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LANGUAGE is the shared knowledge of sounds, words, meanings,and grammatical rules that people use to send and receive mes-sages. Along with our extreme reliance on the social leaning ofculture, the ability to communicate complex, precise informa-

tion is the main mental capability that makes humanity distinct fromother animals.

WE BEGIN this chapter by discussing briefly a few of the reasons why lan-guage is so remarkable and so important. Then we describe some of thefeatures of language that differentiate it from the communication systemsof other animals. We show how people communicate by following uncon-scious rules for combining sounds and words in ways that other peoplewho know the language recognize as meaningful. Finally, we discuss howlanguage is related to certain aspects of culture and how speaking is itselfa culturally conditioned behavior.

Communication by means of symbolic language is one of the main abilitiesthat makes humans distinct from other animals.

Visit http://www.wadsworth.com/humanity to learn more about the material covered

in this chapter and to access activities, exercises, and tutorial quizzes.

Culture and Language

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NT

EN

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Humanity and Language

Some Properties of Language

Multimedia Potential

Discreteness

Arbitrariness

Productivity

Displacement

How Language Works

Sound Systems

Variations in Sound Systems

Words and Meanings

Language and Culture

Language and Cultural Classifications

of Reality

Language as a Reflection

of Culture

Language and World Views

Social Uses of Speech

C H A P T E R

PART I HUMANITY, CULTURE, AND LANGUAGE

Humanity and LanguageAlthough we talk to one another every day, we seldomconsider how remarkable it is that we can do so. Yet theability to speak and comprehend the spoken messages oflanguage requires knowledge of an enormous number oflinguistic elements and rules. Language and culturetogether are critical to the development of human individ-uals—unless we learn them, our psychological and socialdevelopment is incomplete. In all probability, withoutthem we would be unable to think, as the word “think” isgenerally understood, because language and culture pro-vide our minds with the concepts and terms for thoughtitself. The importance of language for human life isrevealed by mentioning several points.

First, Homo sapiens is the only animal capable ofspeech. Other animals—including honeybees, somewhales and dolphins, and chimpanzees—are capable ofimpressive feats of communication, but only humanshave and use language. By intense human effort, chim-panzees (our closest primate relatives) can learn to usesign language or to manipulate symbols standing forwords and concepts into sentences. Yet no chimpanzeecan respond to this simple request: “Tell me what youplan to do tomorrow.”

In fact, language is so critical to humanity that ithelped to shape our biological evolution. This includes,of course, our brains, but it also includes our vocaltracts. The human vocal tract—the parts of our respira-tory tract that allow us to form distinct sounds—consistsof the lungs, trachea, mouth, and nasal passages. Thehuman vocal tract is biologically evolved for speech, forit is a remarkable resonating chamber. Distinctive vowelsounds are made by raising and lowering the tongue, orparts of the tongue, to produce sounds of different wave-lengths, which our ears recognize as different sounds(compare where your tongue is for the vowels in sit andset, and in teeth and tooth). Most consonants are pro-duced by interrupting the flow of air through ourmouths. The initial sound of tap is formed by bringingthe tongue into contact with the alveolar ridge justbehind the teeth, then releasing the contact suddenly.You change tap to sap by blowing air through yourmouth while almost, but not quite, touching the tip ofyour tongue to your alveolar ridge, thus making the ini-tial sound into a brief hissing noise. You do all thisunconsciously and with astounding speed and precision.The other vowels and consonants of English and otherlanguages are made by articulating various parts of thevocal tract in different ways. Each sound is possiblebecause the chamber formed by the mouth, throat, andnasal passages, and the muscles of the tongue and lips,are biologically evolved to allow us to produce them.

There is a good reason why chimpanzees cannot speakhuman words: Their vocal tracts are not evolved to doso. Yet, with training, any human can make the soundsfound in any other human language.

Second, language makes it possible for people tocommunicate and think about abstract concepts, as wellas about concrete persons, places, things, actions, andevents. Among these abstractions are truth, evil, god,masculinity, wealth, values, humanity, infinity, law,democracy, universal, space, and hatred. Humans allunderstand abstractions such as these and they greatlyaffect our everyday behavior.

Third, the social learning by which children acquireculture would be impossible without language. Languagemakes it possible for the knowledge in one person’s mindto be transmitted into the mind of another person. Experi-ence is stored and transmitted to others by means of lan-guage. During enculturation, we learn not just “facts” and“lessons” about the world. We hear (or read) stories andmyths, whose “lessons” are only implicit. The world viewof a culture is communicated (and perhaps even shaped)by language. And, as we discuss later in this chapter, theways in which a society or other group classify reality isencoded in their language.

Finally, language allows humans to reap the benefitsof the most complete and precise form of communicationin any animal. Because of language, we can communi-cate incredibly detailed information about past, present,and future events. Indeed, we can talk about events thatmight not even have occurred, events that are barelypossible, events that certainly never did happen, andevents that might happen tomorrow but probably won’t.We can tell lies to one another about an event, a thirdparty, or ourselves. We can discuss plans, contingencies,and possible courses of action, based on our expectationsabout what might happen in the future. These are thingswe all do so routinely that it is hard to imagine not beingable to do them!

In brief, language is powerful. It makes abstractthought possible. It allows the relatively quick and easytransmission of information from one individual (andgeneration) to another. It allows the communication ofamazingly complex and precise messages.

Some Properties of LanguageWe can best understand the power of language bydescribing some of the properties that distinguish it fromthe communication abilities of other animals. Nearly fortyyears ago, linguist Charles Hockett identified thirteen fea-tures shared by all human languages. Only five of thethirteen are important for our purposes.

CHAPTER 3 CULTURE AND LANGUAGE

Multimedia Potential

Any message uses some medium for its transmissionfrom sender to recipient. For example, writing is themedium in which the messages of this book are transmit-ted. When you speak, the medium for your message isspeech, transmitted by sound waves. Gestures and bodilymovements are communications media, which arereceived by the sense of sight rather than hearing. Mes-sages can also be transmitted through other media(including even chemicals, whose odors carry meaning toanimals such as ants and dogs).

Unlike most other ways of communicating, languagehas multimedia potential, meaning that linguistic mes-sages can be transmitted through a variety of media. Theoriginal medium for language, of course, was speech, butlanguage’s multimedia potential allowed people to takeadvantage of other media, such as writing and Morsecodes. American sign language is a medium for the hear-ing impaired. Even touching and the resulting nerve sig-nals can be a communication medium for language.Helen Keller, both blind and deaf, communicated andreceived linguistic messages by touch. Writing, signing,and the Internet all are possible because of language’smultimedia potential.

Discreteness

We communicate linguistic messages by combining dis-crete units according to certain shared and conventionalrules. Knowing how to speak a language means knowingthe units and the rules for combining them. Thus, wordsare composed of discrete units of sound (e.g., j, u, m, p)that are combined to communicate a meaning (e.g.,jump). Sentences are composed of discrete units of mean-ings (words) that are combined according to rules tocommunicate a message.

Alphabets are possible because of the property calleddiscreteness. In alphabetic writing, people string togetherthe letters of their alphabet to form words. The letters ofthe English alphabet symbolize discrete sounds, and orig-inally each sound was pronounced in a similar way in allthe words in which it appeared. For example the letter tappears in student, textbook, eat, and today, and so doesthe sound we symbolize as t in the English alphabet. Thesame applies to all other letters in an alphabet.

In the English alphabet, most letters no longer repre-sent a single sound. The letter a, for example, is pro-nounced differently in the words act, father, warden,assume, and nature. The same is true for other lettersthat represent English vowels. Some single sounds inEnglish are rendered in spelling as two letters, such as th,ou, and the gh in rough. Why does the spelling English

now uses for certain words not reflect the way thesewords are pronounced? Basically, because changes inspelling have lagged behind changes in pronunciationsince the invention of the printing press.

By themselves, most sounds carry no meaning: Thethree English sounds in the word cat, for example, aremeaningless when pronounced by themselves. But bycombining this limited number of sounds in differentways, words are formed, and words do communicatemeanings. Thus, the three sounds in cat can be puttogether in different sequences to form the words act andtack. Words, then, are composed of sound combinationsthat have recognized, conventional meanings in a speechcommunity. And all languages use a small number ofsounds to make a large number of words.

Sounds are not the only units of language that peo-ple recombine when speaking with one another. Wordsare combined according to the grammatical rules of thelanguage to convey the complex messages carried bysentences. By mastering their language’s words and theirmeanings, and the rules for combining words into sen-tences, speakers and listeners can send and receive mes-sages of great complexity with amazing precision (e.g.,“In the basket of apples on you left, hand me the reddestone on the bottom.”)

Discrete sounds are sometimes said to be the build-ing blocks of language. By recombining them in differentsequences and numbers, an infinite number of words canbe pronounced (although most languages have onlythousands of words).

Arbitrariness

The relationship between the strings of sounds that makes up words and the meanings these words communi-cate is arbitrary, which means that words are symbols (seeChapter 2). When children learn to speak and understandverbal messages, they learn the combinations of soundsthat are permissible according to the rules of their lan-guage. For instance, in English, mp, nt, and ld are all pos-sible combinations, but pm, tn, and dl are not (althoughthese combinations are used by other languages). Childrenalso learn to match up certain sound combinations (words)with their meanings. By the age of one, most childrenhave learned the meanings of dozens of words. They havemastered many words that refer to objects (ball), animals(doggie), people (mama), sensory experiences (hot), quali-ties (blue, hard), actions (eat, run), commands (no, comehere), emotions (love), and so forth. The child learns toassociate meanings with words, even though the specificsound combinations that convey these various meaningshave no inherent relation to the things themselves. Thus,the feelings aroused by “I love you” in English are also


aroused by “Te amo” in Spanish, although the sounds ofthe message are different. Because the relation betweenmeanings and words or sentences is arbitrary, our ability tocommunicate linguistic messages is based entirely on con-ventions shared by the sender and receiver of a message.When we learn a language, we master these conventionsabout meanings, just as we strive to master pronunciationsand other things.

Productivity

Productivity refers to a speaker’s ability to create totallynovel sentences (and to a listener’s ability to comprehendthem). Productivity means that a language’s finite number ofwords can be combined into an infinite number of meaning-ful sentences. The sentences are meaningful because thespeaker and listener know what each word means individual-ly and the rules by which they may be meaningfully com-bined. The amazing thing is that individuals are notconsciously aware of their knowledge of these rules, althoughthey routinely apply them each time they speak and hear.

Displacement

Displacement refers to our ability to talk about objects,people, things, and events that are remote in time and

space. Language hasthis property becauseof the symbolicnature of words andsentences, whichmeans that things donot have to beimmediately visibleto communicateabout them. We candiscuss someonewho is out of sightbecause the symbolsof language (in thiscase, a name) callthat person to mind,allowing us to thinkabout him or her. Wecan speculate aboutthe future becausealthough its eventsmay never happen,

our language has symbols that stand for future time, andmore symbols that allow us to form a mental image ofpossible events. We can learn about events (such asworldwide depression and civil wars) that happened longago. Displacement makes it possible for us to talk aboutthings that may not even exist, such as goblins, ghosts,and ghouls; indeed, we can give these imaginary thingsdetailed characteristics in our mind’s eye, although ourreal eyes have never seen them. Because of displacement,we can tell one another stories about things that neverhappened, and thus create myths, folklore, and literature.People can learn of events remote from them in space,such as Bill Clinton’s troubles, the trials of O.J., and theglobal financial crisis. Much of culture depends on thisimportant property of language.

Together, multimedia potential, discreteness, arbi-trariness, productivity, and displacement make languagethe most precise and complete system of communicationknown among living things. Because of them, I can writethe following simple (but false) sentence, which youunderstand perfectly although you’ve never read or heardit before: “Last Tuesday at 7:02 P.M., Denzel Washingtonchased my neighbor’s dog around the yard and bit herear.” (If you find your ability to decode this sentenceunremarkable, it’s only because you are human!)

How Language WorksAs children learn the language of their community, theymaster an enormous amount of information about individ-ual sounds, sound combinations, meanings, and rules. Lin-

Language gives humans the ability to speak and understandincredibly complex messages. Because we talk to one anotheralmost every day, most of us are unaware of the power oflanguage.


guistic units (sounds, words) and the rules for combiningthem make up the total system of linguistic knowledgecalled a grammar. Grammar refers to all the knowledgeshared by those who are able to speak and understand agiven language: what sounds occur, rules for combiningthem into sequences, the meanings that are conveyed bythese sequences, and how sentences are constructed bystringing words together according to precise rules.

Grammatical knowledge is unconscious, meaning thatthose who share a language cannot verbalize the nature ofthe knowledge that allows them to speak and comprehendone another. It also is intuitive, meaning that speaking andunderstanding are second nature—we ordinarily do notneed to think long and hard about how to transform themessage we want to communicate into a sentence, or howto decode a sentence we hear into a message.

This scientific use of grammar differs from theeveryday use of the term. In everyday speech we judgepeople partly on the basis of whether we consider theirgrammar proper. In the United States there are severaldialects, or regional variants, of English. One, calledStandard American English (SAE)—the dialect we usual-ly hear in the national news media—is culturally acceptedas most correct. Other dialects, especially those spokenby many African-Americans and by southern orAppalachian whites, are looked down on by many ofthose whose dialect is SAE.

But there is no such thing as superior and inferiordialects (or languages) in the linguistic sense. That is,each language, and each dialect, is equally capable ofserving as a vehicle for communicating the messages itsspeakers need to send and receive. So long as a personsuccessfully communicates, there is no such thing as“bad grammar,” or people who “don’t know proper gram-mar.” The exchange of messages

Merle: I ain’t got no shoes.Pearl: I ain’t got none either.

is perfectly good English—to members of certain subcul-tures who speak one English dialect. So long as speakerscommunicate their intended meaning to listeners, thenthe words they use or the ways they construct their sen-tences are as valid linguistically as any other. The evalu-ations we make of someone else’s grammar or overallstyle of speech, then, are cultural evaluations. Culturally,people define some dialects as more correct than others.But if the history of the United States had been different,some other dialect of American English might havebecome standard, and the sentences

Jennifer: I have no shoes.Christopher: Nor do I.

might have become a cultural marker by which one seg-ment of the population judges another as unsophisticated.

This point is so important that it is worth sayinganother way. Many languages are not uniform but havevariations based on region, class, ethnicity, or some otherdifference between people. These variations in the gram-mar of a single language are called dialects. The speak-ers of a language or dialect share a complete knowledgeof its grammar. When linguists try to discover this gram-mar, they call what they are investigating a descriptivegrammar: They are trying to describe completely andobjectively the elements and rules that underlie communi-cation in some particular language or dialect. The descrip-tive grammar a linguist would write of Black Englishwould differ slightly from that of SAE. But a linguistwould never describe the differences between the twodialects in terms of relative superiority, since each dialectis capable of conveying the same messages.

In contrast, when some speakers of SAE labelAfrican-American or southern dialects as substandardEnglish, they are basing their judgments on their culturalassumptions about the relative correctness of dialects. Butthis judgment is entirely cultural. Linguistically, all lan-guages and all dialects work as well as others, meaningthat all languages and all dialects have equal ability tocommunicate the messages their speakers need to sendand receive.

With this point about the relativity of languages anddialects in mind, here we discuss two aspects of gram-mar: (1) sounds and their patterning, and (2) soundcombinations and their meanings. (A third field studiesthe rules for combining words into sentences, but thiscomplicated subject is outside the scope of this book.)

Sound Systems

When we speak, our vocal tract emits a string of sounds.Linguists are trained to describe and analyze the natureand patterning of these sounds. The sounds of a lan-guage, together with the way these sounds occur in regu-lar and consistent patterns, make up the phonologicalsystem of the language. The study of this sound systemis called phonology.

For example, when you hear the word debt, youhear a sequence of sounds that you associate with a cer-tain meaning. You do not consciously think, and mayeven be unable to recognize, that debt consists of threedistinguishable sounds, / d /, / ε /, and / t /. (The slashmarks / / denote sounds recognized as distinctive in asingle language.) In fact, if someone asked you, “Howmany sounds are there in ‘debt’?” you might say “Four”because you would confuse the sounds in debt with itsnumber of letters in English spelling.

But you do know what the three sounds in debt are,although you might not know that you know. You knowbecause you recognize that the word pet is a different


word that debt, although only its initial sound, / p /, isdifferent. You know because you recognize debt and dateas different words, although they differ only in their sec-ond sound. And you know because you recognize theprofound contrast in meaning between debt and dead,although this difference is caused by a single sound atthe end of the two words. If English speakers did notknow, at an unconscious level, that debt must be pro-nounced / dεt /, rather than / pεt /, / dayt /, or / dεd /,they would mispronounce it, and their listeners would beunable to distinguish debt from these other words. Con-versely, if a listener did not know that / dεt / is differentfrom / pεt /, she or he might expect to receive a cat ordog when the speaker said, “I’m paying my debt to you.”

The particular sounds that the speakers of a lan-guage recognize as distinct from other sounds are calledthe phonemes of the language. Phonemes are the indi-vidual sounds that make a difference in the meanings ofits words. For example, we can break up the wordbrought into four phonemes: / b /, / r /, / ⊃ /, and / t /.The substitution of any other phoneme for any of thephonemes in the word brought would either change theword into another word (e.g., bright, in which a differentvowel sound, / ay /, is substituted for / ⊃ /) or make itunintelligible (e.g., blought or broughk).

Languages have different phonemes, and variouslanguages’ phonological systems are patterned differently.This means that languages recognize and distinguishbetween sounds based on different sound qualities, andthat each language has its own logic and consistency inmaking these distinctions.

As an example of the patterning of the phonologicalsystem of one language, compare two phonemes of Eng-lish: / b / and / p /. The phoneme / b / appears in boy,able, probation, and flab. It is made by putting the lipstogether and then releasing them while making a slightvibration with the vocal cords. The phoneme / p /appears in pat, approach, mop, and example. We makethe / p / sound the same way as / b /, except that we donot vibrate our vocal cords.

You can hear the vibration of your vocal cords in / b / by placing your hands over your ears while sayingthe word bat slowly and listening for a slight buzz duringthe pronunciation of / b /. This buzz is the sound yourvocal cords make when your lungs force air throughthem while they are constricted, or tightened, until theyare nearly in contact with one another. All sounds inwhich the vocal cords vibrate are called voiced. Examplesof other voiced consonants in English are / d /, / z /, / g /, and / j / (/ j / is the first and last sound in judge).All vowel sounds are voiced in English.

Now place your hands over your ears while sayingthe word pat. You will not hear a buzz during the pro-nunciation of / p /. This is because your vocal cords are

completely open, so the flow of air from your lungs isunimpeded and no buzzy sound is created. All sounds inwhich the vocal cords are open, so that their vibrationdoes not contribute to the sound, are called voiceless.Other voiceless phonemes in English are / t /, / s /, / k /,and / c / (/ c / is the first and last sound in church).

The only difference between bat and pat is this firstsound, and the significant difference between the sounds/ b / and / p / is that the vocal cords vibrate during / b /but are open during / p /. Stated technically, the only dif-ference between the two phonemes is that / b / is voiced,whereas / p / is voiceless.

We discussed these two English phonemes in somedetail to make a general point: Our understanding ofwords is based on our shared ability to hear distinctionsbetween their constituent sounds and to recognize thesedistinctions as significant. People who speak Englishhave no difficulty hearing the distinctions between thefirst sounds of bill and pill, although they do not con-sciously know what qualities make these sounds differ-ent. We also recognize the distinctions between the twosounds as significant—that is, as making a difference inthe meanings of the words in which they appear. If thedifference between / b / and / p / was not significant,we would not recognize any difference between wordsthat differ only in these sounds—pill and bill wouldhave the same meaning and therefore would be thesame word!

Variations in Sound Systems

We have just put into words what every speaker of Eng-lish unconsciously and intuitively knows: that we detectthe difference between sounds such as / t / and / d /, and/ f / and / v /, and that we recognize this difference assignificant. Can’t everyone in the world hear this differ-ence, and doesn’t everyone recognize this difference assignificant?

No, they can’t and don’t. There are a great manylanguages in which sounds that differ only in whetherthey are voiced or voiceless are not recognized as differ-ent sounds. In fact, speakers may not be able to hear thedifference between such sounds. For instance, in Kos-raen, a Micronesian language, the distinctions betweenthe sounds / t / and / d /, / p / and / b /, and / k / and / g / make no difference in meaning. So the two alterna-tive pronunciations of the following words make no dif-ference in meaning to Kosraens:

k�p and g�p mean “satiated,” “full from eating”t�n and d�n mean “color”p�k and b�k mean “sand”

It is as if English-speaking people made no distinctionbetween cot and got, between tan and dan, and between


One of many differences between languages is the discretesounds that their speakers recognize as distinctive.Distinctions between some sounds that are clearly heard byEnglish speakers are not made by the Micronesian languagethese women speak.

pig and big. This does not mean that Kosraen ears are notas sensitive as Canadian, Australian, or English ears. Itmeans only that the Kosraen and English languages donot recognize the same distinctions in similar sounds asmaking a difference in the meanings of words. In English,/ k / and / g / are different phonemes; in Kosraen, theyare alternative ways of pronouncing the same phoneme.

So differences between sounds that are meaningful inone language’s phonological system do not always make adifference in meaning in another’s. Conversely, one lan-guage may recognize distinctions between similar soundsthat the speakers of another language do not detect. Forexample, we have referred to the English phoneme / p / asif it is always pronounced the same way. In fact, we usetwo pronunciations for / p /, depending on the soundsaround it. Consider the words pit and spit. You might thinkthat the only difference between the two is the sound / s /.If so, you are wrong. The / p / in pit is followed by a shortpuff of air (called aspiration) between it and the vowel; the/ p / in pit is said to be aspirated. The / p / in spit is notfollowed by such a puff; it is unaspirated. (You cannot hearthis difference, but you may be able to feel it: Put yourhand immediately in front of your mouth while saying thetwo words, and you may feel the aspiration after the / p /in pit, but not after the / p / in spit.)

Surely such a slight difference cannot matter, but inmany languages it does. In Thai, for example, / p / and / ph / (the h stands for aspiration) are separate phonemes,which means that those who speak Thai detect the differ-ence between many aspirated and unaspirated sounds

and recognize it as changing the meaning of manywords. This is seen in the following Thai words:

paa “forest” phaa “to split”tam “to pound” tham “to do”kat “to bite” khat “to interrupt”

Note that a difference in sound that is nearly inaudible toa speaker of English changes the meanings of the pairedThai words just listed. Hindi, the language spoken bymany Asian Indians, also recognizes the differencesbetween aspirated and unaspirated sounds.

One of the most interesting ways in which languagesdiffer in their phonological systems is the way the pitch ofthe voice is used to convey meaning. (The pitch of a voicedepends on how fast the vocal cords vibrate: The higher thefrequency of vibration, the higher the pitch of the voice.)English speakers use pitch to convey different meanings, asyou can see by contrasting the following sentences:

She went to class.She went to class?

The first statement is turned into a question by alteringthe pitch of the voice. In the question, the pitch rises withthe word class.

Speakers of English use the changing pitch of theirvoices over the whole sentence to communicate a mes-sage; that is, the voice pitch falls or rises mainly fromword to word, rather than within a word. There are manyother languages in which a high, medium, or low pitchused within an individual word, or even in a syllable,changes the fundamental meaning of the word.

Languages in which the pitch (or tone) with which aword is said (or changes in the voice pitch during its pro-nunciation) affects the meaning of a word are known astone languages. Tone languages occur in Africa and insoutheastern and eastern Asia. Chinese, Thai, Burmese,


In the process of interacting with parents and other adults,children learn the rules for forming morphemes out of soundsand the meanings people in their community attach to thesemorphemes.

and Vietnamese are all tone languages, which is why theyhave a musical quality to ears accustomed to English. As anexample of how pitch can affect meaning, consider thesewords from Nupe, an African tone language:

ba (high tone) means “to be sour”ba (mid tone) means “to cut”ba (low tone) means “to count”

Here, whether the two phonemes in ba are pronouncedwith a high, mid, or low tone changes their meaning. Thesame principle can apply to syllables within a word—how thepitch of the voice changes between the syllables alters themeaning. This is exemplified by the following Thai words:

nâa (tone of voice falls on second vowel) means “face”naa (tone of voice rises on second vowel) means “thick”

Because the tone with which a word is pronounced, orchanges in tone between the syllables of the word, can

change its meaning, the pitch of the voice is a kind ofphoneme in tone languages. It has the same effect asadding / s / in front of the English word pot, whichtotally alters its meaning to spot.

Words and Meanings

Words are combinations of sounds (phonemes) towhich people attach standardized meanings. Any lan-guage contains a finite number of words, eachmatched to one or more meanings. The total inventoryof words in a language is called its lexicon. Morphol-ogy is the study of meaningful sound sequences andthe rules by which they are formed.

Of all linguistic elements, words are the most eas-ily transmissible across different languages. Whengroups who speak different languages come into con-tact, one or both groups often incorporates some ofthe “foreign” words into its lexicon. Incorporation isespecially likely to happen if one language’s wordshave no counterparts in the lexicon of the other, as iscommonly the case for many nouns. Because of theway the world trading and political system has devel-oped in the last five centuries (see Chapter 17), Eng-lish words have spread widely into other languages.The Japanese language has incorporated hundreds ofEnglish words, and in France the use of English wordsbecame such a hot political issue that the governmentrecently outlawed the “importation” of further Englishwords. Lest English speakers become too chauvinisticabout their language, it should be noted that English(a Germanic language) itself has, over the centuries,adopted words from the Romance languages (whichoriginated from Latin), as anyone who has takenFrench, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or otherRomance languages knows. Less well known is thefact that the early English colonists who settled in theAmericas adopted lots of words from the Indians—words that are now incorporated into the English lexi-con (see “A Closer Look”).

In studying the meanings of language, morpholo-gists need a more precise concept than word. To see why,ask yourself if you know the meaning of the followingsound sequences, none of which qualifies as a word:

un edpre snon inganti ist

You do, of course, recognize these sound sequences.Those in the first column are prefixes, which changethe meaning of certain words when placed beforethem. Those in the second column are suffixes, whichalter a word’s meaning when they follow the word.

Sound sequences such as these are “detachable” fromparticular words. Take the words art and novel, for exam-ple. By adding the suffix -ist to these words, we make newwords meaning “a person who creates art” or “one whowrites novels.” That -ist has a similar meaning whenever itis attached to other words is shown by the made-up wordcrim; you don’t know what this word means, but by adding-ist to it, you instantly know that a crimist is “a person

who crims.” We need a concept that will include prefixesand suffixes such as uni-, -ing, -ly, and so forth to analyzesuch compound words and their meanings.

Any sequence of phonemes that carries meaning isknown as a morpheme. There are two kinds of mor-phemes in all languages. Free morphemes are anymorphemes that can stand alone as words, for exam-ple, type, walk, woman, establish. Bound morphemes

Indian givers

The earliest Europeansettlers of eastern NorthAmerica came from theBritish Isles. With the exception ofFrench-speaking Quebec, most citizens ofCanada and the United States speak Eng-lish as their “native language.” Few ofus know about the influence of the origi-nal native languages of North America—those spoken by American Indians—onthe English vocabulary. As Jack Weather-ford explains in his book Native Roots,many familiar English words, phrases,and place names are derived from one oranother Native American language.

The earliest Spanish and Portugueseexplorers were surprised at how many ofthe plants and animals in the “NewWorld” (North and South America andthe Caribbean) were unknown to them.A few animals, such as deer and wolves,were enough like familiar Europeanfauna that European words were appliedto them. Others, however, had no Euro-pean counterparts. Terms taken fromNorth American Indian languages wereadopted for many of these, includingcougar, caribou, moose, raccoon, chip-munk, opossum, skunk, and chigger.Other “English” terms for animals aretaken from the languages of SouthAmerican peoples: condor, piranha, tapir,toucan, jaguar, alpaca, vicuña, andllama. Plants, too, were unfamiliar, andNative American words were adopted forsaguaro, yucca, mesquite, persimmon,hickory, and pecan, to name only someof the most common derivatives.

As we shall see in Chapter 6, Indiansof the Americas were the first to domesti-cate numerous food plants that nowhave worldwide importance. All the fol-lowing crops have names with Native

American origins: squash,maize, hominy, avocado,

tapioca (also called maniocand cassava, both also taken from

native languages), pawpaw, succotash,tomato, and potato.

Indian words for natural featuresother than plants and animals also wereadopted by European immigrants: bayou,muskeg, savanna, pampas, hurricane,chinook. Terms in various Native Ameri-can languages for clothing, housing, andother material objects have made it intoEnglish: igloo, teepee, wigwam, moc-casin, parka, poncho, toboggan, husky,canoe, kayak, and tomahawk. Caucusand powwow, for meetings, are twoother English words with native origins.

People everywhere find it useful toname geographical locations to make iteasy to discuss people, things, and events.The earliest European settlers often namedAmerican places to honor important peoplein their home countries—for example,Charleston, Albuquerque, Columbus, Car-olina, and Virginia (the latter named afterthe supposed condition of England’s QueenElizabeth I). Other American place namesare derived from European geography—Nova Scotia (new Scotland), New Hamp-shire, Maine (a province in France), and,of course, New England.

Native American peoples had theirown names for places and landscape fea-tures, and often these manes were theones that endured and appear on modernmaps. River names with Indian originsinclude Mississippi, Ohio, Yukon, Mis-souri, Arkansas, Wabash, Potomac, Kla-math, Minnesota, and Mohawk, tomention just a few of the most familiar.The lakes called Huron, Ontario, Michi-gan, Oneida, Tahoe, and Slave have Indi-

an names, as do hundreds of other bod-ies of water in Canada and the UnitedStates. Whole states are named afterIndian peoples such as the Illini, Massa-chuset, Ute, Kansa, and Dakota, whilenames of other states and provinces arederived from native words, such as Man-itoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Texas,Oklahoma, Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa, andNebraska. Miami, Chicago, Saskatoon,Ottawa, and Omaha are just a few largecities with names derived from Indianlanguages. Seattle was named after aparticular Indian leader, Seal’th, of theWest Coast. Finally, the names of twocountries on the North American conti-nent have Indian roots: kanata (Canada)is an Iroquoian word meaning village(although it now is applied to a muchlarger community), while the area for-merly known as New Spain took a namemeaning “the place of the Mexica”(another name for the Aztecs) after win-ning its independence in 1823.

Aside from the inherent interest inthe historical fact that many words in theEnglish vocabulary have Indian origins,the adoption of words is a reminder ofanother, wider point: The culture of thoseof us who live in the modern world is theproduct of interaction among disparatepeoples. In the past five centuries,increasing contact among the majorregions of the planet has led to thespread of cultural beliefs and ideas. Likeour languages, our cultural traditionshave multiple origins. We shall discusssome of these connections and theirimpacts in later chapters.

Source: Weatherford (1991); we thankThomas Love for correcting errors in theprevious edition.

A C L O S E R L O O K



are attached to free morphemes to modify their mean-ings in predictable ways, for example, dis-, bi-, -er, -ly.Thus, by adding suffixes to the example free mor-phemes, we get:

typist typed typingwalked walking walkswomanly womanhood womanishestablished establishment establishes

Both prefixes and suffixes—which in English are the two kindsof bound morphemes—can be attached to a free morpheme tochange its meaning, as shown in the following examples:

desire desirable undesirableexcuse excusable inexcusablypossible impossible impossibilityhealth healthy unhealthfulcomplete completely incompletely

Note that both free and bound morphemes carry meaning(although the meaning depends on the context in whichthey are used), unlike most phonemes such as/ l /, / g /, / n /, and so on. Just as phonemes are a language’s minimalunits of sound, morphemes are the minimal units of mean-ing. Thus, we cannot break down the free morphemesfriend, possible, man, or run into any smaller unit that car-ries meaning. Nor can we break down the bound mor-phemes non-, -ish, -able, or tri- into any smaller units andstill have them mean anything in English.

There is no doubt that the speakers of a languagelearn its rules for forming compound words by combin-ing free and bound morphemes. That is, people learnhow to make new compound words by applying a rule ofcompound-word formation, not be learning each com-pound word separately.

For instance, take the English rule for forming aplural noun from a singular noun. It can be done byadding the bound morpheme / z /, as in: beads, apples,colors, eggs. (Incidentally, / z / represents one of only afew cases in English in which a phoneme is also a mor-pheme. When used as a bound morpheme at the end of anoun, / z / usually carries the meaning “more than one.”)Children learn the morphological rule for plural formationat an early age, but it takes them a while longer to learnthe many exceptions to the rule. They apply the rule con-sistently to all words, saying “childs,” “mans,” “foots,”“mouses,” and so on.

The same is true for the English rule for forming thepast tense of a verb. Generally, the bound morpheme / d / is added as a suffix to the verb, as in formed,bored, loaded, and included. Again, children learn thisrule for past-tense formation early, and they apply itconsistently. We hear children say “goed,” “runned,”“bringed,” and “doed.”

Thus, one of the many things people unconsciouslyknow when they know a language is its rules for chang-ing the meanings of free morphemes by the addition ofbound morphemes. We do not have to learn tree andtrees as separate words. We need only apply a generalmorphological rule (i.e., add / z / as a suffix to make anoun plural) to tree, or to many other nouns.

Language and CultureThe major interest of anthropological linguists (seeChapter 1) is how the culture a group of people share isrelated to the language they speak. This topic is obvi-ously complex and potentially very technical, so here wefocus on only three areas in which language and culturemight be most closely tied together. First, as we knowfrom Chapter 2, the members of a single culture share(to a large degree) the same classification of reality. This classification is closely related to the contrasts inmeaning between the words of the language. Second,many parts of language reflect the social relationshipsbetween individuals and the cultural importance peopleattach to different things or categories. Third, somescholars have suggested that language powerfullyshapes a peoples’ perception of reality and even theirentire world view. These possible interconnections arediscussed in the remainder of this section.

Language and Cultural Classifications of Reality

Cultures differ in how they break up the natural andsocial world into categories (see Chapter 2). In the1960s, a specialization within cultural anthropologydeveloped that is usually called cognitive anthropologyor ethnoscience. Cognitive anthropologists often studyhow cultures construct their classifications of reality byperceiving and labeling the world according to differentcriteria. One conclusion of such research is that classifi-cations are organized in consistent patterns, much likethe patterns of sound systems in language.

To see how this organization works, return for amoment to phonology. As we have seen, English recog-nizes as significant the difference between voiced andvoiceless consonants. On the other hand, many otherlanguages do not recognize this distinction betweensounds, for the meaning of a word in these languages isnot affected by whether certain of its consonants arevoiced or voiceless. The distinctions between the samesounds are objectively present in all languages, but theyare not necessarily perceived and made significant.

Now recall that one difference between cultures ishow they classify reality into categories of objects, peo-ple, other life forms, and events. This is done by perceiv-


ing or not perceiving different features of things, and byrecognizing or not recognizing these differences as impor-tant (just as the speakers of a language do or do not per-ceive or recognize differences between sounds). On thebasis of these perceptions and recognitions of contrastsand similarities between things, humans define categoriesof reality. We classify specific objects, people, naturalphenomena, and so forth into one or another category,depending on which of their many features we notice andview as significant. Members of different cultural tradi-tions do not necessarily base their categories on the samecontrasts and similarities (just as speakers of differentlanguages do not distinguish phonemes based on thesame contrasts and similarities; recall, for example, thataspiration is not a difference that matters in Englishphonology, although it is the only difference betweensome phonemes in Hindi and Thai).

An example sheds light on how the “cognitive cate-gories” of a people can be built up in much the same wayas elements of language. Take three kinds of livestock:cattle, horses, and swine. How do North American live-stock farmers categorize and classify these animals? Con-sider the following list:

Cattle Horses Swinecow mare sowbull stallion boarsteer gelding barrowcalf foal pigletheifer calf filly giltbull calf colt shoat

(Unless you have a rural background, you may notrecognize some of these terms. Farmers need to discusscattle, horses, and swine more than do suburban or cityfolk, so they use a rich lexicon to talk about livestock.)Note that the same features are used to contrast thedifferent categories of cattle, horses, and swine. Cowand bull contrast in the same way as mare-stallion andsow-boar: The first is female; the second, male. Thereis a special term for each kind of mature male animalthat has been neutered: steer, gelding, and barrow.There are specific terms for newborn animals, regard-less of their sex: calf, foal, and piglet. And there areseparate terms for female and male immature animals:heifer calf and bull calf, filly and colt, gilt and shoat.Each kind of livestock is then divided into categoriesbased on sex (female, male, neutered male) and age(adult, immature, newborn). Each category can bedescribed by the features that distinguish it in the farm-ers’ classification of livestock: a filly is an “immaturefemale horse,” a barrow is a “mature castrated maleswine,” and so on.

These are the features of animals that farmers findimportant enough to make the basis of their classificationof livestock. Notice that this classification rests on con-trasts and similarities between selected characteristics ofthe animals—just as the speakers of a language recognizeonly some features of sounds as significant. Notice alsothat the classification is patterned: The same contrastsand similarities (sex, age) are used to distinguish kinds ofcattle, horses, and swine. Similarly, the phonological rulesof a language are patterned: If a feature (e.g., voicing) ofone class of sound (e.g., stop) is recognized as significantfor one member of the class, it tends to be recognized assignificant for other members of the class as well.

Like the sound systems of languages, the way peopleclassify things is constructed out of selected features ofthose things, and these same features are the basis for dis-tinguishing other, similar things. Thus, the part of culturalknowledge called classifications of reality is organizedmuch like the sound system of language: We perceive onlycertain differences and similarities as significant, and buildup our conception of reality from these differences and simi-larities. Since we generally assign labels (morphemes) tothe resulting categories (and subcategories), language isclosely related to a culture’s classifications of reality.

Language as a Reflection of Culture

Anthropological fieldworkers try to learn the language ofthe community they work with, partly because it facili-tates interaction, but also because knowing how to speakthe language helps fieldworkers understand the local culture. In fact, many aspects of the language a peoplespeak reflect their culture.

For example, a complex lexicon tends to developaround things that are especially important to a commu-nity, as we just illustrated with the farmer’s classificationof livestock. People will assign names or labels to thoseobjects, qualities, and actions that they see as mostimportant, which makes it easier for them to communi-cate complex information about these subjects.

Examples of how vocabulary reflects a people’s needto communicate about certain subjects are found amongindividuals of different subcultural and occupational cate-gories in North American society. Take automobile tools,for example. A professional mechanic can identify hun-dreds of kinds of tools; the Saturday-afternoon homemechanic can identify perhaps several dozen; and the restof us don’t know a compression tester from a feeler gauge.Numerous other examples could be cited to show that alanguage’s lexicon responds to the needs of people to dis-cuss certain topics easily. There are no surprises here.

But not all specialized vocabularies are developedentirely to meet the need of the members of some group


to converse easily or precisely among themselves. Spe-cialized vocabularies also serve as status markers forprofessions and other groups. Lawyers speak “legalese”only partly because they need to make fine distinctionsbetween points of law that are obscure to the rest of us.Legalese is a secret—as well as a specialized—vocabu-lary. Entry into the select group of attorneys depends inpart on mastery of an esoteric vocabulary with all itsnuances. And it is helpful to the profession that the gen-eral population cannot understand real estate agreementsand other contracts written by attorneys. Most of us arecompelled to pay for the specialized knowledge of anattorney to interpret important documents. And, as youmight have noticed, college professors, when acting outtheir professional roles, usually use words, sentence con-structions, and speech styles that have distinctive charac-teristics. (Even textbook authors sometimes do the samething with their word choices and writing styles.) This ispartly to increase the precision of communication, but italso serves to distinguish them from other people withless (or different forms of) formal education.

In sum, in a diverse and complex society, occupationalor other kinds of groups may develop specialized speech tofacilitate communication, to mark themselves off fromeveryone else, to help ensure the continuation of their privi-leges and records, and so on. What about differencesbetween whole languages, spoken by members of differentcultures? Similar ideas apply. To understand them, the con-cept of semantic domain is useful. A semantic domain is aset of words that belongs to an inclusive class. For exam-ple, chair, table, ottoman, and china cabinet belong to thesemantic domain of “furniture.” “Color” is another semanticdomain, with members such as violet, red, and yellow.

Semantic domains typically have a hierarchical struc-ture, meaning that they have several levels of inclusive-ness. For instance, two colors the English languagedistinguishes can be further broken down:

Blue Greenaqua kellysky mintroyal forestnavy avocadoteal lime

We divide the semantic domain of color into specific col-ors (e.g., blue, green), each of which in turn is dividedinto “kinds of blue” and “kinds of green,” and eveninto—for some of us—“shades of sky blue” or “tones offorest green.”

By now you can see where this discussion is headed:Different languages, spoken by members of different cul-tures, vary in the semantic domains they identify, in howfinely they carve up these domains, and in how they

make distinctions between different members of adomain. Some of these differences are rather obvious. Forinstance, the semantic domain of “fish” is unlikely to beas elaborate among desert dwellers as among coastal orriverine peoples. Tropical lowland peoples are not likely tohave the semantic domain we call “snow” in their nativelanguage, whereas some Arctic peoples discuss it somuch that they have an elaborate vocabulary to facilitatecommunication about snow conditions. Further, thedegree to which some semantic domain has a multilevelhierarchical structure depends on the importance of theobjects or actions in peoples’ lives: Island, coastal, orriverine people dependent on fish are likely to have manycategories and subcategories of aquatic life, fishing meth-ods, and flood and tide stages, for instance. Can we gobeyond such fairly obvious statements?

For some semantic domains we can. There are somethings or qualities that seem to be “natural domains,”meaning that the differences between their members seemto be obvious to anyone. In fact, they seem to be inherentin the things themselves. We therefore would expect thatpeople everywhere would carve up these domains in simi-lar ways. For instance, color is an inherent (natural) qual-ity of things, which can be measured by instruments thatdetermine the wavelength of light reflected from an object.Surely anyone can recognize that blue and green are dif-ferent colors, and surely this recognition is reflected inseparate terms for the two colors? Likewise, biological kin-ship is a natural relationship, in the sense that who aninfant’s parents are determines who will and will not behis or her closest genetic relatives. What human cannotrecognize that his or her aunts and uncles are fundamen-tally different kinds of relatives than parents?

Although blue and green are objectively different col-ors, and aunts are objectively different relatives frommothers, people are not obliged to recognize these differ-ences and make them culturally significant. The semanticdomains of color and relatives are in fact divided up dif-ferently by different cultures, and these divisions are notat all self-evident.

The domain of “relatives” or “kinfolk” is an excellentexample of how members of different cultural traditionsdivide up an apparently natural domain according to dif-ferent principles. Because we return to this subject inChapter 8, here we want only to show that different cul-tures do not in fact make the same distinctions betweenrelatives as we do; that is, the way relatives are culturallydistinguished is variable.

Consider the relatives that English-speaking peoplecall aunt, first cousin, and brother. An aunt is a sister ofyour mother or father; a first cousin is a child of any ofyour aunts and uncles; and a brother is a male child ofyour parents. These individuals are all biologically related


to you differently, so you place them in different cate-gories and call them by different terms.

But notice that other distinctions are possible that youdo not recognize as distinctions and are not reflected in thekinship lexicon of English. Your aunts are not related toyou in the same way: One is the sister of your mother, oneis the sister of your father. Why not recognize them bygiving them different terms? Similarly, your first cousinscould be subdivided into finer categories and given specialterms, such as child of my father’s sister, child of mymother’s brother, and so on. And since we distinguishmost other categories of relatives by whether they are maleor female, (e.g., brother versus sister, aunt versus uncle),why does sex not matter for any of our cousins?

How do we know that the way a culture divides upthe domain of relatives into different categories is notentirely natural? Because different cultures divide up thedomain in different ways. People in many societies, forinstance, call their mother’s sister by one term and theirfather’s sister by another term (although we collapse bothinto one term, aunt). It is also common for people to dis-tinguish between the children of their father’s sister andtheir father’s brother, calling the first by a term we trans-late as “cousin,” the second by the same term as they usefor their own brothers and sisters. Even stranger—to thoseof us who think that relatives are a purely biological cate-gory—are cultures who call the daughters of their maternaluncles by the term “mother” (just like their “real mother”),but not the daughters of the paternal uncles, whom theycall “sister”! (These various ways of categorizing kin, bythe way, are not random, for anthropologists have discov-ered that such labels are related to other aspects of a peo-ple’s kinship system—see Chapter 8.) Obviously, the wayvarious peoples divide up the seemingly “natural domain”of biological relatives is not the same the world over.

The same applies to color, our other example. BrentBerlin and Paul Kay found diversity in color terms amongvarious human populations. Some had only two terms for,roughly, “light” and “dark.” Others had terms for otherwavelengths of the color spectrum, which, however, donot always translate neatly as our words red, blue, green,and so forth. This does not mean that members of othercultural traditions are unable to see differences betweenwhat we call, for example, “green” and “yellow.” It doesmean that any differences they perceive are not linguisti-cally encoded, presumably because people do not need tocommunicate precise information about colors.

Other examples could be cited, but the overall pointis clear. Cultures divide up the world differently, formingdifferent categories and classifications of natural andsocial reality out of the objective properties of things.These differences are reflected in the language of thebearers of the culture.

Language and World ViewsAs we have just seen, some aspects of a language reflectthe culture of the people who speak it. Is the conversealso true? Is it possible that knowing a given languagepredisposes its speakers to view the world in certainways? Could it be that the categories and rules of theirlanguage condition people’s perceptions of reality andperhaps even their world view (see Chapter 2)?

Language could shape perceptions and world viewsboth by its lexicon and by the way it leads people tocommunicate about subjects such as space and time. Anylanguage’s lexicon assigns labels to only certain things,qualities, and actions. It is easy to see how this mightencourage people to perceive the real world selectively.For instance, as we grow up, we learn that some plantsare “trees.” So we come to think of tree as a real thing,although there are so many kinds of trees that there is nonecessary reason to collapse all this variety into a singlelabel. But we might perceive the plants our language callstrees as more similar than do people who speak a lan-guage that makes finer distinctions between these plants.

Further, language might force people to communicateabout time, space, relations between individuals andbetween people and nature, and so forth in a certain kindof way. Potentially, this constraint on the way peoplemust speak to be understood by others can shape theirviews of what the world is like.

The idea that language influences the perceptionsand thought patterns of those who speak it, and thusconditions their world view, is known as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, after two anthropological linguistswho proposed it. One of the most widely quoted of allanthropological passages is Edward Sapir’s statement,originally written in 1929:

[Language} powerfully conditions all our thinking aboutsocial problems and processes. Human beings do not livein the objective world alone, nor alone in the world ofsocial activity as ordinarily understood but are very muchat the mercy of the particular language which has becomethe medium of expression for their society. . . The fact ofthe matter is that the “real world” is to a large extentunconsciously built up on the language habits of thegroup. . . The worlds in which different societies live aredistinct worlds, not merely the same world with differentlabels attached (Sapir 1964, 68-69).

Sapir and Benjamin Whorf believed that language helpsdefine the world view of its speakers. It does so, in part,by providing labels for certain kinds of phenomena(things, concepts, qualities, and actions), which differentlanguages define according to different criteria. Somephenomena are therefore made easier to think about than


others. The attributes that define them as different fromother, similar things become more important than otherattributes. So the lexicon of our language provides a filterthat biases our perceptions. It digs grooves in which ourthought patterns tend to roll along.

But the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is subtler than this.In the 1930s and 1940s, Whorf suggested that languageconditions a people’s conceptions of time and space.Whorf noted that English encourages its speakers to thinkabout time in spatial metaphors (e.g., “a long time” and“a long distance”), although time cannot really be “long”or “short” in the same sense as distance. Also, English-speaking people talk about units of time using the sameconcepts with which they talk about numbers of objects(e.g., “four days” and “four apples”), although it is possi-ble to see four objects at once but not four units of time.Finally, English-speaking people classify events by whenthey occurred: those that have happened, those that arehappening, and those that will happen.

Because they share a different language, however, theNative American Hopi must speak about time and eventsdifferently. With no tenses exactly equivalent to our past,present, and future and no way to express time in terms ofspatial metaphors, Hopi speak of events as continuouslyunfolding, rather that happening in so many days orweeks. Whorf argued that the Hopi language led the Hopipeople into a different perception of the passage of time.

What shall we make of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis?None of us as individuals create the labels our languageassigns to reality, nor do we create the constraints ourgrammar places on the way we talk about time andspace. We must adhere to certain rules if we are to beunderstood. Surely this necessity biases our perceptionsto some degree. It is, therefore, likely that language doesaffect ways of perceiving, thinking about, classifying, andacting in the world. To some degree, then, language does“create” views of reality. The question is, how much?More precisely, how important is language as opposed toother influence perceptions and views of reality?

Although intriguing, the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is notwidely accepted, for several reasons. First, if a languagegreatly shapes the way its speakers perceive and think aboutthe world, then we would expect a people’s world view tochange only at a rate roughly comparable to the rate atwhich their language changes. Yet there is no doubt thatworld views are capable of changing much more rapidlythan language. How else can we explain the fact that theEnglish language has changed little in the past 150 yearscompared with the dramatic alteration in the world views ofmost speakers of English? How else can we explain thespread of religious traditions such as Islam and Christianityout of their original linguistic homes among people withenormously diverse languages? (This is not to suggest thatthese traditions have remained unchanged as they diffused.)

Second, if language strongly conditions perceptions,thought patterns, and entire world views, we should findthat the speakers of languages with a common ancestorshow marked cultural similarities. More precisely, wewould expect to find the cultural similarities betweenspeakers of related languages to be consistently greaterthan the cultural similarities between speakers of lan-guages that are less closely related. Sometimes we do findthis; unfortunately, we often do not.

Third, many people (in fact, probably billions of peoplealive today) are bilingual or multilingual. In Europe, NorthAmerica, and some nations of Africa and southeast Asia,many children routinely learn two languages while growingup. Yet there is no evidence that they perceive reality in dif-ferent ways while speaking one or the other language.

Also, many differences in languages that would seemto affect perceptions and views of reality do not, in fact,seem to do so. For example, in some languages nouns areclassified as either “feminine” or “masculine.” As childrenlearn these languages, they learn that different nounsrequire different articles (“the,” “a”) and that adjectivesacquire different endings depending on whether they referto nouns that are masculine or feminine. The Romancelanguages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian,and Portuguese) classify objects in this way, whereas Ger-manic languages (including German, Dutch, and English)do not. According to the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, the factthat Romance languages classify things into gender cate-gories would seem to imply that the speakers of these lan-guages somehow view gender as a more significantdistinction than do speakers of other languages: Everytime people speak, they use gendered terms, which shouldreinforce the significance of gender in their minds. Butthere is no evidence that speakers of Romance languageshave more gendered views of reality than do speakers ofGermanic languages or other languages.

For these and other reasons, the Whorf-Sapirhypothesis is not highly regarded by most scholars today.But future research may uncover unexpected effects oflanguage on perception and, perhaps, on world views.

Social Uses of SpeechDuring enculturation, humans learn how to communi-cate and how to act appropriately in given social situa-tions. They learn that different situations requiredifferent verbal and nonverbal behavior, for how onespeaks and acts varies with whom one is addressing,who else is present, and the overall situation in whichthe interaction is occurring.

To speak appropriately, people must take the totalcontext into account. First, they must know the varioussituations, or social scenes, of their culture: which are


solemn, which are celebrations, which are formal andinformal, which are argumentative, and so on. Culturalknowledge includes knowing how to alter one’s total(including verbal) behavior to fit these situations. Second,individuals must recognize the kinds of interactions theyare expected to have with others toward whom they haveparticular relations: Should they act lovingly, jokingly, con-temptuously, or respectfully and deferentially towardsomeone else? Cultural knowledge thus also includesknowing how to act (including how to speak) toward oth-ers with whom an individual has relations of certain kinds.

These two elements—the particular situation and thespecific individuals who are parties to the interaction—make up the context of verbal and nonverbal behavior.Enough linguists have become interested in such topicsthat a special field of study has been devoted to them:sociolinguistics, the study of how speech behavior isaffected by cultural factors, especially by the social context.

How the speech of the parties to a social interactionreveals and reinforces the nature of their relationship isseen clearly by terms of address. In some parts of theUnited States, unless instructed otherwise, Americans usu-ally address those of higher social rank with a respectterm followed by the last name (e.g., Dr. Smith or Ms.Jones). Those with higher rank are more likely to addressthose with lower rank by their first name, or even by theirlast name used alone. This nonreciprocal use of addressterms often not only expresses a social inequality; it alsoreinforces it each time the individuals address each other.When address terms are used reciprocally—when bothindividuals call each other by their first names, for exam-ple—their relation is likely to be more equal.

Spanish-speaking people have a similar understand-ing with polite address terms such as Don or Señora. Theyalso have to choose between two words for you: the for-mal (usted) versus informal (tú). Tú is used betweenoccupants of certain statuses, such as between intimatefriends and relatives and to address children. In parts ofLatin America, the informal tú is also a marker of rank,used by landlords, officials, and some employers towardtheir tenants, subordinates, servants, and employees. Herethe fact that a social subordinate uses usted with a higher-ranking person, while the latter uses “tú,” symbolizes andreinforces the social differences between them.

Speech style and habits depend on status and rank inother ways. For example, there used to be greater differ-ences between the speech of men and women in NorthAmerica than there are today. Because of their enculturatedfear of being considered “unladylike,” women were lesslikely to use profanity, at least in public. Men, likewise,were expected to avoid profanity in the presence of women,to avoid “offending the ladies.” Certain words were (and tosome extent still are) regarded as more appropriate forwomen’s use than men’s, such as charming, adorable, and

lovely. Today, as a consequence of the women’s movementand the popular media, there are fewer differences betweenwomen’s and men’s vocabularies.

Other cultures exhibit customs in speech behaviorwith which most English-speaking people are unfamiliar.Here are a few examples:

• Some languages accentuate the difference betweenthe sexes far more than English does. In languagessuch as Gros Ventre (of the northeastern UnitedStates) and Yukaghir (of northeastern Asia), men andwomen pronounced certain phonemes differently,which led to differences in the pronunciation of thewords in which these phonemes appeared. In Yana,an extinct language spoken by a people who formerlylived in northern California, many words had twopronunciations, one used by men and one by women.In a few languages, the vocabularies of men andwomen differ, with men using one word for some-thing and women using quite a different word. In alanguage spoken by the Carib, who formerly inhabit-ed the West Indies, the vocabularies of men andwomen differed so much that early European explor-ers claimed (mistakenly) that the sexes spoke differ-ent languages! In many languages, the speech of thesexes differs in other respects, such as the degree offorcefulness of their speech, the degree to which theyavoid confrontational speech, and the tone of voice.

• In parts of Polynesia and Micronesia there used to be aspecial language, sometimes called a respect language,with which common people had to address members ofthe noble class. On some islands this was much morethan a difference in speech style because differentwords were used. Often there were severe penalties forcommoners who erred in addressing a noble.

Sociolinguists study how speech is affected by the overallsocial context, here exemplified by a religious service at a

Lutheran seminary.


• On the Indonesian island of Java, there are distinct“levels” of speech, involving different pronouns, suf-fixes, and words. A speaker must choose betweenthe three levels—plain, more elegant, and most ele-gant. The speech style the parties to the interactionuse depends on their relative rank and on theirdegree of familiarity with one another. In choosingwhich style to use with a specific person, a Javanesethus communicates more than the message encodedin the utterance. He or she also imparts informationabout the quality of their relationship. Accordingly,changes in the relationship between two individualsare accompanied by changes in speech style.

• In Japanese, a complicated set of contextual norms(called honorifics) governs the degree of formality andpoliteness people normally use to show respect tothose of higher social position. For instance, verbs andpersonal pronouns have several alternative forms thatspeakers must choose between in addressing others.The main determinant of which forms are used is therelative status of the parties. One form of the verb isused when the speaker is of higher status than the lis-tener, another form when the two are of roughly equalstatus, and yet another when the speaker is a socialinferior. Women, who to some extent even today areconsidered “beneath” men, would generally be obligedto address men with the honorific verb forms thatsymbolically express the superiority of the addressee.The same applies to personal pronouns (I, you), differ-ent forms of which are used to reflect the relative sta-tus of the parties. In fact, when a social superior isaddressing an inferior, he or she often does not use thepronoun I as a self-reference but refers to his or herstatus relative to the person being addressed. Forinstance, a teacher says to a student, “Look at teacher”instead of “Look at me”; a father says to his son, “Lis-ten to father” instead of “Listen to me”; and so forth.Reciprocally, one usually does not use the pronoun youwith one of higher status but replaces it with a termdenoting the superior’s social position. This yields sen-tences like: “What would teacher like me to do next?”and “Would father like me to visit?” Confused foreign-ers trying to learn the subtleties of Japanese speech eti-quette usually are advised to use the honorific forms toavoid giving offense unintentionally. (Fortunately forthe rest of us, most Japanese are tolerant of our inabili-ty to master the nuances of their honorifics!)

• All societies have customs of taboo, meaning thatsome behavior is prohibited for religious reasons orbecause it is culturally regarded as immoral, improper,or offensive. It is fairly common to find taboosapplied to language: Some words cannot be utteredby certain people. For instance, the Yanomamö Indi-ans of the Venezuelan rain forest have a custom

known as name taboo. It is an insult to utter thenames of important people and of deceased relativesin the presence of their living kinfolk. So theYanomamö use names such as “toenail of sloth” or“whisker of howler monkey” for people, so that whenthe person dies they will not have to watch their lan-guage so closely. Other name taboos are enforcedonly against specific individuals. Among the Zulu ofsouthern Africa, for example, a woman was once for-bidden to use the name of her husband’s father orany of his brothers, under possible penalty of death.

As the preceding examples show, in all culturesspeech is affected by the social context, including how sit-uations are culturally defined and the particular individualswho are engaged in speaking and listening. Norms partlyexplain why people’s use of language varies with con-text—you are not expected to act and speak the same wayat a party as you do in church or at work, for instance,and you know intuitively and unconsciously how to adjustyour behavior to these various social scenes.

The choice of speech style and the use of particularwords and phrases are governed by more than just norms,however. People have personal goals, and speaking in acertain way often can help them get what they want.Nowhere is this point made so clearly as in the speech ofmany modern politicians which, as a rule, involves cast-ing oneself in a favorable light while making one’s oppo-nents look bad. In the 1994 Congressional elections, theleader of one party advised its candidates to characterizetheir opponents using words such as “pathetic,” “corrupt,”“waste,” “stagnation,” “traitors,” and “decay.” Words usedto portray their own party included “moral,” “courage,”“share,” “change,” “truth,” “duty,” and—of course—“fam-ily.” The memorandum in which this advice was givenreferred to “Language, a Key Mechanism of Control.” Thenext time you hear a politician give a “speech” (i.e., pub-lic address), pay attention to his or her “speech” (i.e., useof words and phrases and overall style)—how much doyou let your opinions be controlled by these?

We shouldn’t be too hard on politicians, however,because we all manipulate our speech to get what we want.In everyday life we strive to present the image of ourselvesthat we want someone else to perceive. The opinions thatemployers, friends, lovers and hoped-for lovers, co-workers,roommates, and even parents have of us depend partly onhow we speak—our use of certain words and avoidance ofothers, the degree of formality of our style, whether we tryto hide or to accentuate regional dialects, and so forth. Inshort, how we speak is an important part of what social sci-entists call our presentation of self. It is part of how we tryto control other people’s opinions of us. Like the jewelry wewear and where we wear it, how we sit, stand, and walk,and how we comb our hair or shave our heads, the way we


wear, the foods we eat, and the cars we drive, the waywe speak is part of the way we present ourselves to theworld. Others will interpret not only our words and sen-tences, but will also read meanings into our speech habitsand style. By adjusting our habits and style of speech, wecan to some extent control the implicit messages we com-municate about ourselves. The act of speaking, then, con-veys messages beyond the meanings of the words andsentences themselves; consciously or unconsciously,every time we speak we tell the world the way we are.

phemes and their meanings. They also learn the rules bywhich bound morphemes can be attached to free morphemes.

Cultural anthropologists have turned to linguistics asa source of ideas and models that might have value in thedescription and analysis of culture. Cognitive anthropolo-gists have illustrated how cultural classifications of realityare built up and organized in the same way as language.

The culture of a people is related to their language.Some aspects of language, particularly lexicon, reflect thecultural importance of subjects, people, objects, and nat-ural phenomena. The need to converse easily about somesubject leads to the elaboration of semantic domains con-nected to the subject, as seen in the domain of color. Inother domains, such as relatives, anthropologists havediscovered surprising diversity in how various peoplesdivide kin into kinds and give them different labelsaccording to different principles.

Some anthropologists have argued that the languagea people speak predisposes them to see the world in acertain way by shaping their perceptions of reality. Thisidea, known as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, argues thatthe lexicon of a language influences perceptions by lead-ing its speakers to filter out certain objective properties ofreality in favor of other properties. The conventions oflanguage also force individuals to talk about subjectssuch as time and space in a certain way if they are to beunderstood by others. Some anthropological linguistshave argued that the way a given language (e.g., Hopi)forces people to communicate affects their perceptions ofreality, and even their world view. Although languagedoes, in some ways and to some degree, shape percep-tions and world views, the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is nothighly regarded by most modern scholars.

Sociolinguistics is the study of how speech is influencedby cultural factors, including culturally defined contexts andsituations, the goals of the speaker, the presence of other par-ties, and so forth. Speech can be used in subtle ways to markdifferences in rank and status, as between ethnic groups,classes, and males and females. Because speech is part of theway we present ourselves to others, control of the way wespeak is one way we influence how others perceive us.

speak is part of the way we tell others what kind of a per-son we are. Almost without knowing it, we adjust ourspeech style, mannerisms, and body language to managethe impressions other people have of us.

We pointed out early in this chapter that language iscomposed of symbols that convey conventional mean-ings. We can now add that the very act of speaking isitself symbolic in another way. Just as the morphemes oflanguage communicate meaning, so do the multitude ofways in which we can say them. Like the clothes we

SummaryAlong with culture, language is the most important mentalcharacteristic of humanity that distinguishes us from otheranimals. Five properties of language that differentiate itfrom other systems of communication are: its multimediapotential; the fact that it is composed of discrete units(sounds, words) that are combined in different sequencesto convey different meanings; its reliance on the shared,conventional understanding of arbitrary and meaningfulsymbols; the ability of people to intuitively and uncon-sciously combine the sounds and words of language cre-atively to send an infinite number of messages; and thefact that language allows humans to communicate aboutthings, events, and persons remote in time and space.

Grammar refers to the elements of language and therules for how these elements can be combined to form aninfinite number of meaningful sentences. Grammaticalknowledge is enormously complex, yet it is both uncon-scious and intuitive. Linguists divide the study of lan-guage into several fields, including phonology,morphology, and syntax.

Phonology is the study of the sounds and sound pat-terns of language. Only some of the sounds humans areable to make with their vocal tracts are recognized byany specific language. The features of sounds that speak-ers recognize as significant—that is, as making a differ-ence in the meanings of words in which they occur—varyfrom language to language. The sounds that speakersrecognize as distinct from other sounds are called thephonemes of the language. Among many other differ-ences, languages vary in the way they use voice pitch toconvey meanings, as illustrated by tone languages.

Morphology studies meaningful sound sequences andthe rules by which they are formed. Any sequence ofphonemes that conveys a standardized meaning is a mor-pheme. Free morphemes can stand alone as meaningfulsequences, whereas bound morphemes are not used alonebut are attached to free morphemes during speech. Whenpeople learn a language they learn its free and bound mor-

• Nearly seventy articles, many of them classics, on thesubject of language and culture and the social uses of language.

Salzmann, Zdenek. Language, Culture, and Society: AnIntroduction to Linguistic Anthropology. 2nd ed. Boulder,Colo.: Westview Press, 1998.• An introductory text, describing language as a system ofcommunication as well as how language use is affected bysocial context, nonverbal communication, and other inter-connections between language and culture.

Tannen, Deborah. Gender and Discourse. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996.

Tannen, Deborah. Talking from 9 to 5: How Women’s andMen’s Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard,Who Gets Credit, and What Gets Done at Work. NewYork: W. Morrow, 1994.

Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don’t Understand: Women andMen in Conversation. New York: Ballantine, 1991.• These three popular books by linguist Deborah Tannenanalyze how conversational speech style affects relation-ships and performance. One focus is on misunderstandingsand perceptions based on language use.

morphologyphonemestone languageslexiconmorphemefree morpheme

bound morphemesemantic domainWhorf-Sapir hypothesissociolinguists


Key Termsgrammardialectsphonology

Suggested ReadingsAgar, Michael. Language Shock: Understanding the Culture

of Conversation. New York: William Morrow and Compa-ny, 1994.• Enjoyable description and analysis of the uses of languagein society. Full of illustrative personal stories and anecdotes.

Escholz, Paul, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark, eds. LanguageAwareness. 6th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.• Articles deal with various elements of English-languageuse. Contains sections on political speech, advertising lan-guage, jargon, prejudice, and taboos.

Farb, Peter. Word Play. New York: Knopf, 1974.• Readable, enjoyable introduction to anthropological linguistics.

Fromkin, Victoria, and Robert Rodman. An Introduction toLanguage. 5th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace College Pub-lishing, 1993.• Excellent textbook, thorough in its coverage, readilyunderstandable, with many excellent examples.

Hymes, Dell, ed. Language in Culture and Society: A Readerin Linguistics and Anthropology. New York: Harper &Row, 1964.

Internet ExercisesAn interesting web page relating to language is “Ethnologue: Languages of the World” at (http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/ethnologue.html). This page, which is a part of the Summer Institute of Linguis-tics website, catalogues the more than 6,700 languages of the world. An excellent site for general lin-guistics is maintained by John Lawler, a professor of linguistics at The University of Michigan, at theweb address (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/). Professor Lawler’s page contains many goodlinks (not limited to linguistics), as well as numerous other creations of his own. Take a look at hisChomskybot for an interesting twist on language. There are quite a few sites devoted to specific lan-guages, and many online language lessons. An example is “Speaking Our Language” at (http://194.35.194.1/gaidhlig/ionnsachadh/bac/), which provides Gaelic lessons with Real Audio sound clips.

Using InfoTrac College Edition you can search for articles that relate to the material covered in thischapter. Using a subject search for the term anthropological linguistics, clicking on See also 2 relatedsubjects, and then selecting see Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, comes up with an article describing the author’stest of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis using color terminology—both of which you read about in this chap-ter. What was the outcome of their test? Do the results support or refute the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis?

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