Communication, Language and
Culture: The Form of the
Message
In order for social scientists to
understand how people organize their
lives, carry out work, practice
religions, and the like, they need to be
aware of how people talk to each
other (Bnvillain 2003, 2)
Communicative interactions
Types of meanings transmitted
through language:
• Situational
• Social
• cultural
The act of speaking is action
• Creation of particular meanings
• Creating expectations
Why is
communication(language)
important for anthropology?
• Links of language and culture
• Understand social organization --religion,
law, etc.
• Social patterns and structures
Language needs to be understood
within cultural contexts: social,
situational, cultural
Cultural Model
Is a construction of reality that is
created, shared, and transmitted by
members of a group (ideology)
Speech community
Consists of people who are united in
numerous ways: norms and shared
rules
Characteristics of Human
Communication
• Productivity: the ability to communicate
many messages efficiently
• Displacement: the ability to think in the
past, the future and the present
Properties of languages
• Sounds
• --Phoneme: a minimal unit of sound that
functions to differentiate the meaning of
words
• Vocabulary
• Grammar: rules for combining sounds into
sequences that carry meaning
Grammar
• Morphology
• Syntax
• Semantics
Morphology
• Is concerned with how phonemes are
combined by language into larger units
• Words: one or more morphemes
Morphological examples
• Cow
• Cow- boy
• Affixes: bound morphemes:
• dis --- dis-like
Syntax
• rules that determine how words should be
combined to make sense to speakers of a language
• (English) word order critical for meaning (you,
are, and there)
• There you are
• You are there
• Are you there?
Morphological Typologies
(classification system)
• Classification of languages according to how they
structure words out of morphemes
• Isolating languages: few morphemes, simple
method: prefix and suffix (English)
• Agglutinating languages: words containing many
morphemes, highly regular rules (Turkish)
• Synthetic or polysynthetic: Words containing
many morphemes, very complex rules (Inuktitut
Origins of Language
• 50,000
• Stated as paralanguage: non-verbal
communication (body posture, voice tone, touch,
smell and facial movements)
• All languages equally efficient (semantically and
grammatically)
• Semantics: the study of meaning in language,
including the analysis of meaning of words and
sentences
Discussion Question
• Why do you think it is important to
understand the relationship between
language, communication and cultural
contexts?