01:070:111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Language Change, Linguistic Relativity, George Lakoff

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: 01:070:111
• Professor: Scott

Document Summary

Pragmatics- the study of language use in actual social contexts. Linguistic anthropologists focus on how language is used in actual social contexts. Language ideologies- the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests. Language in relation to social differences and inequalities (such as race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation etc) Relationship between language and thought (sapir-whorf hypothesis) Language structures/constructs thought also called linguistic relativity. Safe- languages in no danger of dying out because of official government support or large number of speakers. If we choose 100,000 speakers as a safe number, there might be 600. Safe languages out of almost 7,000 total languages in the world (depending on how you count dialects and languages) Endangered- languages that are still being learned by children but that will eventually cease to be learned by children in the coming century.