
WHAT IS
LANGUAGE?
NONHUMAN PRIMATE
COMMUNICATION
Call systems
Sign Language
Origin of Language
NONVERBAL
COMMUNICATION
STRUCTURE OF
LANGUAGE
Speech Sounds
LANGUAGE, THOUGHT,
AND CULTURE
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Focal Vocabulary
Meaning
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Linguistic Diversity
Gender Speech Contrasts
Language and Status
Position
Stratification
Black English Vernacular
(BEV)
HISTORICAL
LINGUISTICS
Language Loss



Maybe spoken or written

Primary means of communication

Transmitted through learning (enculturation)

Always changing

Linguistic anthropologist explore the role of language in colonization and the expansion of world economy

Nonhuman Primate

communication systems of nonhuman primates

Call systems are only produced by environmental stimuli
 Apes have been taught to communicate with human through sign language

Washoe was the first chimp to learn ASL, at age two she began to construct rudimentary sentences

Nonhuman Primate
Communication

Cultural transmission – transmission through learning, basic to language
 Washoe and other chimps have tried to teach ASL to other animals including their own offspring
 Penny Patterson began to work with
Gorillas at Stanford University. Patterson raised and trained Koko, a female gorilla, whom can regularly employ
400 ASL signs.

Nonhuman Primate
Communication

The Origin of Language:

A mutation of gene FOXP2, explains why humans can speak and chimps do not.

When comparing human and chimp genomes, the mutation of FOXP2 appeared around in man around
150,000 years ago.
HUMAN LANGUAGE
Capacity to speak of past events
Can combine expressions
Language can be culturally transmitted
PRIMATE CALL SYSTEMS
Are stimuli-dependent
Calls can not be combines
Little variation among groups of the same species

Nonverbal
Communication

Facial expressions, bodily stances, gestures and movements can convey information and are an important part of human communication
Kinesics - study of communication through body movement and facial expressions
Linguists pay attention not only to what is said but how it is said, and to features besides language itself that convey meaning.


Speech sounds

Phoneme
– smallest sound contrast that distinguishes meaning

Phonemes are found by comparing minimal pairs -
words that resemble each other in all but one sound. (EX: pit/bit)

Language, Thought, &
Culture
The Sapir-Whorft Hypothesis

 Edward Sarpir and student Benjamin Lee Whorft:
Argued that grammatical categories of different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways
Focal Vocabulary – set words describing particular domains (foci) of experience
Lexicon – is a language’s dictionary, its set of names for things, events,
and ideas. Lexicon influences perception.

Language, culture and thought are interrelated. In opposition to Sapir-
Whorft Hypothesis, it is more reasonable to say changes in culture produce change in language and thought than the reverse.

Language, Thought, &
Culture

Ethnosemantics – study of lexical categories and contrasts.
Semantics – a language’s meaning system.
Meaning

Speakers of particular language use sets of terms to organized, or categorize, their experiences and perceptions. Linguistics terms and contrasts encode differences in meaning that people perceive.


No language is a uniform system in which everyone talks just like everyone else. The field sociolinguistics investigates relationships between social and linguistics variation.
Linguistic Diversity

Everyone's speech varies in different contexts
Style shifts – varying one’s speech in different social contexts
Diglossia – Language with “high” (formal) and low (informal, familial) dialects


Just as social situations influence our speech, so do geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic differences.
Our tendency to think of particular dialects as cruder or more sophisticated than others is a social judgment.
Gender Speech Contrasts

Comparing men and women, there are differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary as well in the body stances and movements that accompany speech


Multiple negation ( I don’t want none) according to gender and class (in percentages)
Male
Female
UMC
6.3
0.0
LMC
32.4
1.4
UWC
40.0
35.6
LWC
90.1
58.9
Language and Status Position
Honorifics – terms of respect; used to honor people
 Certain terms can imply a status deference between speaker and to whom is being referred.


Stratification

Speech in study in context of extralinguistic forces: social, political, and economic.

The speech of low status groups are view negatively not because the speech itself is wrong but because they symbolize low status
Black English Vernacular (BEV)
 Dialect spoken by majority of black youth in most parts of US

Phonology and syntax are similar to southern dialects
SE
You are tired
He is tired
We are tired
They are tired
SE Contraction
You’re tired
He’s tired
We’re tired
They’re tired
BEV
You tired
He tired
We tired
They tired


Daughter Languages – languages sharing a common parent language
Protolanguage – Language ancestral to several daughter languages
Languages evolves, varies and divides into subgroups. Dialects of a language become distinct daughter languages. Evolving speech within ancestral homeland should be considered a daughter language. Close relationships between languages does not necessarily mean that their speakers closely related biologically or culturally.
Language Loss
One aspect of linguistic history is language loss. When languages disappear, cultural diversity is reduced as well.