or write to ourselves, our very choices of words, as well as our underlying intentions and desires, are influenced by the social contexts in which we have seen, heard, or experienced those words, intentions, and desires before. Linguistic anthropologists therefore maintain that the essence of language cannot be understood without reference to the particular social contexts in which it is used. But those contexts do not stand apart from linguistic practices or somehow “contain” them, as a soup bowl would contain soup.⁴ Rather, social contexts and linguistic practices mutually constitute each other. For this reason, language should be studied, Alessandro Duranti writes, “not only as a mode of thinking but, above all, as a cultural practice, that is, as a form of action that both presupposes and at the same time brings about ways of being in the world” (1997:1).

This approach to language differs from the popular view of language as an empty vehicle that conveys pre-existing meanings about the world. Language, according to this view, which is held by many members of the general public as well as many linguists and other scholars, is largely a set of labels that can be placed on pre-existing concepts, objects, or relationships. In this mistaken way of thinking, language is defined as a conduit that merely conveys information without adding or changing anything of substance (Reddy 1979).

Within the field of linguistics, a similar approach to language is dominant: one in which language is reduced to a set of formal rules. Such reductionism extends back hundreds of years but was made the dominant approach of the field of linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, a famous Swiss linguist who lived a century ago. De Saussure maintained that it was not only possible but necessary to decontextualize the study of language: “A science which studies linguistic structure is not only able to dispense with other elements of language, but is possible only if those other elements are kept separate” (Saussure 1986[1916]:14).⁵ This perspective was reinforced by Noam Chomsky, an American linguist who revolutionized the field and has dominated it for the past 50 years. Chomsky and his followers are interested in discovering Universal Grammar (UG), which they define as: “The basic design underlying the grammars of all human languages; [it] also refers to the circuitry in children’s brains that allows them to learn the grammar of their parents’ language” (Pinker 1994:483).

This is not to say that linguistic anthropologists are uninterested in grammar or believe that linguistic forms cannot be studied systematically – on the contrary, many build upon the “considerable progress in the understanding of formal properties of languages” made by scholars in the field of linguistics (Duranti 1997:7), but they ask very different kinds of questions that explore the intersections between grammar and social relations, politics, or emotion. Even linguistic anthropologists who value the work done by linguists believe that in order to acquire a comprehensive understanding of language, it must be studied in real-life contexts (cf. Hanks 1996). Grammar, according to linguistic anthropologists, is just one part of language’s “socially charged life” (Bakhtin 1981:293).⁶

So, What Do You Need to Know in Order to “Know” a Language?

In order to understand what it means to study language as a linguistic anthropologist would, it is helpful to ask what it means to “know” a language (Cipollone et al. 1998). Linguists generally use the Chomskyan distinction between “competence,” the abstract and usually unconscious knowledge that one has about the rules of a language, and “performance,” the putting into practice – sometimes imperfectly – of those rules. De Saussure made a similar distinction between langue (the language system in the abstract) and parole (everyday speech). This distinction is partly analogous to the way a person might have abstract knowledge about how to knit a sweater but in the actual knitting of it might drop a stitch here or there or perhaps make the arms a bit shorter than necessary. In both the Chomskyan and Saussurean approaches, it is the abstract knowledge of a language system (competence or langue) that is of primary, or even sole, interest for a science of language; performance or parole is irrelevant.

To take the knitting analogy further, if Chomsky were a knittist instead of a linguist, he would be interested only in the abstract rules of Knitting (capitalizing the word, as he does with Language) such as the following: Row 20: P 1, (k 1, p 1) 11(13-15) times, k 5, T R 2, k 4, T R 2, k 1, p 12, k 1, T L 2, k 4, T L 2, k 5, p 1, (k 1, p 1) 11(13-15) times.⁷ Chomsky the knittist would posit the existence of a Knitting Acquisition Device (KAD, rather than LAD, a Language Acquisition Device), a specialized module of the brain that allows people to acquire knitting skills. While he would acknowledge that people require exposure to knitting in their social environments in order to learn how to knit, he would be completely uninterested in the following:

• How or why people learn to knit in various cultures and communities.
• How knitting practices have changed over time.
• The gendered nature of knitting and other handicrafts in many societies (although knitting is often associated with girls and women in this society, for example, handicrafts such as weaving were until recently conventionally produced by lower-caste men in Nepal).
• The role of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, as she secretly encodes the names of counterrevolutionaries into her knitting.⁸
• The global economics involved in the many different yarns people use to knit – anything from yak wool from Nepal to Icelandic wool to synthetic mohair.
• The many different kinds of products of economic, social, or emotional value that are made by knitters to be worn by themselves, given to loved ones, donated to charity, or sold to tourists.
• The ways in which knitting is viewed by different groups in the society – as a hip, in-group practice by some, as an old, fuddy-duddy practice by others, as a useful, money-making skill by yet others.
• How one’s individual and social identities can be reflected in and shaped by whether, how, what, and with whom one knits.

While this analogy with knitting is not by any means a perfect one, it does nevertheless demonstrate how narrowly Chomsky and most other linguists view language. Other practices such as playing music, dancing, or painting would work equally well in the analogy I set up above because knitting and all these other practices are – like language – socially embedded and culturally influenced. Of course there are abstract cognitive and biological dimensions to anything that we as humans do, including language, but to reduce language solely to these dimensions, as Chomsky and others do when they claim they are interested only in competence and not in performance, is to miss the richness and complexity of one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence.

Linguistic anthropologists therefore reject the Chomskyan/Saussurean distinction between competence (langue) and performance (parole), though they do so in various ways. Some deny the existence of any distinction at all betwe...