Language/culture socialization
An anthropological perspective
•
Linguistics as a field is concerned primarily with the analytical study of a
language to reveal its structure.
•
Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological and neurobiological
factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce
language.
•
Linguistic anthropology is most concerned with the relationship between
language, worldview, culture, and social relationships, etc.
Linguists, psycholinguists, and linguistic anthropologists have all studied how
children learn language and the patterns of language acquisition and
competence. Different from linguists and psycholinguists, linguistic
anthropologists are often concerned with how children in various cultures learn
language and how they acquire their particular cultural attributes through the
process of learning language. Linguistic anthropologists often conduct what are
called language socialization studies (Don Kulick & Bambi Schieffelin: Language
Socialization).
1
In the past, linguists conducted most of their language-learning studies among
white middle class North American and northern European children. These
children generally shared the linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds of the
researchers who were studying them. Culture was, for the most part, invisible to
these researchers, who erroneously concluded that children everywhere
acquired language in the same ways. (Don Kulick & Bambi Schieffelin:
Language Socialization)
There are some basic patterns, but Anthropologists have studied children
learning language all over the world. Anthropologists see that how children are
socialized to learn language and through language varies from culture to
culture.
Language socialization paradigm
• Insists that in becoming competent members of
their social group, children are socialized through
language
• Children are socialized to use language
• So language is not just one dimension of the
socialization process
• It is the most central and crucial dimension of that
process
2
The language socialization paradigm claims
that:
Any study of socialization that does not document the
role of language … in the acquisition of cultural
practices … is incomplete and fundamentally flawed.
As background, past linguistic and psycholinguistic studies
assumed that cultural competence was complete after
adolescence.
In comparison:
• Language socialization studies emphasize the socializing nature of
all human interaction.
We know now that we are socialized all of our lives to use language and to
understand the world through language. Our various subcultures, professions,
educational emphases and areas of expertise all influence the language
categories we use to describe and perceive our relationships, experiences and
beliefs.
3
Multiple agencies are present and should be accounted for
in any social interaction
Mother child interactions
• It is not only the child who is being socialized
• The child, through her/his actions and verbalizations, is also
actively socializing the mother as a mother
Co-workers socialize each other as co-workers
Lovers socialize each other as lovers
The goal in language socialization studies is to understand how people come to
be culturally intelligible subjects (that is people who understand a cultural way
of being). The main question here is ‘how’?
4
Below are a few classic examples of case studies to show what anthropologists
mean by learning culture while learning language.
Don Kulick studied infant caregivers in the Papua New Guinean village of
Gapun. In this village, people assume that infants are naturally willful and
stubborn. People are more likely to interpret infants’ behaviors as expressing
dissatisfaction and anger.
“A child cooing softly in its mother’s lap is likely to be shaken suddenly and
asked ‘Ai! What are you mad about!’ The first words attributed to a baby are
oki, mnda and ayata – words which mean ‘I’m leaving’, ‘I’m sick of this’ and
‘Stop it’, respectively. If a mother notices a baby reaching out towards a dog,
she won’t tell the child to pet it. Instead, voicing what she takes to be the child’s
inner state, the mother asserts, ‘Look, she’s mad now, she wants to hit the dog’,
and she moves closer to the animal, thrusting out the child’s hand onto the
dog’s fur, encouraging her. ‘That’s it, hit it! Hit it’! Imputed aggression in babies is
frequently matched by anyone tending them, and the most common mode of
face play with babies involves the caregiver biting her lower lip, widening her
eyes, thrusting out her chin sharply, and raising the heel of her hand in a
threatening manner, swinging it to within a few inches of the child’s face and
then suddenly pulling it back again. After pulling several of these punches, the
woman or man doing this laughs at the baby and nuzzles its face and body with
her or his lips (Kulick 1992:99-104).
-
These kinds of routine caregiver-child interactions foreground anger
as an emotion of important consequence.
5
-
In Gapun, anger is a structuring principle of social life.
-
For example, anger is a crucial component of the village’s gender
division.
-
Women are held to be selfish and always ready to publicly vent
their anger.
-
Men are expected to suppress anger for the greater social good.
-
The conviction is held that to impose on another person and make
them angry may cause them, their ancestors, or the supernatural
entities associated with their land to act by causing someone to
sicken or die (Kulick 1992, 1993, 1998).
The Kaluli are another group in Papua New Guinea. Their beliefs about the
nature of children differ from beliefs in Gapun. Instead adults assume that infants
are ‘soft’ or helpless, vulnerable, and without understanding. The first sounds
produced by children that are recognized by adults as Kaluli words are no: and
bo, ‘mother’ and ‘breast’. “These words are significant in that they attest to a
social view of language expressing the child’s primary relationship and the
giving of food that is central to its constitution. Kaluli say that children know how
to beg and whine to get what they want, but they must be taught to use
language. Kaluli use no baby talk or simplified speech when communicating
with their infants. Instead, they socialize young children by telling them precisely
what to say and how to say it.
-
Kaluli children are understood to need to acquire assertive
demeanors.
6
-
Adults often pay little attention to what the young child might want
to say or do.
-
Mothers make extensive use of the ‘say it’ routine to direct young
children to request, command, tease and challenge.
-
They model what they want the child to say and how it should be
said.
-
The child needs to learn how to go from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ in his or her
speech.
-
Hardness signifies verbal and social competence, which includes
being able to verbally demand what one desires.
-
Once children are able to demand, they may be asked to give
and share and enter into the system of reciprocity that defines Kaluli
social life and relationships.
-
In this society it is important to know when to demand and when to
appeal to others to feel sorry and give.
The Gapun and Kaluli examples demonstrate how children learn to be
appropriate members of their culture group. They learn how to be Kaluli or
Gapun through the social frames that surround learning language.
Another question might be how do children learn to be
inappropriate members of their culture group?
7
How do some people become ‘bad’ and some
‘good’ relative to their culture groups?
“Good” subjects are those members of a culture group who learn
and adhere correctly to socialization.
Don Kulick and Bambi Schieffelin (linguistic anthropologists) ask what
happens when language socialization results in unexpected
outcomes such as resistance.
• To answer questions of how people become good or bad in
relation to cultural expectations involves documenting how certain
children or novices come to be what could be called ‘bad’ subjects.
• (Not that they are inherently ‘bad’, necessarily, except that they
do not respond to calls to behave in particular socially sanctioned
ways.)
Examples of ‘bad’ subjects
• In societies that value sensitivity, ‘bad’ subjects might be people who don’t
stop talking about themselves.
8
• In societies that stress generosity, ‘bad’ subjects might be people who are
selfish.
• In societies that value cooperation, they might be people who behave in
criminal ways.
• Traditionally, in psychology, people who didn’t conform were
called ‘deviants’.
• They were seen as the product of individual psychological
processes.
• They were thought to be socialized through negligence, abuse or
idiosyncratic caregiving strategies.
Some of these socialization issues are valid, but Kulick and
Schieffelin say that to particularize (and individualize) even a case
as serious as a serial killer is to ignore the fact that these are cultural
products.
First, serial-rapist murderers do not exist everywhere,
as culturally imaginable subjectivity or as an actual
occurring type of person.
9
Second, they are not exclusively children of
negligent or abusive parents.
Even when there are biological components to 'badness' the expresion of badness and
manifestation of badness often differs from culture group to culture group. For example,
scizhophrenia manifests itself differently from culture group to culture group, most likely
because of contrasting socialization of language and culture, as well as values, beliefs and
expectations of groups.
To better understand how cultural patterns manifest into different expressions of
badness or goodness, it is important to study the messages children learn about
being good and bad in their various cultural settings. Basically when children are
learning how to be good, they are also learning the inverse, or how to be bad,
relative to their culture group.
What is it about the ways that language socialization occurs that
contributes to a type of badness that manifests itself in serial rapist
murder in some cultures but not others? While we may not yet know
the answer to that specific question, cultural analysis is crucial to
better understanding types of ‘badness’ according to Kulick and
Schiefflen.
Again, remember that children receive socializing messages about
how to behave and feel in particular ways.
These messages also produce their own inversion.
10
Each time that an adult tells a child how to speak politely, the adult is also
indicating how to speak rudely.
•
“You must say please”
•
“Don’t say that word.”
•
These commands tell the child what rudeness is.
•
The commands also point to the forbidden phrases.
•
In teaching politeness, adults provide a model of rudeness.
•
The socialization processes teaches what to repress and what to express.
•
What is repressed and expressed is relative to different culture groups.
To understand how a culture’s version of badness is taught requires
researchers to take a close look at how adults communicate with
infants and children.
11
• Language socialization studies include exploration of the ways in which
utterances manifest ‘dual indexicality’ …their surface content and the
simultaneous inverse of that content
Examples: A study in comparisons
Patricia Clancey working with mothers and two-year-olds in
Japan
In her study of Japanese two-year-olds with their mothers, Clancey wanted to
find out how children came to learn ideal Japanese communication styles that
include being indirect and intuitive in conversations and mannerisms. She found
that as children learn culture (through learning language) their mothers practice
certain socialization routines. For example:
-
If a child is behaving inappropriately his mother might attribute
feelings and speech to other people asking, “How is your
grandfather feeling about what he sees you doing?” This tells the
child how to read non-verbal behavior and to consider how other
people might be feeling about his behavior.
-
The child’s mother might appeal to hito, ‘other people’, who are
supposedly always watching and evaluating the child’s behavior.
-
The child’s mother might use strong affect-laden adjectives like
‘scary’ or ‘frightening’ to describe the child’s misbehavior. This
makes it clear that the behavior is unacceptable and shameful.
12
“These kinds of communicative interactions sensitized children to subtle
interactional expectations which in adult interactions are not expressed
explicitly. They also encouraged children to acquire the specific anxieties and
fears (such as the disapproval of hito) that undergird Japanese communicative
style” (Kulick & Schieffelin, 10).
In these types of socializing experiences, what do children
learn are the reasons for being good?
U.S. example
Desirable leads to Desirable
Undesirable leads to Undesirable
In a study of common (but not universal) North American ways of
communicating with children about good and bad behavior, adults use more
conditional language, “If you clean your room, you can watch cartoons.” They
also use more threats and warnings than do many Japanese mothers.
A child who is afraid of a vacuum cleaner sound is told by her mother, “I won’t
put the vacuum cleaner on if you drink all your juice.”
•
(Desirable for the child to desirable for the mother)
13
A father warns his child, “If I see you with matches, I’ll give you a spanking.”
•
(Undesirable behavior of child to undesirable behavior toward child)
In these types of socializing experiences, what do children
learn are the reasons for being good?
English speaking adults:
Desirability links:
To control child’s behavior, adults link actions that are desirable for the adult to
actions that the adult frames as desirable to the child.
Undesirability links:
•
English speakers often use conditionals, promises, threats, and warnings.
These are presented to children with an explicit reason for complying with the
directive.
•
The reason is linked to consequences that the child would face (I’ll give you a
spanking).
•
This way focuses on the child being good for the sake of avoiding punishment
or to receive rewards.
•
(Is the inverse being bad to get away with it, expecting rewards for good
behavior, etc.?)
•
14
Japanese and Korean adults mostly do not present children with this kind of
information.
•
They rely more on general statements (it won’t do … it’s scary)
These do not assert what will happen if the child does or does not follow to the
adult’s command to do, or stop doing, something.
•
This way focuses on the child learning self control for the sake of others’
welfare and opinions
•
•
(Is the inverse fear of loss of self control and fear of other people’s opinions?)
Questions for further study:
• In learning how to be good through threats, warnings, and
rewards, what is the inverse of such socialization?
• In what ways do many North American people express ‘badness’
because they learned to be ‘bad’ through rewards, threats and
warnings?
15