Language and Ways of Speaking

Many Different Languages

• 96% of the world speaks just 4% of the world’s languages

• The most common languages spoken are: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese.

• Over half of the world’s languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers; a quarter have less than 1,000 speakers.

Language as Symbolic

• Language is symbolic because a word refers to an object, event, person, action, or relationship

• These symbols are arbitrary: banana, kwadu

• These words exist in an arbitrary relationship to one another, within a symbolic universe: how is “push” different than “shove” and different than “nudge”?

Whiteriver Unified School District

Language Socialization

• Learned through interaction

• Grammatical and syntactic rules not consciously known or taught by adults

• Learning to be a member of a speech community with social rules about speech

Western Apache social rules about speaking?

Warm Springs Reservation, Oregon

• Teachers reported students weren’t speaking much in class

• Students did better in cooperative activities than individual activities

• Showing off and competition not okay

Portraits of the Whiteman, by Keith Basso (1979)

Why are there jokes about “the whiteman”?Why are the Apache concerned about maintaining

some aspects of their tradition and not others ?

Sapir-Whorf HypothesisHuman beings do not live in the objective world alone. . . but are very much at the mercy of the

particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. . . . The

fact. . . is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language

habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as

representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live as

distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

(1949: 162)

Kinds of Snow the Saami Recognize Related to Reindeer Hunting

Firm, even snow that falls in mid weather

Thickly packed snow caused by intermittent freezing/thawing and high winds

Hard-packed snow formed by strong wind

Dry, large-grained, water-holding snow at the deepest layers, closest to the ground, found in late winter and spring

Snow that forms a hard layer after rainIce sheet on pastures formed by rain on

open ground that freezesA layer of frozen snow between other

snow layers that acts as an ice sheet.Source: Jernsletten, 1997

Sociolinguistics

Because speech varies by:

• social position,• context, and • social relationship,

speech signals:• the relationship between

people, • the social roles they are

playing, and• the social context.

Speech Genres, p. 49

What might be some equivalent speech genres that you are familiar with?

Narrative Genres, p. 49

What are different narrative genresthat you are familiar with?