Why is symbolic language important?. Anthropology

• symbolic language makes it possible for humans to advance human civilizations

- Interrelationship between culture and language

• human language is clearly cultural because it is learned and shared among hu­mans

• the way people use language provides clues to understanding of the world and themselves

• language is used as a tool to learn

• language is used to share knowledge, emotions, feelings, and ideas

• language is used to transmit information from one group to another and from one generation to the next

• language is used to forge cultural ties and to construct social identity

- The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: two American anthropologists (Edward Sapir and Ben­jamin Whorf) observed that the grammars of different languages often described the same situation in different ways

• views grammar as the linguistic pattern that shapes culture and thought

• languages determine our cognition, thought process, culture, and how we see the world

- Linguistic Determinism: idea that language and its structure limit and determine hu­man knowledge or thought

• Limitations:

- difficult to test and when it is tested the results have been ambiguous

- indicates the extreme relationship between language and culture

- difficult for researchers to figure out how to separate the effects of other aspects of culture from the effects of language in human thoughts process

- makes bilingualism and translates impossible; this principle doesn't comply with the rules of bilingual learning process

• le) Standard average European (SAE)

• time and objects talked about in the same way; time objectified like a physical quantity

• le) Hopi (Native American)

• concept of time as “becoming later”, not like a physical quantity that you can have
• does not use “before” or “after”

- Gender, sexist language, and social status

• Housewife: suggests that domestic chores are the exclusive burden of females
• Mankind: the word man or mankind contrives to keep women invisible by represent­ing everyone, and yet not women
• Value-laden terms in western society: terms such as “old maid” and “spinster” show inherent disapproval of women who do not fulfill these traditional roles, while terms such as bachelor suggest an entirely different status

- Major forces of language change

• 1. Colonialism and contact languages

• Ie) Native Americans, Australian aboriginals

• 2. Nationalism and linguistic assimilation

• nationalist policies of cultural assimilation of minorities have led to the suppres­sion and loss of local dialects and the extinction of many indigenous and minority languages throughout the world

• 3. Globalization

- economic and cultural globalization processes homogenize major global lan­guages

- Most spoken world languages:

• Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese

- Pidgin: a language that combines and simplifies elements of two or more languages; any simplified or broken language, with reduced vocabulary and grammatical struc­ture and considerable variation in pronunciation

• Basic Features:

- 1. has no native speakers; not a mother language

- 2. characterized by a small vocabulary drawn largely from the superstrate lan­guage (language of the socially dominant group)

- 3. reduced grammatical features

- 4. can remain for long periods of time and undergo linguistic change without ac­quiring native speakers

- 5. arises out of the necessity to communicate when people speaking different languages come into close and prolonged contact

- 6. its formation is often linked to trade and colonialism where a single group dom­inated one or more groups

- 7. common throughout the South Pacific

- Creole: a language descended from a pidgin and that subsequently has its own native speakers

• develops among children who are taught a pidgin as their first language

• has a richer vocabulary than a pidgin and a more developed grammar

- Linguistic inequality or “linguistic ethnocentrism”: when a dominant language variety is used as the standard against all other varieties to measure the value/superiority/inferi- ority

• making value judgements about other people's speech in the context of dominance

• where pidgins and creoles coexist alongside the language of the dominant group

such views can be seen as an outgrowth of the situation that led to the formation of most of the pidgins