Language and Culture

What is Language?

• Language is any form of communication that involved symbols misplacement and productivity

Key Features of Language:

• Symbolism
• Displacement
• Productivity
• Duality of patterning

Symbolic:

• Based on the arbitrary association of sounds with meanings
• Arbitrary: no connection between the sound and the object

Displacement:

• The ability to communicate about something that is not happening at the moment
• Talk about the past and the future
• Allows us to lie

Productivity:

• The ability to add words and join them in different combinations

Duality of Patterning:

• The independent ordering of speech at two levels

o Sound

o Meaning

Call Systems (signal systems):

• Animal communication systems that consist of a relatively small number of sounds to express moods and sensations like fear, delight, contentment, anger or pain

The Components of Language:

• Phonology

o Phon = sound (study of sound)

o Study of sound systems in language, including phonetics and phonemics

o Phonetics: study of the articulation and production of human speech sounds

• Outside (etic) - sound

o Phonemics: analysis of the use of sounds to differentiate the meanings of words

• Inside (emic) - meaning

o Phoneme: a minimal unit of sound that differentiates meaning in a particular language

o Ex: /p/ and /b/: pit and bit

• So in this English example, /p/ and /b/ are separate phonemes

o Stress: phonemic use of accented sounds of syllables

o Pitch: phonemic use of rising and falling speech cadences

• Ex: in Mandarin, the word /ma/ can be used with 4 different pitches, which all have different meanings
• Morphology

o Morph = shape (study of shape)

o The study of the internal structure of words and the combination of meaningful units within the words (the analysis of word structure)

o Morpheme: a unit of sound and meaning, either a separate word or a meaningful part of a word

• Syntax: the rules that generate the combination of words to form phrases and sentences

o Ex: the cat chased the dog or the dog chased the cat

o Same words in both sentences but different meanings because of the word order

• Semantics: the study of systems of meaning in languages

Non-verbal Communication:

• Emblems: nonverbal actions with specific meanings that substitute for spoken words
• Body language
• Intercultural communications: people from different languages and their communication with each other

Linguistic Anthropology:

• Investigates connections between language, culture, and worldview
• Overlaps with sociolinguistics
• Sociolinguistics: study of the impacts of socioeconomic factors, such as gender and class, on language and communication within a society
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the assertion that they form and content of language influence speakers' behaviours, thought processes, and worldview

o False story/idea

o Ex: how the Inuit have forty different words for the word snow and shaped how they see the world

• Dialects: a variety of a language spoken by a particular group of people, based on regional differences of social differences, such as gender, class, race or ethnicity

o Ex: Pittsburg language (yinz - you ones) o Regional dialect

o Social dialects - ex: Black English in the US (speak that way because they are apart of a social group in the same part of the US, not because their black)

Language Standardization:

• Standard English: the dialect of English chosen as normative, a reflection of the social, economic and political standing of its speakers

o Generic, flat English

• Code-switching: changing from one dialect or language to another according to the context in which one is speaking

Processes of Language Change:

• Lingua Franca: language used in particular areas by speakers of many different languages in order to communicate with one another

o Ex: speaking English at the UN

• Pidgins: a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common

o Ex: language in Cannibal Source

• Creoles: a language that has historic roots as an amalgamation of vocabulary and grammar derived from two of more independent languages

o Pidgin evolves into creoles - when pidgin is their native language

• Historical linguistics:

o Language families

o Cognates - words that all mean the same thing in different languages o False cognates - when you think there is a connection to the spelling of the word, but really it means something completely different