The document discusses the topics of language and communication from an anthropological perspective. It covers what language is, how it differs from nonhuman communication systems, its structure, and relationship to thought and culture. Additional sections explore nonverbal communication, sociolinguistics including linguistic diversity and gender differences, and historical linguistics focusing on reconstructing past languages and language families. Key points are that language is uniquely human, is learned through social interaction, and influences how people perceive and think about the world.

1. 15 Language and
Communication
Anthropology:
The Exploration of Human Diversity
12th
Edition
Conrad Phillip Kottak

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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?
• Transmitted through learning as part of
enculturation
• Based on arbitrary, learned
associations between words and the
things they represent
• Primary means of communication
(spoken or written)

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What Is Language?
– 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.
• Allows humans to:

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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
– Phonology – study of speech sounds
– Morphology – forms in which sounds
combine to form words
– Lexicon – dictionary containing all it’s the
words and their meanings
– Syntax – arrangement and order of words
in phrases and sentences
• Scientific study of spoken language
involves several levels of organization

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The Structure of Language
– 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
• Speech Sounds

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

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Language, Thought, and Culture
– 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
• Focal Vocabulary

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– 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)
Language, Thought, and Culture
• Meaning

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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
doesn’t happens in a vacuum it
happens in a society.

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Linguistic Diversity
• 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
• Style Shifts – varying speech in
different contexts

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Gender Speech Contrasts
– In North America and Great Britain,
women’s speech tends to be more similar
to standard dialect than men’s speech
– In Japan women speak with artificially high
voice because this is considered as polite
• Men and women have differences in
phonology, grammar, and vocabulary,
as well as in the body stances and
movements that accompany speech

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

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

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

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Historical Linguistics
• Historical linguists reconstruct many
features of past languages by studying
contemporary daughter languages
• Long-term variation of speech by
studying protolanguages and 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 Ethnologue’s 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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