ANT253H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Khoisan Languages, Afroasiatic Languages, Munda Languages
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Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand Saussure, Francis Boas, Benjamin Whorf, William Labov,
Erving Goffman, King
Berlin and Kay, Bronislaw Malinowski, George Lakoff,
1 Sociolinguistics
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of
government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Václav Havel (1936-2011)
From the dawn of history, humans have used a unique faculty—language—to think, to
communicate with each other beyond the instinctual use of body signals, to encode and
transmit knowledge to subsequent generations, and to carry out an infinite host of
intellectually-sophisticated activities. Civilization is built on language. Each word is, at
once, a capsule of time-specific knowledge, an act of human consciousness, and an
implicit principle of social structure. Cumulatively, the words of the world’s languages
constitute humanity’s collective knowledge and memory system. The Greek philosophers
saw language as a manifestation of lógos, which meant both “word” and “mind.”
Jumping forward a couple of millennia to the nineteenth century, a scientific discipline,
called linguistics, emerged to study lógos. In the subsequent twentieth century, linguistics
developed its own branches. One of these is sociolinguistics, the investigation of
language as an intrinsic part of social systems and behaviors; another one is linguistic
anthropology (or anthropological linguistics), the examination of how language, thought,
and culture interact to produce people’s beliefs and worldviews. These two branches,
considered as a singular approach to the investigation of language, society, and culture,
are the focus of this textbook.
Humans have always been curious about language. Already in the 400s BCE, an
Indian scholar named Pāṇini described the Sanskrit language he spoke with a set of about
4,000 rules. His work, called the Astadhayayi, is considered to be one of the first
grammars of any language on Earth. Pāṇini showed that many words could be
decomposed into smaller meaning-bearing units. In English, for example, the word
incompletely is made up of three such units: in + complete + ly. Two of these (/in-/ and /-
ly/) recur in the formation of other words and are thus intrinsic parts of English grammar
(the system of rules for forming words, phrases, sentences, and texts); complete is,
instead, part of a collection of meaning-bearing forms called a lexicon. Pāṇini also
described with precision how Sanskrit words were pronounced, looking forward to the
modern-day study of sound systems. Moreover, he argued that Sanskrit grammar and
vocabulary provided an indirect historical record of how a particular society emerged,
developed, and shaped the beliefs of its speakers.
This chapter will provide an introductory overview of what the systematic study of
language and society is fundamentally about. It also presents basic notions related to the
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connection among language, mind, and culture. The contemporary sociolinguist, like
Pāṇini, focuses on how language structures underlie and reveal details of social and
cultural systems. The ideas presented here are discussed in a schematic way. Many of
these will be developed and illustrated in subsequent chapters.
1.1 Language
Defining language is an exercise in circular reasoning, because we need words to do so,
and language is, in a reductive sense, a collection of words. The English term language
comes from Latin lingua, meaning “tongue.” So, a common definition is the use of the
tongue (and other organs) to create words. This implies that language is primarily spoken,
or at least acquired through exposure to vocal utterances. It is also found in other media,
such as writing, and van be delivered by nonvocal means, such as through gesture.
Language is not limited to conveying biological needs, as are, by and large, the signaling
systems of other species. Words allow humans to refer to, and think about, objects, states,
ideas, feelings, and events. A plant thus becomes a tree or a flower, if our language makes
these distinctions; otherwise it remains an unnamed generic plant. When we come across
something for which we have no name in our language, then we employ several ingenious
strategies—we can make a new word up, we can use paraphrases (other words) to
describe it, or we can borrow a word from another language that seems to fill in the gap in
our own language. Language is an adaptive tool that we can change or modify any time
we need or desire to do so.
Wherever there are humans living in groups, there are languages. Animals
communicate effectively with their innate signaling systems. Humans also use signals
(body language and facial expressions). But language is a unique evolutionary
endowment among species. Unlike signaling systems, which tend to be stable and largely
uniform across time and space, language varies and fluctuates according to where it is
used and the time period of its usage. Different languages emerge in accordance to the
specific experiences and needs of the people who speak them. There is no better or worse
language. All languages serve human needs equally well, no matter if the language is
spoken by millions of people (like Mandarin Chinese) or a small handful (like some
indigenous languages of America); and no matter if it is the main language of one or more
nation states or used by a small community of people within a nation. Each language is
used to solve common problems of knowledge and social organization. Languages enable
people to name, categorize, and reflect on the things that are relevant and meaningful to
them wherever they live and whenever they have lived.
There are between 6000 and 7000 languages spoken in the world today. This number
does not include dialects (local variants of a language). There are a little more than 200
languages with a million or more speakers. Of these, around 20 have 50 million or more
speakers each. More than half of the languages spoken today are expected to disappear in
the next 100 years—a tragedy that parallels the corresponding loss of natural species and
resources on earth. Diversity is a principle of life—biological and intellectual. If we lose
diversity, we are at serious risk. The main languages in danger of extinction are the
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indigenous ones of nations like America, Canada, and Australia. Preserving these is an
objective of many sociolinguists and anthropologists. Language loss (also known as
language attrition) is a worldwide problem.
The Most Spoken Languages
1. Mandarin: Over 845 million
2. Spanish: Over 320 million
3. English: Over 320 million
4. Arabic: Over 200 million
5. Hindi: Over 180 million
6. Bengali: Over 180 million
7. Portuguese: Over 170 million
8. Russian: Over 140 million
9. Japanese: Over 120 million
10. German: Over 90 million
Classification is at the core of any science. This is the case in linguistics as well,
which classifies languages into families, that is, into groups of languages related to each
other historically. For example, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit all derive from the same
source, called Indo-European. There are many subfamilies of Indo-European, including
English. The language families classified according to their historical ties include the
following:
1 the Indo-European family comprised of the Germanic languages, the Romance
languages, the Indo-Iranian languages, with three sub-branches, Iranian, Indo-Aryan, and
Nuristani, spoken from southwest Asia through the Indian subcontinent, Albanian,
Armenian, Celtic, Hellenic (including Greek), and Balto-Slavic;
2 the Uralic languages, most of which belong to the Finno-Ugric family (Finnish,
Hungarian, Estonian, Turkish);
3 the Dravidian family, which is dominant in southern India;
4 the Munda languages, which represent the Austro-Asiatic family, spoken in central
and eastern India and Bangladesh;
5 the Sino-Tibetan family, which covers most of China, much of the Himalayas, and
parts of Southeast Asia;
6 the Tai languages, which cover a large territory of Southeast Asia;
7 the Austronesian family, which encompass the languages of the Malay Peninsula and
most islands to the southeast of Asia;
8 the Papuan languages, spoken by most of the inhabitants of New Guinea’s main
island;
Document Summary
Noam chomsky, ferdinand saussure, francis boas, benjamin whorf, william labov, I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions. Each word is, at once, a capsule of time-specific knowledge, an act of human consciousness, and an implicit principle of social structure. Cumulatively, the words of the world"s languages constitute humanity"s collective knowledge and memory system. The greek philosophers saw language as a manifestation of l gos, which meant both word and mind. Jumping forward a couple of millennia to the nineteenth century, a scientific discipline, called linguistics, emerged to study l gos. In the subsequent twentieth century, linguistics developed its own branches. These two branches, considered as a singular approach to the investigation of language, society, and culture, are the focus of this textbook. His work, called the astadhayayi, is considered to be one of the first.
