LANGUAGE,
CULTURE AND
COMMUNICATIO
N
Basic Concepts
 Anthropology
 Culture
 Cultural Holism
 Norms
Cultural Model
 Enculturation
 Cultural relativism
 Ethnocentrism
 Ethnography
 Ethnology
 Participant Observation
 Emic
 etic
 Ethnolinguistics
What is language?
Characteristics of language
 a system of symbols - visual, auditory, or tactile
 put together according to certain rules
 symbols used are arbitrary – meaning based on consensus
Learned
 unconscious
 Dynamic (living)
 A form of communication (interaction)
shared - communicators know the rules and meanings
A form of communication that is a systematic set of arbitrary
symbols shared among a group and passed on from generation to
generation
System
 system of sounds that when put together according to certain
rules results in meanings
 Systematic nature of language is usually unconscious
arbitrary symbols
Rabbit
Conejo
Usagi
Kanninchen
Cuniglio
 associations
between
words/sounds and
the things they
represent are
arbitrary
Eng
Sp
Jp
Gr
It
 not natural or selfevident meaning.
 meaning provided
by tradition and
consensus
 Because symbols
“look at
this”
lobster
Descriptive symbols
are arbitrary they
“grab hold
have to be learned.
of this”
A form of Communication
Other forms?
What is communicated?
 thoughts, knowledge, meaning, feelings, intentions and
desires
 Information about ourselves and others
Sociolingusitics
 Study
of language(s) in relation to society - Social Uses and
function of language
Basic assumption is that there is an intimate connection between
language and social factors
 The differences in language use reflect and maintain social
distinctions.
The social differences are reflected in language use
Three things influence the meanings and language we use.
1.
2.
3.
Social Relationships
Situational Context
Cultural Meanings

Social Relationships
Speakers choose between alternatives of vocabulary,
pronunciation, sentence construction, etc.
 Social variables influence a person's choices
 Social meanings are signalled by linguistic alternatives chosen by
different groups of people
• Class
• Gender
• Status
• Age
• education
• occupation
• ethnicity
• regional
identity
A
child learning a language also acquires social competence i.e. the ability to
recognize and interpret the social activity taking place.
Language and Identity
we use language to send social messages about
 who we are
 where we come from
 who we associate with
we may judge a person's
background, character, and
intentions based upon the person's
language, dialect, or, in some
instances, even the choice of a single
word.
Gangland to God
Newfie translation
Situational Context
 Different situational contexts influence the forms of language
that occur.
 The forms of language that occur or are excluded reflect the
meaning of various contexts
Cultural Meanings
 Cultural meanings are expressed by the symbolic meanings of
words
 Speakers evaluate the communicative behaviour of each other
based on shared understandings of the world, i.e. On cultural
models.
cultural model - eels
Speech is constantly, although unconsciously evaluated
Analysis of speech reveals social and cultural beliefs about
how society is structured and the ways that people are
expected to behave and interact
Why is understanding communication (language)
important for anthropology?
 The act of speaking is action which creates particular meanings
and expectations in given contexts
“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” (Bonvillain 2008: 2)
Studying language use in context helps us to
 Understand social organization
 Social institutions - religion, law, etc.
 Patterns of behavior
 Cultural meanings, values, attitudes
STUDYING LANGUAGE CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION
Language needs to be understood within the contexts social, situational, cultural – in which communicative
interaction occurs
Therefore we have to understand and analyze
 Speech – how sounds are produced and meaning is created,
grammatical constructions, vocabulary
 Situational and social contexts in which speech acts take place
 The cultural norms used in evaluating speech.
How Do we do that?
Ethnographically
ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION
 gathering data from observations of
people’s daily lives – how they make requests,
express opinions, the norms of appropriate
behaviour, use of language in various contexts
 attempting to understand behaviour from the participants point of
view - emically
 Interviews with individual native speakers - to collect material dealing
with specific categories of vocabulary or types of grammatical
construction
 extracting communicative rules by observing the reactions of
members of a community to each other’s actions - etically
 “Analyses of these facts of communicative behaviour reveal
underlying cultural models and demonstrate the cognitive and
conceptual bonds that unify people within their culture.”
Sociolinguistic Approach
 Concerned with discovering patterns of linguistic variation
 recording and analyzing actual speech behaviour of members of
distinct groups within of the population.
 What specific attributes of a
person (e.g. Age, gender, ethnicity
etc.) influence a speakers
selection, in any given situation,
of the linguistic choices they
make?
 What elements of context such as
setting, participants topics and goals
influence speech
 What social factors (e.g. Gender of
class, ethnicity) influence the
sensitivity to context
“because sociolinguistic patterns are discoverable on the basis of
frequencies of usage, research methodologies emphasize interviews,
experimental and situational observations and quantitative analysis”
sociolinguistics ideally collects large samples
Discourse analysis
analysis of the connected stretches of speech that occur in informal
as well as formal contexts
looks at what speakers say, what they intend to mean, what they
intend to do, and how their speech is interpreted by participants the
meanings
Includes analysis of the cultural contexts in which speech occurs,
the norms of production and interpretation that give it meaning
emphasis on the socio-political
relations of power that inform
both the production and
interpretation of discourse
Speech community
 people who speak the same language but are also united other
ways: norms and shared rules, the proper and improper uses of
language.
 Canadians, Australians, Indians, all speak English but differ in
what is the proper way to speak - e.g. what situations requiring a
greeting, what topics are forbidden etc.
 society exerts
pressure for
conformity through
the transmission of
cultural models on
both conscious and
unconscious levels
Speech network
 people who have regular contact with each
 dense networks
• have frequent contact - e.g. related, work together, same
neighbourhood and know one another
• exert pressure on members to conform since values are shared
and individuals behaviour is readily known.
• tend to maintain speech norms with little variation
weak networks
•less contact
• do not share values as constantly
• do not have mechanisms that can apply social sanction against
non- conformists on an individual basis.
 Analysis of speech networks focuses on actual speakers and the
mechanisms of control that lead to establishing and maintaining
group norms in small scale, daily interactions.
gangland sign langauge