Language
Language, like culture, is something that is easier to discuss than to define, and no unitary definition is offered here. Instead, what anthropologists and linguists mean by language is better understood by trying to be clear about what does and does not count as language. In some cases, this involves disentangling folk uses of the term language from scientific uses.
In its folk sense, language is often used to mean any communication system—the "dance" of honeybees, the significance of type and color of flowers given to someone, computer codes, the posture and gestures included in "body language," and so on. Although these are indeed communication systems, they are not examples of language because they lack specific properties of human language, including especially the following:
Properties
- Discreteness or discrete infinity
The elements of language (phonemes, words, and phrases) are perceptually discrete and can be combined and recombined without limit.
- Dual patterning
A relatively small number of phonemes (as few as 15 for Hawaiian and approximately 35 for English), which are without intrinsic meaning, are combined to form units that bear meaning (e.g., morphemes, words). In other animal systems, each call is a meaningful unit.
Linguistic elements are nested within each other. For example, the noun phrase the gray cat contains the nested constituents the and gray cat, and gray cat in turn contains gray and cat.
- Structure dependence
The rules that govern the formation of words, phrases, and sentences operate on structural categories such as nouns and verb phrases, not on individual words such as cat and eat.
Some features of human language that are hinted at in other animal communication systems include the following:
- Displacement
Linguistic expressions can have referents that are not present in either space or time such as the moons of Saturn and Attila the Hun.
- Prevarication
Linguistic expressions can have referents that exist only in the imagination such as Tolkien's hobbits and Darth Vader.
The displacement feature may be present in the communication of direction and distance to the source made by honeybees. In addition, many animals "lie" by disguising themselves as more dangerous animals. Some monkeys learn to give false warning calls to the troop when they are under threat from other monkeys, and some of the primates that have acquired elements of human sign language seem to be able to use it for both displacement and prevarication, although they appear to be proficient at about the level of a 2-year-old human.
For anthropologists and linguists, then, one sense of language is the species property, the apparently uniquely human and innate capacity to acquire and use the entities that we label with words such as English, Tagalog, and American Sign Language. Darwin called this our "instinctive tendency to acquire an art." This is not an entirely uncontested view, but most linguists agree that language is innate in humans, although all agree equally that the specific language variety that people acquire as children depends on the social context within which they are enculturated.
Studying Language
Scholars who study the structural aspects of language generally focus on one or more of the traditional core areas: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. These core areas represent most of what users of a language must know about their language:
- Phonetics
Speakers must know how to articulate the sounds of their language. English speakers must know that the first sound of a word such as top is alveolar rather than dental as in Spanish.
- Phonology
Speakers of a language must know what the distinctive sounds of their language are. English speakers must know that the sounds [p] and [b] contrast in words such as pat and bat.
- Morphology
Speakers must know how to combine the sounds of their language into meaningful units—words, prefixes, suffixes, and so on. English speakers must know how to form the plural of words such as cat, dog, and bush by adding the appropriate suffix to form cat[s], dog[z], and bush[iz], respectively.
- Syntax
Speakers must know how to combine their words into sentences that call attention to something and then provide information about it. Again using English as an example, English speakers must know how to form yes/no questions from statements such as "She is in the kitchen" ("Is she in the kitchen?") by the appropriate movement of is.
- Semantics
Speakers must know the meanings of the words they use. Speakers of English must know that foot refers to a small part of the leg, whereas speakers of some forms of Creole English must know that foot refers to the entire leg and foot.
It is also possible to study how people use their language appropriately to accomplish what they want in a given social situation (pragmatics), how language shapes and is shaped by social context (sociolinguistics), the acquisition and mental processing of language (psycholinguistics), language variation across space or between social groups (dialectology), and language variation through time (historical linguistics).
The knowledge that native speakers have is mostly unconscious knowledge; they "know"how to use their language, but they (usually) cannot explain how or why they say what they say. The scientific description and explanation of this knowledge, as possessed by a language's native users, is known broadly as descriptive grammar. In its folk sense, however, grammar often refers to prescriptive rules of use that are, in fact, social rules rather than linguistic rules. One example is the rule against using double negatives in English. Like most such rules, this one wrongly took language to be a logical (rather than a patterned) system. Prescriptive rules sometimes try to make one language fit the patterns of another more prestigious language such as the Latin-inspired rule against ending English sentences with prepositions. Still other prescriptive rules attempt to impose social values on language such as the English rules promoting man and he as "generic" forms.
Language, Dialect, and Idiolect
In another folk sense, language refers to any of a number of entities with labels such as English and Tagalog. But these are really labels of convenience; what counts as English is contestable within a socio-cultural context. The points at which language can be thought of as a natural object are (a) the linguistic knowledge possessed by individual persons (their idiolects) and (b) the property universal to the human species, namely human language. In between thesePage 1403 | Top of Article extremes, entities such as "English,""American English," and "African American Vernacular English" are fuzzy categories that are socially and culturally defined and whose membership may expand or contract, depending on social and cultural consensus. They are all "dialects" because, at different levels, they all represent forms of language acquired and used across speech communities.
Because all people speak dialects, the reasons why particular forms of language get labeled as languages and others get labeled as dialects must be sought in the context in which they are embedded. The people who wield political, economic, and social control speak the "language"; nonelites speak a "dialect" of the language. As the old linguistic saying suggests, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
Language as Biology and Culture
It seems clear that language is a part of the human biological endowment. Perhaps the most compelling evidence for this can be found in the area of children's acquisition of language. All normal human children everywhere acquire the language of their social setting at about the same pace and in the same way. They do so without formal training, and they do so in social and cultural contexts that differ in terms of what kinds of linguistic interactions are supposed to be appropriate between parents/caregivers and infants. These differences do not seem to affect the rate or quality of children's acquisition of language; in a sense, children acquire language in much the same way as they acquire the skill of walking. However, children who for some reason are isolated from all forms of linguistic interaction do not acquire language, and if they reach puberty without exposure to language, they might never be able to acquire more than a very rudimentary linguistic ability.
By the time children are roughly 3 to 4 years of age, they have mastered some of the most complex and subtle rules of their language, rules that no teacher of language could ever teach them. Of course, they still have lots of vocabulary to learn as well as some of the pragmatic rules of language use in different social situations and the literacy practices of their culture.
Although the underlying shape of language is biological, any given language itself is a cultural artifact. The best way of illustrating this is to take the words for the domesticated animal that English speakers refer to as a dog. All languages have a word for this animal; no language has a word for "half a dog." This seems to result from a property of the human brain that guides our perception and representation of natural objects in the world, such as dogs, that come to us in whole "packages" (other candidates might be rocks, trees, birds, and so on). At the same time, the words we find in different languages are as different as dog (English), perro (Spanish), anu (Aymara), kelb (Arabic), and sobáka (Russian). None of these words has a privileged connection to the animal itself. Each is an arbitrary but conventional answer to the problem of naming this familiar domesticated animal.
Apes and Language
Investigators have made numerous attempts to teach our phylogenetically closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, to use language. Early efforts to teach them oral language were unsuccessful due in part to the fact that their vocalization behavior is not under fully voluntary control. Beginning in the 1960s with the chimpanzee Washoe, some of these fellow hominids showed that they can acquire and use a limited subset of a signed language such as American Sign Language, and they have also demonstrated some proficiency with other symbolic systems using computerized images or plastic tokens. Their linguistic capacity seems to limit them to a "two-word" or "telegraphic" use of the signs or tokens, although at least one bonobo (Pan paniscus) seems to understand some complex spoken English sentences.
During the formative years of anthropology, the study of language was at the core of ethnology done by researchers such as Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber. Notions about language developed alongside the broader precept of cultural relativism, under which it was believed that languages, like cultures, could vary infinitely. It was also assumed that language acquisition was primarily a product of external forces. Noam Chomsky's 1958 review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior challenged this view by amassing evidence that language acquisition is driven primarily by an innately provided universal grammar and that enculturation fills in the surface details, determining whether a person acquires "Japanese,""American Sign Language," or some other system. To account for the fact that human children can easily acquire, without formal teaching, whatever happens to be the language of their community, most of language must be innate and languages must be, at some level, far more alike than different. Some anthropologists resisted this approach to language, preferring instead to continue focusing on the features that make languages different from each other, in keeping with the broader interest in cultural differences over cultural universals.
Further Readings
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (1987). The Cambridge encyclopedia of language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Foley, W. A. (1997). Anthropological linguistics: An introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Lieberman, P. (1984). The biology and evolution of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York: William Morrow.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Source
Kephart, Ronald. "Language." Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Ed. H. James Birx. Vol. 4. Thousand Oaks: Sage Reference, 2006. 1401-1404. 5 vols. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. 18 Apr. 2009
