7 Chapter 3: Language
Learning Objectives
• Explain the relationship between human language and culture.
• Identify the universal features of human languages and the design features that make them unique.
• Describe the structures of language: phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
• Assess the relationship between language variations and ethnic or cultural identity.
• Explain how language is affected by social class, ethnicity, gender and other aspects of identity.
• Evaluate the reasons why languages change and efforts that can be made to preserve endangered languages.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE TO HUMAN CULTURE
Students in my cultural anthropology classes are required to memorize a six-point thumbnail definition of culture, which includes all of the features most anthropologists agree are key to its essence. Then, I refer back to the definition as we arrive at each relevant unit in the course. Here it is— with the key features in bold type.
Culture is:
1. An integrated system of mental elements (be-liefs, values, worldview, attitudes, norms), the behaviors motivated by those mental ele-ments, and the material items created by those behaviors;
2. A system shared by the members of the so-ciety;
3. 100 percent learned, not innate;
4. Based on symbolic systems, the most import-ant of which is language;
5. Humankind’s most important adaptive mech-anism, and
6. Dynamic, constantly changing.
This definition serves to underscore the crucial impor-tance of language to all human cultures. In fact, human lan-guage can be considered a culture’s most important feature since complex human culture could not exist without lan-guage and language could not exist without culture. They are inseparable because language encodes culture and pro-vides the means through which culture is shared and passed from one generation to the next. Humans think in language and do all cultural activities using language. It surrounds our every waking and sleeping moments, although we do not usually think about its importance. For that matter, hu-mans do not think about their immersion in culture either, much as fish, if they were endowed with intelligence, would not think much about the water that surrounds them. Without language and culture, humans would be just another great ape. Anthropologists must have skills in linguistics so they can learn the languages and cultures of the people they study.
All human languages are symbolic systems that make use of symbols to convey meaning. A symbol is anything that serves to refer to something else, but has a meaning that cannot be guessed because there is no obvious connection between the symbol and its referent. This feature of human language is called arbitrariness. For example, many cultures assign meanings to certain colors, but the mean-ing for a particular color may be completely different from one culture to another. Western cultures like th