 3. Anthropology
 Methodology: Anthropologists are most interested in discovering the
values of a sociocultural group, and the cultural rules of behavior that
reveal those values.
 Like the social psychologist, the anthropologist is interested in how the
individual speaker is dealing with the structure of his society, but not
in terms of his own psychological needs so much as how that person is
using his language choices to reveal his cultural values.
 Sociologists and social psychologists are likely to rely on questionnaire
data or the observation of people's behavior under controlled
experimental conditions.
 Anthropologists use participant observation: observing normal,
uncontrolled behavior of people as they carry on their everyday lives.
1
 Community structure
 Two kinds of social structure:
 (A) Higher- and lower-status groups as members of
separate communities.
 Diglossia without bilingualism: There are two separate
communities in the same society, one is a ruling elite and
the other is the governed group. They use different
languages and there is relatively little communication
between them except perhaps by means of a pidgin. The
governed group would acquiesce to the rule of the elite, but
would not consider themselves part of the same speech
community. There are two separate communities in the
same society.
2
 (B) People of the lower-status group are simultaneously
part of the high-status group.
 There are two groups within the same society; one with
more prestige and power than the other; but members of
the lower-status group see the more prestigious group as a
wider category that includes them. They have a kind of
'dual group membership'. This dual membership is
sequentially ordered within a person's lifetime; he first
becomes a member of the lower-status group. As he grows
older, he owes some allegiance to another social grouping
which is somewhat foreign, but which includes his own.
3
 Blom and Gumperz's work (1972): the Norwegian village of Hemnesberget: two
linguistic varieties: (1) Ranamal, the local variety used for everyday
conversation; and (2) Bokmal, a standard Norwegian variety.
 Ranamal linguistic forms are associated with the typical Low language
functions, and Bokmal forms with the usual High functions.
 Blom and Gumperz observed two kinds of switching:
 (A) situational switching: If the situation is considered rather formal and
relatively remote from local and personal concerns, then Bokmal forms will
predominate. If the situation is one of closeness and is part of the specifically
Hemnesberget community, then there will be a greater concentration of
Ranamal forms.
 (B) metaphorical switching: the linguistic choice becomes a symbol or
'metaphor' for the relationship being enacted regardless of the situation.
4
Blom and Gumperz set up three gatherings, two (old
people) one (young people). In the first two
gatherings, there were no instances of metaphorical
switching or any use of Bokmal at all, except when
someone was quoting what someone else said in
Bokmal or in speech directed to Blom or Gumperz
themselves. In the group of returned students (young
people) and when a topic arose in which a speaker
would benefit from an appeal to her status as an
intellectual, Bokmal forms would be used.
5
Gal's work (1978b, 1979) in Oberwart, Austria: peasants
are bilinguals in Hungarian and German. Hungarian,
the traditional ingroup language of one segment of the
society, is the Low variety. German, the national
language of Austria as well as the language of
education and of the professional class, is the High
language. Hungarian is associated with traditional
rural peasant values: hard work, ownership of farm
animals, and land ownership as a source of status.
German symbolizes the more 'Austrian' and urban
values that have moved into the community since the
Second World War.
6
 There are individual differences in the acceptance or
rejection of national and urban values associated with
the use of German.
 1- Men at café
 2- Old couples and neighbor
 3- Married women before and after the Second World
War
7
 The degree of fluency in the Higher language: A century
ago, peasants in Oberwart only spoke German 'well enough
to get by at markets in neighboring villages'. By the 1970s,
the goal was not only to learn German fluently, but to
speak German so free of any trace of a Hungarian accent
that one is 'able to pass as a monolingual'.
 Gal discovered orderly patterns of language choice when
individual selection patterns were placed on an
'implicational-scale' table with speakers represented by
rows and interlocutors by columns.
8
 Results:
 1- Older friends and relatives are the ones most likely to be
addressed in Hungarian and younger ones in German.
 2- Black-market clients use Hungarian.
 3- Prayers and hymns (speech addressed to God) are the
most likely speech events to be carried out in Hungarian. In
Oberwart, almost all members of the Hungarian-speaking
community are Calvinists; German is considered the
language of other people's religions, for the most part
Lutherans and Catholics. High variety of Hungarian is
used.
9
 A greater use of Hungarian means that a speaker tends to
think of the Hungarian-speaking and wider Austrian
communities more as parallel than as overlapping.
 peasantness: living in a household where cows or pigs or
both are owned
 There was a strong relationship between a dense
communications network with traditional members of the
Hungarian-speaking community and the tendency to
choose Hungarian.
10