• 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 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”?

• 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

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

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

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.

What might be some equivalent speech genres that you are familiar with?

What are different narrative genres that you are familiar with?