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I. Introduction A. Every region has its own dialect based on regional patterns of speech, pronunciation, and word choice. B. Some dialects, like that of Midwestern Americans, have few stigmatized variants that people readily notice. |
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II. Language A. Language is our primary means of communication. 1. Language is transmitted through learning, as part of enculturation. 2. Language is based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent. 3. Only humans have the linguistic capacity to discuss the past and future, in addition to the present. B. Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context. |
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III. Nonverbal Communication A. Kinesics is the study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures and facial expressions. B. Odors also play an important role in nonverbal communication. |
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IV. The Structure of Language A. The scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization: phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax. 1. Phonology is the study of the sounds use in speech. 2. Morphology studies the forms in which sounds are grouped in speech. 3. A language's lexicon is a dictionary containing all of the smallest units of speech that have a meaning (morpheme). 4. Syntax refers to the rules that order words and phrases into sentences. B. Speech Sounds 1. In any given language, phonemes are the smallest sound contrasts that distinguish meaning (they carry no meaning themselves). 2. Phones are the sounds made by humans that might act as phonemes in any given language. 3. Phonetics is the study of human speech sounds, phonemics is the study of phones as they act in a particular language. 4. Phonemics studies only the significant sound contrasts of a given language. |
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V. Language, Thought, and Culture A. Chomsky argues that the universal grammar is finite, and the fact that any language is translatable to any other language is taken to be evidence supporting this claim. B. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Sapir and Whorf are described as early advocates of the view that different languages imply different ways of thinking (e.g., Palaung vs. English, Hopi speculative tense). C. Focal Vocabulary 1. Lexical elaboration that corresponds to an activity or item that is culturally central is called a focal vocabulary. 2. It is argued that, while language, thought, and culture are interrelated, change is more likely to move from culture to language, rather than the reverse. D. Meaning 1. Semantics refers to a language's meaning system. 2. The ways in which people divide up the world--the lexical contrasts they perceive as meaningful or significant--reflect their experiences. |
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VI. Sociolinguistics A. Introduction 1. Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between linguistic performance and the social context of that performance. 2. The notion that linguistic variation is a product of ongoing general forces for change is called linguistic uniformitarianism. B. Linguistic Diversity Within Nations 1. The ethnic and class diversity of nation-states is mirrored by linguistic diversity. 2. Single individuals may change the way they talk depending upon the social requirements of a given setting-this is called style shifting. 3. Diglossia is the regular shifting from one dialect to another (e.g., high and low variants of a language) by members of a single linguistic population. 4. Linguistic relativity says that no language is superior to any other as a means of communication. C. Gender Speech Contrasts 1. In America and England, there regular differences between men's speech and women's speech that cut across sub-cultural boundaries. 2. The fact that women in these populations tend to speak a more "standard" dialect and use fewer "power" words has been attributed to women's lack of socioeconomic power. D. Stratification and Symbolic Domination 1. In situations where social stratification exists, the dialect of the dominant strata is considered "standard" and valued more than the dialects of the lower strata. 2. Sociolinguistic studies have indicated that status-linked dialects affect the economic and social prospects of the people who speak them, a situation to which Bourdieu applies the term, symbolic capital. 3. According to Bourdieu, overall societal consensus that one dialect is more prestigious results in "symbolic domination." E. Black English Vernacular (BEV), a.k.a. "Ebonics" 1. Most linguists view BEV as a dialect of American English, with roots in southern English. 2. William Labov writes that BEV is the "relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the U.S. today " 3. BEV has its own complex system of linguistic rules, it is not an unstructured selection of words and phrases. a. BEV speakers do not pronounce intervocalic r's. b. BEV speakers use copula deletion to eliminate the verb to be from their speech. 4. Standard English is not superior in terms of ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige dialect. |
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VII. Historical Linguistics A. Historical linguistics studies the long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages. B. Anthropologists are interested in historical linguistics because cultural features sometimes correlate with the distribution of language families. |
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VIII. Box: Using Modern Technology to Preserve Linguistic and Cultural Diversity A. Global linguistic diversity is falling at an increasing rate. B. Some anthropologists are teaching native speakers of endangered languages to document their languages by way of a computer program that encodes speech. |