Language and Communication

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Language and Communication

• What Is Language
• Nonhuman Communication
• Nonverbal Communication
• The Structure of Language
• Language, Thought, and Culture
• Sociolinguistics
• Historical Linguistics

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What Is Language?

• Primary means of communication (spoken or written)

• Transmitted through learning as part of
  enculturation
• Based on arbitrary, learned associations between
  words and the things they represent

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What Is Language?

• Allows humans to

• Conjure up elaborate images
• Discuss the past and future
• Share experiences with others
• Benefit from their experiences
• Anthropologists study language in its social and
  cultural context. One of the main characteristics
  is that the language is changing.

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Nonhuman Communication

• Call Systems limited number of sounds that are
  produced in response to specific stimuli. Animals
  have call systems.
• Automatic and cannot be combined (ex. When
  animals encounter food or danger they can make
  only one call)

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Human Communication

• Men speak
• At some point in human development, ancestors
  began to combine calls and to understand the
  combinations
• Communication came to rely almost totally on
  learning

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The Origin of Language

• Language did not appear suddenly but it developed
  over hundreds of thousands of years from human
  ancestors call systems.

• Language uniquely effective vehicle for learning
  that enables humans to adapt more rapidly to new
  stimuli than other animals.

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• Language permitted to man kind to exchange
  information and to diffuse it which is impossible
  for animals.
• It is the most effective way of learning because
  we can speak of the things which we experienced
  and we can anticipate the response before
  something happens.

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Nonverbal Communication

• People engage also in nonverbal communication
  such as our face expression, body gestures and
  moves
• Kinesics study of communication through body
  movements, stances, gestures, and facial
  expressions

• Linguists pay attention to what is said and how
  it is said
• Body movements communicate social differences. In
  Japan different bows are used for different
  social statuses.

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The Structure of Language

• Scientific study of spoken language involves
  several levels of organization

• Phonology study of speech sounds
• Morphology forms in which sounds combine to
  form words
• Lexicon dictionary containing all its the
  words and their meanings
• Syntax arrangement and order of words in
  phrases and sentences

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The Structure of Language

• Speech Sounds

• Phoneme sound contrast that makes a difference,
  that differentiates meaning ex. pit and bit
• Phonetics study of human speech sounds
• Phonemics studies only the significant sound
  contrasts of given language ex. In English R and
  L like Craw and Claw

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Language, Thought, and Culture

• Noam Chomsky argues human brain contains limited
  set of rules for organizing language, so all
  languages have common structural basis.
  (Universal grammar)

• The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Rather than speaking
  universal linguistic structures different
  languages produces different way of thinking.
• Grammatical categories of different languages
  lead their speakers to think about things in
  particular ways. (Ex in English the third person
  pronounce he, she, it distinguish gender.)

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Language, Thought, and Culture

• Focal Vocabulary

• Specialized sets of terms and distinctions that
  are particularly important to certain groups (ex.
  Eskimos had many words for snow, African tribes
  for cattle)
• Vocabulary is area of language that changes most
  rapidly. When needed new word appear (ex. Fax
  e-mail)
• Language, culture, and thought are interrelated.
  With the change of one thing the others change
  also

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Language, Thought, and Culture

• Meaning

• Ethnosemantics study of how speakers of
  particular languages use sets of terms to
  organize, or categorize, their experiences and
  perceptions
• The ways people divide up the world the
  contrasts they perceive as meaningful or
  significant reflect their experiences
• (ex. Australian hunters use word black or white,
  European and Asians say black, grey, beige, white)

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Sociolinguistics

• Investigates relationships between social and
  linguistic variation, or language in its social
  context

• Sociolinguists focus on features that vary
  systematically with social position and
  situation. Every linguistic change doesnt
  happens in a vacuum it happens in a society.

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Linguistic Diversity

• Style Shifts varying speech in different
  contexts

• Diglossia regular style shifts between high
  and low variants of the same language
• We rank certain speech patterns as better or
  worse because we recognize they are used by
  groups that we also rank

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Gender Speech Contrasts

• Men and women have differences in phonology,
  grammar, and vocabulary, as well as in the body
  stances and movements that accompany speech

• In North America and Great Britain, womens
  speech tends to be more similar to standard
  dialect than mens speech
• In Japan women speak with artificially high voice
  because this is considered as polite

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Gender Speech Contrasts

• Deborah Tannen found that women typically use
  language and body movements to build rapport,
  social connections with others

• Men tend to make reports, reciting information
  that serves to establish a place for themselves
  in a hierarchy

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Language and Status Position

• Honorifics terms used with people to honor
  them

• Americans tend to be less formal than other
  nationalities, although they include honorifics
• British have a more developed set of honorifics
  because of the status distinction on nobility
  (Mr., Mrs., Dr. Professor, Dean)
• Japanese language has several honorifics (samma,
  san)
• Family terms can be associated with gradations in
  rank and familiarity (ex. Father vs. dad)

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Stratification

• Use and evaluate speech in context of
  extralinguistic forces social, political, and
  economic.

• Our speech habits help determine our access to
  employment and other material resources
• Educated people use proper language and are
  considered to be the higher class. While lower
  class use street or uneducated language.

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Sociolinguistics

• Bourdieu views linguistic practices as symbolic
  capital that properly trained people may convert
  into economic and social capital.

• Linguistic forms take on the power of the groups
  they symbolize
• Linguistic insecurity often felt by lower-class
  and minority speakers result of symbolic
  domination

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Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.)

• William Labov writes B.E.V. is relatively
  uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black
  youth in most parts of the U.S. today

Most linguists view B.E.V. as a dialect of
English rather than a separate language
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Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.)

• B.E.V. a complex system of linguistic rules

• B.E.V. speakers less likely to pronounce r than
  Standard English (SE) speakers
• B.E.V. speakers use copula deletion to eliminate
  the verb to be from their speech
• Standard English is not superior in terms of
  ability to communicate ideas, but it is the
  prestige dialect

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Historical Linguistics

• Long-term variation of speech by studying
  protolanguages and daughter languages

• Historical linguists reconstruct many features of
  past languages by studying contemporary daughter
  languages

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Historical Linguistics

• Daughter Languages languages that descend from
  same parent language and that have been changing
  separately for hundreds or even thousands of years

• Protolanguage original language from which
  daughter languages descend. Latin language is
  protolanguage for French, Spanish and Italian.
• Subgroups languages within a taxonomy of
  related languages that are most closely related
  like dialects

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Major language families

• Indo-European languages 46 (Europe, Southwest to
  South Asia, North Asia, North America, South
  America, Oceania)
• Sino-Tibetan languages 21 (East Asia)
• Niger-Congo languages 6.4 (Sub-Saharan Africa)
• Afro-Asiatic languages 6.0 (North Africa to Horn
  of Africa, Southwest Asia)
• Austronesian languages 5.9 (Oceania, Madagascar,
  maritime Southeast Asia)

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Major language families

• Dravidian languages 3.7 (South Asia)
• Altaic languages 2.3 (Central Asia, Northern
  Asia, Anatolia, Siberia)
• Japonic languages 2.1 (Japan)
• Austro-Asiatic languages 1.7 (mainland Southeast
  Asia)
• Tai-Kadai languages 1.3 (Southeast Asia)

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PIE Family Tree
This is a family tree of the Indo-European
languages. All can be traced back to a
protolanguage, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken
more than 6,000 years ago. PIE split into
dialects that eventually evolved into separate
languages, which, in turn, evolved into languages
such as Latin and proto-Germanic, which are
ancestral to dozens of modern daughter languages.
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• Languages are not at all uniformly distributed
  around the world. Just as some places are more
  diverse than others in terms of plant and animal
  species, the same goes for the distribution of
  languages.
• According to organization Ethnologues there is
  total of 6,809 in the world. For instance, only
  230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken
  in Asia.
• One area of particularly high linguistic
  diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an
  estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of
  around 3.9 million.

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Most spoken languages in the world

• 1. Mandarin- family is Sino-Tibetan, script used
  is Chinese Characters, spoken by 1151mil. In
  countries China, Malaysia, Taiwan
• 2. Spanish- family Indo-European, script used is
  Latin, spoken by 329mil., Mexico, Central and
  South America, Spain
• 3. English- family is Indo-European, script
  used is Latin, spoken by 328mil. in USA, UK,
  Australia, Canada, New Zealand
• 4. Arabic - 221 million, script used is Arabic,
  spoken in Middle East and North Africa
• 5. Hindi - 181 million, script used is Devanagari
  script, spoken in India, Nepal, Mauritius

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