Language, Culture, and Society

An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974700
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why should we study language? How do the ways in which we communicate define our identities? And how is this all changing in the digital world? Since 1993, many have turned to Language, Culture, and Society for answers to questions like those above because of its comprehensive coverage of all critical aspects of linguistic anthropology. This seventh edition carries on the legacy while addressing some of the newer pressing and exciting challenges of the 21st century, such as issues of language and power, language ideology, and linguistic diasporas. Chapters on gender, race, and class also examine how language helps create - and is created by - identity. New to this edition are enhanced and updated pedagogical features, such as learning objectives, updated resources for continued learning, and the inclusion of a glossary. There is also an expanded discussion of communication online and of social media outlets and how that universe is changing how we interact. The discussion on race and ethnicity has also been expanded to include Latin- and Asian-American English vernacular.

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Introducing Linguistic Anthropology

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Explain some of the “myths” people have about language, and why; be able to refute them

• Give a brief overview of the history of anthropology and identify its four subfields

• List some of the assumptions underlying “Americanist” linguistic anthropology

• Identify Franz Boas and Edward Sapir and explain their importance to linguistic anthropology

• Describe some ways languages can differ in terms of grammar and vocabulary

The first thing that someone reads in any introductory textbook is the authors’ capsule definition of the subject matter at hand. In this book we have two disciplines that, at first glance, might appear to be very different. Stereotypically, people think of anthropologists in pith helmets out in a jungle someplace uncovering bizarre tribal customs. Likewise, they imagine a linguist as someone who can speak a dozen languages fluently, or else as a scholar poring over ancient texts deciphering secret hieroglyphic messages. In reality these two fields are hardly like that, but that does not make them any less exciting. This book is about how those people who call themselves linguistic anthropologists study the universal phenomenon of human language. But before we go into the specifics of how they do that, we should ask ourselves an even more basic question.

WHY SHOULD WE STUDY LANGUAGE? LANGUAGE IN DAILY LIFE

“Why should I study language?” is hardly a rhetorical question. Most people never formally study language, and they seem to get along fine. But do they? For example, have you ever arranged to meet someone “next Tuesday,” only to find that your friend was planning to show up a week later than you had anticipated? Or why do we need lawyers to translate a contract for us when the document is written in a language that all parties share? David Crystal (1971:15) points out that communication between patients and physicians can be extremely difficult, given the differences in training and perspective of the persons involved. The doctor often has to take a general phrase, such as “a dull ache in my side,” and formulate a diagnosis and treatment based solely on this description. And when responding to what the patient has said, the doctor must choose her words carefully. What a doctor calls a “benign growth” might be heard as “cancer” by the patient.

At school we are confronted with language problems the minute we walk in the door. Some are obvious: “I can’t understand Shakespeare. I thought he spoke English. Why is he so difficult?” Other problems are not so obvious: “What is the difference between who and whom? Doesn’t one make me sound British?” “Why do I have to say ‘you and I’ instead of ‘me and you’?” Some problems, such as the subtle sexism found in some textbooks, may be beyond our everyday psychological threshold. Problems of ethnicity and community-identity can be seen in such controversial issues as bilingual education or the teaching of Ebonics.

Language is involved in a wide variety of human situations, perhaps every situation. If something permeates every aspect of human life and is so complex that we cannot fathom its influence, we should study it. The scientific study of language is one of the keys to understanding much of human behavior.

The study of language will not in itself solve all the world’s problems. It is useful enough to make people aware that these problems of language exist and that they are widespread and complex. Besides being of intellectual interest, then, the study of language offers a special vantage point of “linguistic sensitization” (Crystal 1971:35) to problems that are of concern to everyone, regardless of discipline and background.

Some of the questions we will address in this book, then, are broad but fundamental—for example:

1. How can language and culture be adequately described?

2. Do other animals, such as chimpanzees using American sign language, show linguistic capacities?

3. How did language originate? How did it contribute to human evolution and the development of culture?

4. How are languages acquired?

5. How can languages be classified to show the relationships among them?

6. What is the relationship between language and thought?

7. What is meaning? How is it bestowed? How is it learned?

8. What does it mean to be human?

MODERN MYTHS CONCERNING LANGUAGES

This may be a good place to provide information about languages in general to set some basic matters straight. Every human being speaks a language, but what people think about languages—particularly those about which they know little or nothing—is quite another matter. Consider the following statements. Which ones do you think are true?

Almost everywhere in the world, everyone is monolingual or monodialectal, just as in America.

Spelling in English is basically phonetic and governed by clear rules.

Most writing systems in the world are based on some kind of alphabet.

If you really want to learn Spanish, don’t take a class in school. It is better to just go, say, to Mexico for a month or two.

Some languages are naturally harder to learn than others.

Some languages are naturally more “primitive” than others.

Language itself is not ambiguous; it is people’s misinterpreting things that causes problems.

Some dialects are, well … stupid, demonstrating that a person is uneducated.

The use of language somehow reflects one’s intelligence.

People who are fluent in another language may not have complete mastery of their native language.

The ability to learn a foreign language is a special kind of skill that some of us have, and others don’t.

As our grade school teachers taught us, if you want to get it right, go to the dictionary!

People who use double negatives (“I don’t need no anthropology classes”) are really not thinking logically.

It is easier to learn Chinese if you come from a Chinese family background than from a European family.

Languages seem to have special characteristics or personalities: for example, French is romantic; German is scientific; Russian is soulful; Spanish is hot-blooded; Italian is emotional; Chinese is simple and straightforward; Japanese is mysterious, spiritual, and Zen-like; English is logical; Greek is philosophical, and so on.

All Native Americans generally speak the same language; that’s why they could communicate with each other using sign language (like in the movies).

The more words you know, the better you know your language.

Most anthropologists and linguists would say that all of these statements are suspect, if not outright wrong. Let us briefly consider a few of these misconceptions concerning languages in more detail because they appear to be widespread, even among those who are otherwise well educated and knowledgeable. These misconceptions we can refer to as myths, in the sense of being unfounded, fictitious, and false beliefs or ideas.

Primitive Languages … Or Not?

The most common misconception is the belief that unwritten languages are “primitive,” whatever that may mean. Those who think that “primitive” languages still exist invariably associate them with societies that laypeople refer to as “primitive”—especially the very few remaining bands of hunter-gatherers. There are of course differences in cultural complexity between hunting-and-collecting bands and small tribal societies, on the one hand, and modern industrial societies, on the other, but no human beings today are “primitive” in the sense of being less biologically evolved than others. One would be justified in talking about a primitive language only if referring to the language of, for example, the extinct forerunner of Homo sapiens of a half million years ago. Even though we do not know on direct evidence the nature of the system of oral communication of Homo erectus, it is safe to assume that it must have been much simpler than languages of the past several thousand years and therefore primitive in that it was rudimentary, or represented an earlier stage of development.

Why are certain languages mistakenly thought to be primitive? There are several reasons. Some people consider other languages ugly or “primitive sounding” if those languages make use of sounds or sound combinations they find indistinct or “inarticulate” because the sounds are greatly different from those of the languages they themselves speak. Such a view is based on the ethnocentric attitude that the characteristics of one’s own language are obviously superior. But words that seem unpronounceable to speakers of one language—and are therefore considered obscure, indistinct, or even grotesque—are easily acquired by even the youngest native speakers of the language in which they occur. To a native speaker of English, the Czech word scvrnkls “you flicked off (something) with your finger” looks quite strange, and its pronunciation may sound odd and even impossible because there is no vowel among the eight consonants; for native speakers of Czech, of course, scvrnkls is just another word. Which speech sounds are used and how they are combined to form words and utterances vary from one language to the next, and speakers of no language can claim that their language has done the selecting and combining better than another.

The Grammar of Non-Western Languages

Another myth has to do with grammar. Some think that languages of peoples whose societies are not urbanized and industrialized have “little grammar,” meaning that such languages have few, if any, of the sort of grammar rules students learn in school. According to this misconception, members of simple societies use language in rather random fashion, without definite pattern. To put it differently, grammar in the sense of rules governing the proper use of cases, tenses, moods, aspects, and other grammatical categories is erroneously thought to be characteristic of “civilized” languages only. Once again, nothing could be further from the truth. Some languages have less “grammar” than others, but the degree of grammatical complexity is not a measure of how effective a particular language is.

What sorts of grammars, then, characterize languages spoken by members of tribal societies? Some of these languages have a fairly large and complicated grammatical apparatus, whereas others are less grammatically complex—a diversity similar to that found in Indo-European languages. Edward Sapir’s description of the morphology of Takelma, based on material collected in 1906, takes up 238 pages (Sapir 1922). In Takelma, the now extinct language spoken at one time in southwestern Oregon, verbs were particularly highly inflected, making use of prefixes, suffixes, infixes, vowel changes, consonant changes, and reduplication (functional repetition of a part of a word). Every verb had forms for six tense-modes, including potential (“I can …” or “I could …”), inferential (“it seems that …” or “I presume that …”), and present and future imperatives (the future imperative expressing a command to be carried out at some stated or implied time in the future). Among the other grammatical categories and forms marked in verbs were person, number, voice (active or passive), conditional, locative, instrumental, aspect (denoting repeated, continuing, and other types of temporal activity), and active and passive participles. Sapir’s description of verb morphology fills more than 147 pages—yet is not to be taken as exhaustive. Although the brief characterization here is far from representative of Takelma verb morphology, it clearly indicates that Takelma grammar was anything but simple. A similar and more detailed demonstration of morphological complexity could easily be provided for hundreds of other so-called primitive languages.

Vocabulary Deficiencies?

When it comes to the vocabulary of languages, is it true, as some suppose, that the vocabularies of so-called primitive languages are too small and inadequate to account for the nuances of the physical and social universes of their speakers? Here the answer is somewhat more complicated. Because the vocabulary of a language serves only the members of the society who speak it, the question to be asked should be: Is a particular vocabulary sufficient to serve the sociocultural needs of those who use the language? When put like this, it follows that the language associated with a relatively simple culture would have a smaller vocabulary than the language of a complex society. Why, for example, should the Inuit people (often known by the more pejorative term “Eskimo”) have words for chlorofluoromethane, dune buggy, lambda particle, or tae kwon do when these substances, objects, concepts, and activities play no part in their culture? By the same token, however, the language of a tribal society would have elaborate lexical domains for prominent aspects of the culture even though these do not exist in complex societies. The Agta of the Philippines, for example, are reported to have no fewer than thirty-one verbs referring to types of fishing (Harris 1989:72).

For Aguaruna, the language serving a manioc-cultivating people of northwestern Peru, Brent Berlin (1976) isolated some 566 names referring to the genera of plants in the tropical rain forest area in which they live. Many of these genera are further subdivided to distinguish among species and varieties—for example, the generic term ipák “achiote or annatto tree (Bixa orellana)” encompasses baéŋ ipák, čamíŋ ipák, hémpe ipák, and šíŋ ipák, referring respectively to “kidney-achiote,” “yellow achiote,” “hummingbird achiote,” and “genuine achiote.” Very few Americans, unless they are botanists, farmers, or nature lovers, know the names of more than about forty plants.

Lexical specialization in nonscientific domains is of course to be found in complex societies as well. The Germans ...