ANT 2410 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Usa Today, African American Vernacular English, George Lakoff
Document Summary
Linguists and anthropologists are interested in what people do say, rather than what they. Speech differences are associated with social variation (region, education, ethnic background, and gender). Men and women talk differently: women peripheralize their vowels, men centralize them. Differences in sport and color terminology between men and women. Language: primary means of communication (spoken or written), part of culture. Based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent. Written form is about 6,000 years old. Language originated thousands of years ago (but no one can say exactly when). Foxp2, mutated gene, helps explain why humans speak but chimps don"t, a variant form of foxp2 that produces a speech disorder in humans is also found among chimps. The speech-friendly form of foxp2 probably took hold in humans around 150,000 years ago. Adaptation can occur more rapidly in homo sapiens than other primates, because. Homo"s adaptive ability means they are more flexible.
