Cultural Anthropology SSC-327

This chapter is about human communication and language, drawing on work in both linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. It looks at communication with a wide-angle lens to include topics from word choice to language extinction. The chapter first discusses how humans communicate and what distinguishes human communication from that of other animals. The second section offers examples of language, microcultures, and inequality. The third section discusses language change from its origins in the distant past to contemporary concerns about language loss. Humans can communicate with words, either spoken or signed, with gestures and other forms of body language such as clothing and hairstyle, and using technology such as cellphones.

Language and Verbal Communication

Most people are in almost constant communication—with other people, with supernaturals, or with pets. We communicate in face-to-face situations or indirectly through old-fashioned mail or through the new media.  Communication  is the process of sending and receiving meaningful messages. Among humans, it involves some form of  language , a systematic set of symbols and signs with learned and shared meanings. Language may be spoken, hand-signed, written, or conveyed through body movements, body markings and modifications, hairstyle, dress, and accessories.

TWO FEATURES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE  Over several centuries, scholars of language have proposed characteristics of human language that distinguish it from communication among other living beings. The following material describes the two most robust such characteristics.

First, human language has  productivity , or the ability to create an infinite range of understandable expressions from a finite set of rules. This characteristic is a result of the rich variety of symbols and signs that humans use in their communication. In contrast, nonhuman primates have a more limited set of communicative resources. They rely on a  call system , or a form of oral communication with a set repertoire of meaningful sounds generated in response to environmental factors. Nonhuman primates do not have the physiological capacity for speech that humans do. In captivity, however, some bonobos and chimpanzees have learned to communicate effectively with humans through sign language and by pointing to symbols on a chart. The world’s most famous bonobo is Kanzi, who lives at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa. He can understand much of what humans say to him, and he can respond by combining symbols on a printed board. He can also play simple video games, such as Ms. Pac-Man (http://www.greatapetrust.org). Second, human language emphasizes the feature of  displacement , the ability to refer to events and issues beyond the immediate present. The past and the future, in this view, are considered to be displaced domains. They include reference to people and events that may never exist at all, as in fantasy and fiction.

Regarding productivity and displacement in human language, language among the Pirahã (pee-duh-hah) of Brazil raises many questions about supposed universal features of language (Everett 2008) (Map 9.1). Their language does not emphasize either productivity or displacement, though both exist to some degree. The Pirahã are a group of about 350 foragers living on a reservation in the Amazonian rainforest. Their language contains only three pronouns, few words associated with time, no past-tense verbs, no color terms, and no numbers other than a word that translates into English roughly as “about one.” The grammar is simple, with no subordinate clauses. Kinship terms are simple and few. The Pirahã have no myths or stories and no art other than necklaces and a few rudimentary stick figures. In spite of over 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and neighboring Indians who speak a different language, the Pirahã remain monolingual.

A Pirahã shelter. According to Daniel Everett, who has spent many years learning about their culture and language, the Pirahã do not lead a culturally deprived life. The Pirahã are content with their lifestyle, which includes leisure activities such as playing tag and other games. In spite of their wish to remain living as they are, their reservation is not secure from outside encroachment.

Map 9.1

Pirahã Reservation in Brazil

Linguistic anthropologist Daniel Everett helped to define the boundaries of the Pirahã reservation in the 1980s. With support from Cultural Survival and other groups, the demarcation was legally declared in 1994.

Since 1977, linguist Daniel Everett has frequently lived with the Pirahã and learned their language, so it is unlikely that he has overlooked major aspects of their language. He insists that their language is in no way “primitive” or inadequate. It has extremely complex verbs and rich and varied uses of stress and intonation, referred to in linguistics as prosody. The Pirahã enjoy verbal joking and teasing, both among themselves and with researchers.

Linguistic anthropologists have, for decades, learned about communication and language mainly through fieldwork and participant observation, and most of this chapter discusses findings from such studies. Recently, however, some scholars have pursued quantitative approaches using what is being called  big data , collections of information including thousands, millions, or even billons of data points often generated from Internet and communication sources, such as cell phone use, Facebooking, and Tweeting (Palchykov et al. 2012). For example, one study analyzed cell phone calls in a European country over seven months, totaling 1.95 billion calls and nearly 500 million text messages. They analyzed the data by age and gender of the caller and the recipient, and they tracked frequency of calls. A striking finding is that, as women age, they trend away from calling men and more frequently call their parents and children. Younger women tend to call male contacts. This level of macroanalysis reveals fascinating patterns at the country level. Most cultural anthropologists would want to learn about more fine-grained patterns as well and the context that shapes the gender differences in cell phone contacts.

FORMAL PROPERTIES OF VERBAL LANGUAGE  Human language can be analyzed in terms of its formal properties: sounds, vocabulary, and syntax (sometimes called grammar), which are the formal building blocks of all languages. But languages differ widely in which sounds are important, what words are important in the vocabulary, and how people put words together to form meaningful sentences. Learning a new language often involves learning different sets of sounds. The sounds that make a difference for meaning in a spoken language are called  phonemes . The study of phonemes is called phonetics.

A native English-speaker learning to speak Hindi, the major language of North India, must learn to produce and recognize several new sounds. Four different “d” sounds exist. None is the same as an English “d,” which is usually pronounced with the tongue placed on the ridge behind the upper front teeth (try it). One “d” in Hindi, which linguists refer to as a “dental” sound, is pronounced with the tongue pressed firmly behind the upper front teeth (try it) (Figure 9.1). Next is a dental “d” that is also aspirated (pronounced “with air”); making this sound involves the tongue being in the same position as it is in making the dental “d,” but now a puff of air is expelled (try it, and try the regular dental “d” again with no puff of air at all). Next is what is referred to as a “retroflex” sound, made by flipping the tongue back to the central dome of the roof of the mouth (try it, with no puff of air). Finally, there is the aspirated retroflex “d” with the tongue in the center of the roof of the mouth and a puff of air. Once you can do this, try the whole series again with a “t,” because Hindi follows the same pattern with this letter as with the “d.” Several other sounds in Hindi require careful use of aspiration and placement of the tongue for communicating the right word. A puff of air at the wrong time can produce a serious error, such as saying the word for breast when you want to say the word for letter.

Figure 9.1

Dental and Retroflex Tongue Positions.

When making a dental sound, the speaker places the tongue against the upper front teeth (position A in the diagram). When making a retroflex sound, the speaker places the tongue up against the roof of the mouth (position B in the diagram)

Every language has a vocabulary, or lexicon, which consists of all of the language’s meaningful words. Speakers combine words into phrases and sentences to create meaning. Semantics refers to the study of the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences. Anthropologists add the concept of ethnosemantics, the study of the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences in particular cultural contexts. They find that languages classify the world in unpredictable ways, categorizing even such seemingly natural things as color and disease differently. (Recall the discussion of Subanun disease categories in Chapter 5.) Ethnosemantic research reveals much about how people define the world and their place in it, how they organize their social lives, and what is of value to them. Focal vocabularies are clusters of words that refer to important features of a particular culture. For example, many circumpolar languages have rich focal vocabularies related to snow (Figure 9.2), whereas in mountainous areas of Afghanistan, people use many terms for varieties of rocks.

Figure 9.2

Kinds of “Snow” the Saami Recognize Related to Reindeer Herding

Syntax, or grammar, consists of the patterns and rules by which words are organized to make sense in a sentence, or string. All languages have rules of syntax, although they vary in form. Even within the languages of contemporary Europe, syntactical variation exists. In German, for example, the verb often appears at the end of the sentence.

All the formal aspects of verbal communication allow people to convey, through speech, simple and complex messages about themselves and their experiences. Not all cultures shape their members to be equally “talky” as will be discussed below in the section on the importance of silence. In “talky” cultures, being able to share narratives (stories) about one’s experiences, especially troubling or traumatic experiences, can be a path to healing (see Anthropology Works).

Anthropology Works

Narrating Troubles

 Listen to the Audio

Refugee survivors of violence are especially at risk of various mental health problems, including what psychiatrists call post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. It includes symptoms such as depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and changes in personality. In treating refugee survivors in North America, several approaches have been used, including narrative therapy, in which the sufferer tells about his or her experiences as a way of unloading the pent-up memories. It involves asking the individual to tell in detail, in a safe and caring interpersonal setting, the story of what happened to him or her.

A study of Bosnian refugees who now live in the United States sheds light on the positive effects of having survivors narrate their experiences of terror and suffering (Weine et al. 1995). Ten of the refugees in the study were male, and ten were female, ranging in age from 13 to 62 years. All but one were Muslims, and all adults were married and had worked either inside or outside the home. Analysis of their narratives showed that all had experienced many traumatic events, the frequency increasing with a person’s age.

Almost all the refugees experienced the destruction of their homes, forced evacuation, food and water deprivation, disappearance of family members, exposure to acts of violence or death, detainment in a refugee camp, and forced emigration: “Nearly all the refugees emphasized the shock that came with the sudden occurrence of human betrayal by neighbors, associates, friends, and relatives” (1995:538).

The testimonies document the genocidal nature of the traumas directed at the entire Muslim Bosnian population. The traumas experienced were “extreme, multiple, repeated, prolonged, and communal” (1995:539). Some of the survivors carry with them constant images of death and atrocity. One man describes them as “films” that play in his head. In contrast, others have lost their memories of the events, and one woman was later unable to remember the trauma story she told three weeks earlier: “All kinds of things come together. Being expelled. Things we lost. Twenty years of work—then suddenly being without anything… . All the memories come at the same moment and it’s too much” (1995:541).

The massiveness of their suffering, the psychiatrists report, extends beyond the bounds of the psychiatric diagnostic category of PTSD. Yet, in spite of their deep and extensive suffering, many Bosnian refugees in the United States are recovering and rebuilding their lives, perhaps in part because of the success of narrative therapy.

Studies of this therapeutic approach among refugees of other cultures, however, reveal that some people are extremely reluctant to discuss their experiences, even in a supportive setting. Thus, narrative therapy may not be effective in all cultures.

Map 9.2

Formerly part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzogovina have a population of around four million. Bosnia occupies the northern areas of the country, about four-fifths of the total area, Many forms of language and communication do not rely on verbal speech. Like verbal language, though, they are based on symbols and signs and have rules for their proper combination and meaning.

SIGN LANGUAGE  Sign language  is a form of communication that uses mainly hand movements to convey messages. A sign language provides a fully competent communication system for its users, just as spoken language does (Baker 1999). Around the world, many varieties of sign language exist, including American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, Russian Sign Language, and many varieties of indigenous Australian sign languages. Most sign languages are used by people who are hearing impaired as their main form of communication. But in many indigenous Australian communities, people who are able to communicate verbally often opt to sign (Kendon 1988). They switch to sign language in situations in which verbal speech is forbidden or undesirable, for example, in some sacred contexts, for men during hunting, and for widows during mourning. Gestures are movements, usually of the hands, that convey meanings. Some gestures may be universally meaningful, but most are culturally specific and often completely arbitrary. Some cultures have more highly developed gesture systems than others. Black urban youths in the cities of Pretoria and Johannesburg in South Africa use a rich repertoire of gestures (Brookes 2004) (see Map  7.5). Some of the gestures are widely used and recognized, but many vary by age, gender, and situation (Figure 9.3). Men use more gestures than women do; the reason for this difference is not clear.

Greetings, an important part of communication in every known culture, often involve gestures (Duranti 1997b). They are typically among the first communicative routines that children learn, as do tourists and anyone trying to learn a foreign language. Greetings establish a social encounter. They usually involve both verbal and nonverbal language. Depending on the context and the social relationship, many variations exist for both the verbal and the nonverbal component. Contextual factors include the degree of formality or informality. Social factors include gender, ethnicity, class, and age.

SILENCE Silence is another form of nonverbal communication. Its use is often related to social status, but in unpredictable ways. In rural Siberia, an in-marrying daughter-in-law has the lowest status in the household, and she rarely speaks (Humphrey 1978). In other contexts, silence is associated with power. For example, in U.S. courts lawyers speak more than anyone else and the judge speaks rarely but has more power than a lawyer, while the silent jury holds the most power (Lakoff 1990).

Silence is an important component of communication among many American Indian cultures. White outsiders, including social workers, have sometimes misinterpreted this silence as a reflection of dignity or a lack of emotion or intelligence. How ethnocentric such judgments are is revealed by a study of silence among the Western Apache of Arizona (Basso 1972 [1970]) (Map 9.3). The Western Apache use silence in four contexts:

· When meeting a stranger, especially at fairs, rodeos, or other public events. Speaking with a stranger immediately indicates interest in something such as money, work, or transportation, all possibly serving as reasons for exhibiting bad manners.

· In the early stages of courting. Sitting in silence and holding hands for several hours is appropriate. Speaking “too soon” would indicate sexual willingness or interest.

· When a parent and child meet after the child has been away at boarding school. They should be silent for about 15 minutes. It may be two or three days before sustained conversations are initiated.

· When “getting cussed out,” especially at drinking parties.

An underlying similarity of all these contexts is the uncertainty, ambiguity, and unpredictability of the social relationships involved.

BODY LANGUAGE Human communication, in one way or another, often involves the body in sending and receiving messages. Beyond the mechanics of speaking, hearing, gesturing, and seeing, the body itself can function as a “text” that conveys messages. The full range of body language includes eye movements, posture, walking style, the way one stands and sits, cultural inscriptions on the body such as tattoos and hairstyles, and accessories such as dress, shoes, and jewelry. Body language follows patterns and rules just as verbal language does. As with verbal language, the rules and meanings are learned, often unconsciously. Without learning the rules and meanings, one will commit communication errors, which are sometimes funny and sometimes serious.

Different cultures emphasize different body language channels more than others. Some are more touch oriented than others, and some use facial expressions more. Eye contact is valued during Euro-American conversations, but in many Asian contexts direct eye contact is considered rude or perhaps a sexual invitation.

Clothing, hairstyles, and modification of or marks on the body convey messages about age, gender, sexual interest or availability, profession, wealth, and emotions. The color of one’s clothing can send messages about a person’s identity, class, gender, and more. In the United States, gender differentiation begins in the hospital nursery with the color coding of blue for boys and pink for girls. In parts of the Middle East, public dress is black for women and white for men.

Covering or not covering various parts of the body with clothing is another culturally coded matter. Consider the different meanings of women’s head or face covering in Egypt and Kuwait (MacLeod 1992). Kuwaiti women’s head covering distinguishes them as relatively wealthy, leisured, and honorable, as opposed to the immigrant women workers from Asia, who do not cover their heads. In contrast, head covering in Egypt is done mainly by women from the lower and middle economic levels. For them, it is a way to accommodate conservative Islamic values while preserving their right to work outside the home. In Egypt, the head covering says, “I am a good Muslim and a good wife or daughter,” while in Kuwait, the headscarf says, “I am a wealthy Kuwaiti citizen.” In many conservative Muslim contexts, it is important for a woman in public to cover more than her head by wearing a full-length loose garment. These rules, along with other patriarchal values, make it difficult for women in some Muslim contexts to participate in sports while in school and in public sporting events such as the international Olympics.

In Japan, the kimono provides an elaborate coding system signaling gender and life-cycle stage (Dalby 2001). The higher one’s status, the shorter is the sleeve of one’s kimono, but there are gender differences: Men’s kimono sleeves come in only one length: short. An unmarried woman’s kimono sleeves reach almost to the ground, and a married woman’s sleeves are nearly as short as that of a man’s.

Media anthropology is the cross-cultural study of communication through electronic media such as radio, television, film, recorded music, the Internet, and print media, including newspapers, magazines, and popular literature (Spitulnik 1993). Media anthropology is an important emerging area that links linguistic and cultural anthropology (Allen 1994). Media anthropologists study the media process and media content, the audience response, and the social effects of media presentations.  Critical media anthropology  asks to what degree access to media is liberating or controlling and whose interests the media serve. Critical media anthropologists examine power issues in many areas including journalism, television, movies, advertising, the Internet, social media, and gaming worlds.

A study of Arab media in everyday life reveals major categories of Arab media (Zayani 2011). First, what is Arab media? It is a loose category of public communication using technology that falls under state control. For example, many Arab states have long used radio programs to shape the views of their citizens. Television now dominates public communication in Arab states, though the Internet has increasing importance. Journalism and film are two other major forms of public media. The dynamism and options for social change and empowerment have only begun to be assessed by cultural anthropologists doing research in the Arab world. The Arab spring movement of 2010 would not have been as successful without cell phone communication and other forms of social media. ADVERTISING FOR LATINOS IN THE UNITED STATES Within the U.S. advertising market, one of the most sought-after segments is the Latino population, also called “the Hispanic market” in the advertising industry (Dávila 2002). Interviews with staff of 16 Latino advertising agencies and content analysis of their advertisements reveal their approach of treating Latinos as a unified, culturally specific market. The dominant theme, or trope, is that of “the family” as being the most important feature of Latino culture, in contrast to the stereotype of the Anglo population as more individualistic. Recent milk-promotion advertisements for the Anglo population show a celebrity with a milk moustache. The Latino version shows a grandmother cooking a traditional milk-based dessert, and the caption reads, “Have you given your loved ones enough milk today?” (2002:270). In Spanish-language television and radio networks, a kind of “standard” Spanish is used, a generic form with no hint of regionalism or accent. Latinos are, however, a highly heterogeneous population. By promoting a monolithic image of Latino culture, media messages may be contributing to identity change toward a more monolithic pattern. At the same time, they are certainly missing opportunities to tap into more specialized markets within the Latino population. Language and Culture: Two Theories

During the twentieth century, two theoretical perspectives were influential in the study of the relationship between language and culture. They are presented here as two distinct models, even though they actually overlap in real life and anthropologists tend to draw on both of them (Hill and Mannheim 1992).

The first was formulated by two early founding figures in linguistic anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. In the mid-twentieth century, they formulated an influential model called the  Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , a perspective that says that people’s language affects how they think. If a language has many words for variations of the English word snow, for example, then someone who speaks that language can “think” about snow in more ways than someone can whose language has fewer “snow” terms. Among the Saami, whose traditional occupation was reindeer herding (see Culturama), a rich set of terms exists for snow (review Figure 9.2). If a language has no word for snow, then someone who speaks that language cannot think of snow. Thus, a language constitutes a thought world, and people who speak different languages inhabit different thought worlds. This catchy phrase became the basis for linguistic determinism, a theory stating that language determines consciousness of the world and behavior. Extreme linguistic determinism implies that the frames and definitions of a person’s primary language are so strong that it is impossible to learn another language fully or, therefore, to understand another culture fully. Most anthropologists see value in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, but not in its extreme form.

A second approach to understanding the relationship between language and culture comes from scholars working in the area of  sociolinguistics , a perspective that emphasizes how people’s cultural and social context shapes their language and its meanings. Sociolinguists are, therefore, cultural constructionists.

Most anthropologists see some value in both perspectives because language, culture, context, and meaning are highly interactive: Language shapes culture and cultural context shapes language. Discourse  refers to culturally patterned verbal language use including varieties of speech, participation, and meaning.  Critical discourse analysis  is an approach within linguistic anthropology that examines how power and social inequality are reflected in and reproduced through verbal language (Blommaert and Bulcaen 2000). Critical discourse analysis reveals links between language and social inequality, power, and stigma. It also provides insights into agency and resistance through language. The material that follows presents examples of power relations as expressed through language.

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Talking the Talk

GENDER IN EURO-AMERICAN CONVERSATIONS Most languages contain gender differences in word choice, grammar, intonation, content, and style. Early studies of language and gender among white Euro-Americans revealed three general characteristics of female speech (Lakoff 1973):

· Politeness

· Rising intonation at the end of sentences

· Frequent use of  tag questions  (questions seeking affirmation and placed at the end of sentences, such as, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”)

In English, male speech, in general, is less polite, maintains a flat and assertive tone in a sentence, and does not use tag questions. Related to politeness is the fact that, during cross-gender conversations, men tend to interrupt women more than women interrupt men.

Deborah Tannen’s popular book You Just Don’t Understand (1990) shows how differences in conversational styles between white Euro-American men and women lead to miscommunication. She says that “women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, whereas men speak and hear a language of status and independence” (1990:42). Although both men and women use indirect response (not really answering the question), their different motivations create different meanings embedded in their speech:

Michele:What time is the concert?

Gary:We have to be ready by seven-thirty. (1990:289)

Gary sees his role as one of protector in using an indirect response to Michele’s question. He feels that he is simply “watching out for her” by getting to the real point of her question. Michele feels that Gary is withholding information by not answering her directly and is maintaining a power position. By contrast, a wife’s indirect response to a question from her husband is prompted by her goal of being helpful in anticipating her husband’s underlying interest:

Ned:Are you just about finished?

Valerie:Do you want to have supper now? (1990:289)

Cross-culturally, women’s speech is not universally accommodating, subservient, and polite. In cultural contexts in which women’s roles are prominent and valued, their language reflects and reinforces their position.

GENDER AND POLITENESS IN JAPANESE, AND THOSE NAUGHTY TEENAGE GIRLS Gender registers in spoken Japanese reflect gender differences (Shibamoto 1987). Certain words and sentence structures convey femininity, humbleness, and politeness. One important contrast between male and female speech is the attachment, by female speakers, of the honorific prefix “o-” to nouns; for example, a woman refers to chopsticks as ohasi, while a man calls them hasi (Figure  9.4). This addition gives women’s speech a more refined and polite tone.

Figure 9.4

Male-Unmarked and Female-Marked Nouns in Japanese

Over a decade ago, in 2004, a kogal in Tokyo’s trendy Shibuyu district displays her cell phone that is covered with stickers. Kogal makeup and dress styles, like kogal language, keep changing.

A contrasting pattern of gendered language comes from the kogals, young Japanese women between 14 and 22 years of age known for their female-centered coolness (Miller 2004). The kogals have distinctive language, clothing, hairstyles, makeup, attitude, and activities, all of which challenge prescriptive norms for young women. Their overall style is flashy and exuberant, combining global and local elements. Heavy users of cell phones, kogals use a complex and ever-changing set of emoticons, or “face characters” including icons for “wow,” “ouch,” “applause,” and “I can’t hear you.” They have also invented a unique text message code for their cell phones that uses mixed scripts such as mathematical symbols and Cyrillic (Russian) letters.

The spoken language of the kogals is a rich and quickly changing mixture of slang, some classic but much newly created. They create new words through compounds and by adding the Japanese suffix “-ru,” which turns a noun into a verb, such as maku-ru (“go to McDonald’s”). They intentionally use strongly masculine language forms, openly talk about sex, and rework taboo sexual terms into new meanings. Reactions from mainstream society to kogals are mixed, ranging from horror to fascination. No matter what, they have cultural influence and are shaking up the gender order and language.

GAY LANGUAGE AND BELONGING IN INDONESIA The national language of Indonesia is referred to as bahasa Indonesia. Many homosexual men in Indonesia speak bahasa gay, or “gay language” (Boellstorff 2004). Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest country in terms of population, with nearly 250 million citizens living on over 6,000 islands and speaking nearly 700 local languages. In spite of this cultural and linguistic diversity, bahasa gay is highly standardized.

Bahasa gay has a distinct vocabulary that plays humorously on mainstream language and provides a political commentary on mainstream life. Some of the vocabulary changes involve sound-alikes; others add a suffix to a standard word. In terms of the state’s strongly heterosexual image, Indonesian gays would seem to be a clearly excluded group. Nonetheless, bahasa gay is moving into mainstream linguistic culture, where it conveys agency and freedom from official control.

AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH: PREJUDICE AND PRIDE The topic of African American English (AAE), or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), is complicated by racism of the past and present (Jacobs-Huey 2006). Scholars debate whether AAE/AAVE is a language in its own right or a dialect (nonstandard version) of English. “Linguistic conservatives,” who champion Standard American English (SAE), view AAE as an ungrammatical form of English that needs to be “corrected.” In the current linguistic hierarchy in the United States, with SAE at the top, speakers of AAE may be both proud of their language and feel stigmatized by those who judge AAE negatively and treat its speakers unfairly (Lanehart 1999).

AAE is a relatively new language, emerging out of slavery to develop a degree of standardization across the United States, along with many local variants. Some of its characteristic grammar results from its African roots. One of the most prominent is the use, or nonuse, of forms of the English verb “to be” (Lanehart 1999:217). In AAE, one says, “She married,” which means “She is married” in SAE. Viewed incorrectly by outsiders as “bad” English, “She married” follows a grammatical rule in AAE. That AAE has its own grammar and usage rules is evident in the fact that when non-AAE speakers attempt to speak it or imitate it, they often make mistakes (Jacobs-Huey 1997).

Ethnographic research on African American school-age children in a working-class neighborhood of southwest Philadelphia examined within-gender and cross-gender conversations, including directives (getting someone to do something), argument, he-said-she-said accusations, and storytelling (Goodwin 1990). All these speech activities involve complex verbal strategies that are culturally embedded. In arguments, the children may bring in imaginary events as a “put-on,” preceded by the cue term “psych,” or use words of a song to create and maintain playfulness within an argument. Much of their arguments involve highly ritualized insults that work quickly to return an insult to the original giver. When a group of girls was practicing some dance steps and singing, a boy said, “You sound terrible.” A girl responded, “We sound just like you look” (1990:183). The study revealed the importance of verbal play and art among the children. It also showed that girls often excel at verbal competitions in mixed gender settings.

Children who grow up speaking a version of AAE at home and with peer groups face a challenge in schools, where they are expected to perform in SAE. Just like native Spanish speakers or any non–English-speaking new immigrants, African American children are implicitly expected to become bilingual in AAE and SAE. More than vocabulary and grammar are involved. Teachers should understand that African American children may have culturally distinct styles of expression that should be recognized and valued. For example, in narrative style, African American children tend to use a spiral pattern, skipping around to different topics before addressing the theme, instead of adopting a linear style. Rather than being considered a deficiency, having AAE speakers in a classroom adds cultural diversity to those whose linguistic worlds are limited to SAE.

Inspired by such findings, the Oakland School Board in California approved a resolution in 1996 to recognize Ebonics, or AAE, as the primary language, or vernacular, of African American students. The school developed a special teaching program, called the Bridge Program, in which AAE speakers were encouraged to learn Standard American English through a process of translation between AAE and SAE (Rickford 1997). After several months, students in the Bridge Program had progressed in their SAE reading ability much faster than African American students who were not in the program. Nevertheless, the program received so much negative publicity and raised such sensitive questions about the best way to enhance minority student learning that it was cancelled within the year.

The underlying issues of the so-called Ebonics controversy are still unresolved. One of the thorniest questions debated is whether AAE/AAVE/Ebonics is sufficiently distinct (either as a language separate from SAE or as a dialect) that U.S. schools should address it in their curriculum with special programs. Languages, like the cultures of which they are a part, experience both continuity and change, and for similar reasons. Human creativity and contact lead to linguistic innovation and linguistic borrowing. War, imperialism, genocide, and other forces may destroy languages. This section looks first at what is known about the origins of human language and provides a brief history of writing. Later parts discuss the influence of European colonialism on languages, nationalism and language, world languages, and contemporary language loss and revitalization.

The Origins and History of Language

No one knows how verbal language began. Current evidence of other aspects of human cultural evolution suggests that verbal language began to develop between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago when early modern humans achieved both the physical and mental capacity for symbolic thinking and verbal communication. Facial expressions, gestures, and body postures were likely important features of early human communication, as they are among many nonhuman primate species today. Early scholars of language were often misled by ethnocentric assumptions that the structure of European languages was normative and that languages with different structures were less developed and deficient. For example, they considered the Chinese language primitive because it lacks the kinds of verbs that European languages have. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the Pirahã language appears simpler in many ways compared with English, as does the Pirahã culture, but both Pirahã and English have to be examined within their cultural contexts. Pirahã is a language that works for a rainforest foraging population. English works for a globalizing, technology-driven, consumerist culture. Languages of foraging cultures today can, with caution, provide insights about what foragers’ language may have been like thousands of years ago. But they are not “frozen in time” examples of “Stone Age” language. Historical linguistics  is the study of language change through history. It relies on many specialized methods that compare shifts over time and across space in aspects of language such as phonetics, syntax, and meaning. It originated in the eighteenth century with a discovery made by Sir William Jones, a British colonial administrator working in India. During his spare time, he studied Sanskrit, a classical language of India. He noticed marked similarities among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin in vocabulary and syntax. For example, the Sanskrit word for the English word father is pitr; in Greek it is patéras, and in Latin it is pater. This was an astounding discovery for the time, given the prevailing European mentality that placed its cultural heritage firmly in the classical Graeco–Roman world and depicted the “Orient” as completely separate from “Europe” (Bernal 1987).

Following Jones’s discovery, other scholars began comparing lists of words and grammatical forms in different languages: for example, the French père, the German Vater, the Italian padre, the Old English faeder, the Old Norse fadhir, and the Swedish far. These lists allowed scholars to determine degrees of closeness and distance in the relationships among those languages. Later scholars contributed the concept of a  language family , or groups of languages descended from a parent language (Figure 9.5). Individual languages descended from the same language, such as French and Spanish (both descended from Latin), are referred to as sister languages. Using comparative evidence from historical and contemporary Eurasian languages, historical linguists developed a hypothetical model of the original parent language, or proto-language, of most Eurasian languages. It is called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Linguistic evidence suggests that PIE was located in Eurasia, either north or south of the Black Sea (Map 9.4). From its area of origin, between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, PIE spread into Europe, then into Central, South, and East Asia, where local versions developed over the centuries.

Similar linguistic methods reveal the existence of the original parent form of the Bantu language family, Proto-Bantu, in Africa (Afolayan 2000). Scholars can trace the Bantu expansion starting around 5,000 years ago (Map 9.5). Today, some form of Bantu language is spoken by over 100 million people in Africa, not to mention the number of people in the African diaspora worldwide. Over 600 African languages are derived from Proto-Bantu. According to linguistic analysis, the homeland of Proto-Bantu is the present-day countries of Cameroon and Nigeria, West Africa. It is likely that Proto-Bantu spread through population migration as the farming population expanded and moved, over hundreds of years, into areas occupied by indigenous foragers. Bantu cultural imperialism may have wiped out some local languages, although it is impossible to document any such extinctions. Substantial linguistic evidence, however, suggests some interactions between the farmers and the foragers through which standard Bantu absorbed elements from local languages. Evidence of the earliest written languages comes from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. The oldest writing system was in use in the fourth millennium BCE in Mesopotamia (Postgate et al. 1995). All early writing systems used  logographs , signs that indicate a word, syllable, or sound. Over time, some logographs retained their original meaning; others were kept but given more abstract meaning, and nonlogographic symbols were added (Figure 9.6). The emergence of writing is associated with the development of the state. Some scholars take writing as a key diagnostic feature that distinguishes the state from nonstate political forms because recordkeeping was such an essential task of the state. The Inca Empire, centered in the Peruvian Andes, is a notable exception to this generalization. It used khipu (kee-poo), or cords of knotted strings of different colors, for keeping accounts and recording events. Scholars are not quite sure how khipu worked in the past because the Inca coding system is so complicated. Debates are ongoing as to whether khipu served as an actual language or more simply as an accounting system. Whatever is the answer, the world’s largest empire in the fourteenth century relied on khipu. Two interpretations of the function of early writing systems exist. The first says that early writing was mainly for ceremonial purposes. Evidence for this position consists of the prevalence of early writing on tombs, bone inscriptions, and temple carvings. The second says that early writing was mainly for secular use in government recordkeeping and trade. The archaeological record is biased toward durable substances, such as stone. Because ceremonial writing was intended to last, it was more likely to be inscribed on stone. Utilitarian writing, in contrast, was more likely to have been done on perishable materials because people would be less concerned with permanence. (Consider the way you treat shopping lists.) It is likely, however, that more utilitarian writing, as well as other forms of nonceremonial writing, also existed. European colonialism was a major force of language change. Not only did colonial powers declare their own language as the language of government, business, and education, but they often took direct steps to suppress indigenous languages and literatures. Widespread bilingualism, or competence in a language other than one’s birth language, is one prominent effect of colonialism. Also, globalization is having substantial and complex effects on language.

EUROPEAN COLONIALISM AND CONTACT LANGUAGES Beginning in the fifteenth century, European colonialism had dramatic effects on the people with whom it came into contact, as discussed elsewhere in this book. Language change is an important part of the story of colonialism and indigenous cultures. Depending on the type and duration of contact, it resulted in the development of new languages, the decline of others, and the extinction of many, along with the people who spoke them (Silverstein 1997). Two forms of new languages prompted by European colonialism are pidgins and creoles. A  pidgin  is a language that blends elements of at least two parent languages and that emerges when two different cultures with different languages come in contact and must communicate (Baptista 2005). All speakers of pidgin have their own native language(s) but learn to speak pidgin as a second, rudimentary language. Pidgins are typically limited to specific functional domains, such as trade and basic social interactions. Many pidgins of the Western Hemisphere were the result of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery. Owners needed to communicate with their slaves, and slaves from various parts of Africa needed to communicate with each other. Pidgins are common throughout the South Pacific.

A pidgin often evolves into a  creole , which is a language descended from a pidgin and that subsequently has its own native speakers, a richer vocabulary than a pidgin has, and a more developed grammar. Throughout the Western Hemisphere, many localized creoles have developed in areas such as Louisiana, the Caribbean, Ecuador, and Suriname. Though a living reminder of the heritage of slavery, creole languages and associated literature and music are also evidence of resilience and creativity in the African diaspora.

Tok Pisin (the indigenous pronunciation of “talk pidgin”), originally a pidgin language of Papua New Guinea consisting of a mixture of English, Samoan, Chinese, and Malaysian, is now a creole and is recognized as one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea. Two other creoles are also nationally recognized: Seselwa, a blend including French spoken in the Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean and Papiamentu, a blend including Dutch spoken in Curaçao (coo-ruh-sao), the Netherland Antilles, in the Caribbean.

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. Direct policies of linguistic assimilation include the declaration of a standard language and rules about the language of instruction in public schools. Often, Christian missionaries worked to suppress indigenous languages as part of their attempts to “civilize” “pagan” peoples (see Culturama) on the following page. Indirect mechanisms include discrimination in hiring on the basis of language and social stigma.

GLOBAL LANGUAGES Ninety-six percent of the world’s population speaks 4 percent of the world’s languages (Crystal 2000). The eight most-spoken languages are Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese, in that order. Languages that are gaining widespread currency are called  global languages , or world languages. Global languages are spoken worldwide in diverse cultural contexts. As they spread to areas and cultures beyond their home area and culture, they take on new, localized identities. At the same time, the “mother language” picks up words and phrases from local languages (Figure  9.7). Global languages may act as both a form of linguistic and economic opportunity and a form of cultural imperialism.

Figure 9.7

Loan Words in North American English

English is the most globalized language in history (Bhatt 2001; Crystal 2003). British English was first transplanted through colonial expansion to the present-day United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Asia, Africa, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean. English was the dominant language in the colonies, used in government and commerce and taught in schools. Over time, regional and subregional varieties of English developed, often leading to a “New English” that a native speaker from England cannot understand at all. So many varieties of English now exist that scholars are beginning to talk of the English language family, which includes American English, “Spanglish,” “Japlish,” and “Tex-Mex.”

Textese  is a new and emerging variant of English and other languages associated with cell phone communications and involving abbreviations and slang. The limited number of characters allowed, so far, in a cell phone text message has prompted widespread creativity in shortening words and sentences. In English Textese, vowels are often deleted, numbers may stand in for part of a word or an entire word, and a single letter may convey a word. Many stock phrases exist asacronyms, such as lol, that are widely recognized by users.