Language Change

Reminder: Midterm 1 is next week!

• Review sheet

• PowerPoint slides – print them out or get copies in 509 Williams for 10 cents/page

• www.uvm.edu/~jadickin/anthropology 28.html

REVIEW SESSION

MONDAY 10/4

7 PM IN LAFAYETTE L111

Also, I will have extra office hours Monday

Historical Linguistics

Historical Linguistics is the study of how languages change and develop over time, and how languages are related to each other.

“Laziness” Principle

This principle argues that changes in pronunciation happen because deleting or changes sounds in a word results in a pronunciation that requires less effort.

I AM becomes I’m

mylne (Old English) becomes mill

The Great Vowel Shift

A shift in the entire vowel system of English taking place in the 15th and 16th centuries.

All the long vowels became “higher”

ma:t became ma:te

ma:te became meet

mite became ma-yit

MacCaulay points out:

Dialect variation is not new – there is evidence of dialect variation in every language that has an ancient alphabetic writing system.

How does written evidence work? Spelling conventions that reflect pronunciation

Rhymes/puns in poetry

Indo-European

1776 - Sir William Jones argues that Sanskrit (an ancient Indian language) and European languages are related

This argument says that there is a Proto-Indo-European language from which most European and Indian subcontinent languages descended

Comparative Method

Looks for cognates (related words) in each language

e.g. “two”Bengali dviDanish toGreek duoIrish doRussian dvaGerman zwei

Regularities

Historical linguistics relies on the fact that large changes in languages usually follow “rules” that affect many different words and sounds at the same time

For example, all the voiced stops at the start of a word may become unvoiced, so d’s become t’s, b’s become p’s and so forth

Regionality

• Often, language changes happen in different regions and at different times

• When languages move far enough away from each other, they become distinct and may even end up in different groups (e.g. Germanic vs. Slavic languages, which both descend from Proto-Indo-European)

Common words

By tracing common words across all the Indo-European languages, we can tell some things about the world of Proto-Indo-European – which trees and animals people talked about, what concepts they had, etc.

Expansion, revitalization, death

Language and Identity

Language, as a primary means of communication between people, is a central part of how people see the world and live according to their belief system.

Language lives in interactions between people – it shapes the nature of social interaction.

Endangered Languages

• Has recently become a “hot” topic in linguistic anthropology

• Some estimates project that within the next 50 years only 10 percent of the languages currently being spoken will still have speakers.

“When a language dies a culture dies”

• Woodbury takes the “biodiversity” perspective which argues that linguistic diversity should be protected because it reflects a certain “richness” that once gone, can’t be replaced

• What kinds of information would be lost if everyone in the world spoke only English?

• “Interrupted transmission of an integrated lexical and grammatical heritage spells the direct end of some cultural traditions and is part of the unraveling, restructuring, and reevaluation of others.”

Language is culture

• Recall the Sapir-Whorf argument that language influences the way we think about and organize the world.

• When we lose grammatical diversity, we lose unique perspectives on the world

• “Culture and language are not things, but ways of thinking and doing.” pg. 104

Key points• Woodbury wants us to look at minority

languages as cultural tools that are actively used by communities to communicate in ways so rich that they can’t be duplicated simply through documentation in a dictionary.

• He also wants us to recognize elements of ideology and collusion that influence how languages, and their use, are perceived.

What do speakers know?

• What do we know when we know a language?

• Recall that communicative competence involves knowing how to speak a language and knowledge of cultural and social norms of appropriate language use in given interactional contexts.

Language Change

Reminder: Midterm 1 is next week!

• Review sheet

• PowerPoint slides – print them out or get copies in 509 Williams for 10 cents/page

• www.uvm.edu/~jadickin/anthropology 28.html

REVIEW SESSION

MONDAY 10/4

7 PM IN LAFAYETTE L111

Also, I will have extra office hours Monday 11-1

“Quiet Room” for exam

18 spots available in Williams 511

Please come down and sign up in front after class

REPORT STRAIGHT TO WILLIAMS 511 AT 9:30 ON TUESDAY!

Today

• Pidgins and Creoles

• Video on new Englishes

• New Languages

Pidgins

• A pidgin is a trade “language” – actually it is grammatically simpler in form than a true language and does not have full elaboration of function.

• Over time, as people expand the situations in which they use a pidgin, it can be come fully elaborated and then become a creole, through the process of creolization.

Creoles

When a highly elaborated pidgin reaches the point where children are learning it as their first language, it has become a creole, a fully functional and elaborated language that emerged from the interaction of two or more languages.

This process is called creolization.

Power and Creoles

• Creolization occurs in situations where one language is associated with more power than another. Some people limit “creoles” to languages that arise in cases of forced movement or colonization.

• The language on which a creole is based is called the “matrix language.”

Example

• Hatian Kreyol - a French creole spoken in Haiti

• French is the matrix language, but West African languages contributed phonology, vocabulary and some elements of the syntax.

Creole Continuum

The creole continuum extends from “deep” creole, usually spoken by people at the bottom of a stratified system, to a standard form of the matrix language.

Barbadian----------B. Creole-------Barbadian

Creole (medium) English

(deep)

Tok Pisin

• Tok Pisin is a creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea that is rapidly gaining speakers. One of 2 official languages of Papua New Guinea

• Tok Pisin has been standardized and is used in written language, broadcasting, and oral communication. You can even search the internet in Tok Pisin.

Krio

• Krio is an English creole language that is one of the official languages of Sierra Leone.

• 4,000,000 speakers, about 10% are native speakers [around 23 languages are spoken in Sierra Leone]

Jamaican Creole• Grammatically distinct from English.

Some examples:di woman dem = the women

• Mi ron = I run (habitually); I ran• Mi a ron = I am running• Mi ena (en+a) ron = I was running• Mi en ron = I have run; I had run

Indian English• Spoken in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh

• Considered a dialect of English, not an English creole.

• Differs in vocabulary, some grammatical elements, and phonology from British English.

• Local variants incorporate vocabulary from local languages.

Variations in New Englishes

• She is knowing her science very well (E. Africa)• I graduate there in 1990. (PNG)• Before I always go to that market (Malaysia)-------• pay attention on it (India)• -You didn’t come by car? (India) - Yes, I didn’t.-------Don’t kacho me when I want to work! (Malaysia)When we get home, we ask daddy to changkol the

garden (Singapore)

Language and globalization

• How do local culture and local language influence the adoption of English?

• Does globalization mean that “everyone is speaking English” the same way?

Film

“Next Year’s Words”

Examples of newly developing English creoles and efforts to get them standardized or made official languages

Three stages of language death• In language shift, people begin to use one

language more than another, and may encourage their children to pick the new language. Eventually, the community is using one language, not the other.

• A language is moribund if no children are learning the language as their first language

• A language is dead if there are no living speakers of the language.

How does language revitalization work?

• Elders who still speak the language work with linguists to develop teaching materials

• Native languages can be introduced as a subject in schools

• Language revitalization can be helped by reviving other traditions, so that language is learned and used in different settings.

Loss of N.American Languages

• http://houseofthesmalllanguages.org/Langages/NA/home.html

Newly Standardized Languages• Around the world, speakers of established

languages like Mayan and Tamil are developing new written standards

• Goals of these standardization projects include increased literacy, self-determination, and reduction of language shift to dominant languages like Spanish and English

• Standardizing languages also “raises” them to the level of government and literary languages

Voting on our word

• faff

• wazi

• jolt

• yar

• nar

• politicking

• kaif (ecstasy)

Questions for the midterm?

• functional vs. semantic shift