Linguistic Anthropology
• Understand principles of how languages
change
• Developing a “genealogy” of languages
(Do not have to write statements below)
– How and where languages were developed
– Borrowing words from other languages
– New words added to vocabulary
Animal Language
“When Good Tweets Go Bad”
Answer in books:
1. How did the finches react to a change in tweets?
2. How was this change perceived by the
researchers?
3. How do your peers react to new “slang” words
and outdated slang words? List a few (school
appropriate)
Human Languages
• 6,909 languages being used today
• Over 120 language families
• “Top 5”
– Indo-European (Love Languages)
– Sino-Tibetan (Tibetan, Chinese, Asian)
– Niger-Congo (Swahili, Zulu)
– Afro-Asiatic (Arabic, Egyptian, Hebrew)
– Austronesian (Indonesian)
Human Language Cont.
• Nearly 6% of the world’s languages have at
least one million speakers and account for
94% of the world’s population.
• The remaining 94% of languages are spoken
by only 6% of the world’s people.
– Does not include dialects
Important definitions
• Proto-language
– a hypothesized ancestral language from which two
or more languages seems to have derived
• English (Mutt language)
• Language family
– languages that seem to have derived from the
same proto-language
• English (American), English (British), Spanish, etc.
Cont.
• Languages
– Sets of speech
– Norms of a particular community
• Dialect
– A systematic variety of a language specific to a
particular region or social group.
• Spanish (Mexican), Spanish (Spain), Western
Pennsylvania, WHSD, etc
Language Families
Language
Thriving
• New words created
frequently
• Learned in various parts of
the world
• Examples:
–
–
–
–
English
Spanish
French
Japanese
Dying
• No words created
• One population
• Examples:
– Mocho’
– Wichita
English Language
• Thriving language
– 2009- cyberslacking, lookism, ego-surfing
– 2010: tweetup, chillax, netbook, vuvuzela, defriend
– New words added to dictionary 2012
• Retweet, cyberbullying
– Words removed
•
Cassette tapes, gasp, video jockey
Quiz
Brain Damage and Speech
• Broca’s Aphasia
– Understand speech
– Impairment of talking
• Complete loss of speaking to ability to communicate
through writing
• Wernicke’s area
– Can not understand spoken language
– Produce sounds, phrases, and word sequences
• No information conveyed= no language
Parts of Language
Objectives
• Identify the aspects of speech
• Describe the effectiveness of speech
Question:
What has technology taken away from language?
Agenda
•
•
•
•
Importance of language
Video (Kony 2012)
Questions
Hand Back Quizzes (pass back in)
Objectives
• Identify the parts of language
• Analyze the importance of language
Question:
What is the most important aspect of having a
written language?
Human Language
• Openness
– Create and understand new messages
– Humans are able to talk about the same
experiences from different perspectives and
paraphrase things in different ways
• Text, Shakespearean language
• Duality of Patterning
– Language is patterned on two levels: sound and
meaning
• Sound phonemes, morphemes
• Displacement
– Ability to talk about absent or non-existent
objects in past or future as easily as we talk about
things in immediate situations.
• Arbitrariness
– Absence of a link between sound and meaning in
language
• book
• Prevarication
– Language can lie and language can be
grammatically well formed, but semantically
senseless
• Semanticity
– Association of linguistic signals with aspects of the
social, cultural, and physical world of a speech
community