Language and Ways of Speaking

1
Language and Ways of Speaking
2
Many Different Languages

• 96 of the world speaks just 4 of the languages
• The most common languages spoken are Mandarin,
  Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese,
  Russian, and Japanese.
• Over half of the worlds languages have fewer
  than 10,000 speakers a quarter have less than
  1,000 speakers.

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Language as Symbolic

• Language is symbolic because a word refers to an
  object, event, person, action, or relationship
• These symbols are arbitrary banana, kwadu
• These words exist in an arbitrary relationship to
  one another, within a symbolic universe how is
  push different than shove and different than
  nudge?

4
Language Socialization

• Learned through interaction
• Grammatical and syntactic rules not consciously
  known or taught by adults
• Learning to be a member of a speech community
  with social rules about speech

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Warm Springs Reservation, Oregon

• Teachers reported students werent speaking much
  in class
• Students did better in cooperative activities
  than individual activities
• Showing off and competition not okay

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Western Apache social rules about speaking?
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Questions about Language Schooling
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Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

• Human beings do not live in the objective world
  alone. . . but are very much at the mercy of the
  particular language which has become the medium
  of expression for their society. . . . The fact.
  . . is that the real world is to a large extent
  unconsciously built up on the language habits of
  the group. No two languages are ever
  sufficiently similar to be considered as
  representing the same social reality. The worlds
  in which different societies live as distinct
  worlds, not merely the same world with different
  labels attached.
• (1949 162)

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Kinds of Snow the Saami Recognize Related to
Reindeer Hunting

• Firm, even snow that falls in mid weather
• Thickly packed snow caused by intermittent
  freezing/thawing and high winds
• Hard-packed snow formed by strong wind
• Dry, large-grained, water-holding snow at the
  deepest layers, closest to the ground, found in
  late winter and spring
• Snow that forms a hard layer after rain
• Ice sheet on pastures formed by rain on open
  ground that freezes
• A layer of frozen snow between other snow layers
  that acts as an ice sheet.
• Source Jernsletten, 1997

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Sociolinguistics

• Speech varies by context
• Speech varies by social position (within the
  society and according to the social relationship
  between participants)

11
Speech Genres, p. 49
12
Narrative Genres, p. 49