Talk in the intimate relationship his and hers

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PART III

Linguistic Anthropology

Language, whether spoken, written, or non-verbal, allows anthropologists to connect and better understand the human condition across time, space, and cul-

tures. Early in the history of American Anthropology, anthropologists like John

Wesley Powell and Franz Boas embraced linguistics as a critical subfi eld of the

discipline. Powell collected and compared vocabularies from American Indian

languages as part of an effort to racially classify North American Indian Nations.

Because Boas did not believe that culture and language were biologically deter-

mined, he disagreed with Powell’s approach. Instead, Boas trained his students

to use linguistic anthropology to facilitate fi eldwork; in his view, language was a

window into culture. Regardless of their contrasting theoretical positions regard-

ing the nature of language, Powell and Boas considered linguistics a critical com-

ponent of anthropology. European anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski

and E. E. Evans-Pritchard also valued language research as a component of cul-

tural anthropology, but only in the U.S. academy did anthropologists incorpo-

rate linguistics as an actual subfi eld of anthropology.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the transformation of Anthropology

from an armchair pastime to a scientifi c, academic discipline coincided with the

rapid extinction of cultural traditions and languages. When undocumented or

poorly documented languages go extinct, humanity loses the specialized knowl-

edge, histories, and worldviews embedded in these languages. In order to pre-

serve and document “disappearing” cultures, early linguistic anthropologists

focused primarily on documenting the vocabularies and grammars of endangered

cultural traditions. Nevertheless, of an estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the

world today, linguists predict that approximately half of these languages will

become extinct in the twenty-fi rst century. Contemporary anthropologists con-

tinue to document endangered languages, but the fi eld of linguistic anthropology

has grown considerably as researchers have developed new approaches to study

language scientifi cally to explore what it means to be human.

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Today, linguistic anthropologists typically divide their subfi eld into three specializations: Historical Linguistics, Descriptive Linguistics, and Sociocultural Linguistics. Historical linguistics includes research on extinct languages as well as the evolution and migration of languages. In Selection 23, Bhattacharjee explains how computer modeling helps linguists see the infl uence of children and migration on the evolu- tion of language throughout the history of human- kind. Because language is not confi ned to speech and the written word, descriptive linguistics also studies the development of specialized sign languages to learn about the evolution of language (Selection 25).

Linguistic anthropologists who specialize in descriptive linguistics specialize in unraveling a lan- guage. Many anthropologists study descriptive lin- guistics so they can quickly learn an unwritten or lesser-known language in the fi eld. Descriptive lin- guistics researchers study words (morphology), sen- tences (syntax), and meaning (semantics), as well as the physical qualities (phonetics) and structure (pho- nology) of speech. Sociocultural linguists, on the other

hand, examine the relationship between language and sociocultural systems. For example, a focus on speech behavior and miscommunication between males and females (Selection 28), can tell an anthropological fi eld- worker a great deal about a society in which he or she studies and their cultural values.

In sum, linguistic anthropology is a multi- disciplinary and scientifi c study of human language. Linguists apply their skills as teachers and research- ers in universities, but you will also fi nd them working in government agencies, professional consulting fi rms, the corporate setting, and more recently in the high- tech sector (to design and improve Internet search engines, speech recognition, computer language mod- eling, the development of artifi cial intelligence, and computer mediated communication). Ultimately, the linguistic anthropologist uses her or his unique meth- odological toolkit to do what cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, and archaeologists do; they develop and test hypotheses to examine the complex diversity and universals of the human experience across time and space.

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New Technology is one of the many ways new words enter our daily vocabulary. Before 2001 the terms “iPod” and “podcast” did not exist, but now these are ubiquitous words used every day on college campuses throughout the United States. New words like “pod- cast” and “email” may seem like benign additions to our language, but not everyone is ambivalent to this technology-inspired linguistic evolution.

In 2008, for example, linguists from the Ministry of Culture in France banned the word “podcast” along with over 500 other words like “wi-fi ” and “super- model.” Because these non-French words have crept into daily French vocabularies, the Ministry of Culture seeks to prevent these linguistic intrusions by offer- ing alternative terms such as “courriel” instead of “email.” Linguistic nationalism and transformation is not unique to France; it was not long ago that the U.S. Congress legislated that french fries in the Capitol Hill cafeteria would be called “freedom fries.”

Languages evolve to fi t the needs and lives of the people who use them. In this selection, Bhattacharjee explains how computer modeling helps linguists see

If a modern-day priest were to chance upon an elev- enth century manuscript of The Lord’s Prayer in English, he would need the Lord’s help to decipher its mean- ing. Much of the text would be gobbledygook to him, apart from a few words that might have a recognizable ring, such as heofonum (heavens) and yfele (evil). And even after a word-for-word translation, the priest would be left with the puzzling grammatical structure of sen- tences like “Our daily bread give us today.”

Although researchers generally think of languages as having evolved slowly over many millennia, language change occurring over time spans of a few centuries

the infl uence of children and migration on linguistic transformation throughout the history of humankind.

As you read this selection, ask yourself the following questions:

■ Why do anthropologists study the evolution of words and grammar?

■ Why do languages change, and why do linguists view language change as a paradox?

■ What role do children play in linguistic evolution?

■ How do non-native speakers transform a language?

■ How does population growth impact the evolution of a language?

The following terms discussed in this selection are included in the Glossary at the back of the book:

creole sociolinguistics computational linguistics verb-second structure

has confounded scholars since medieval times. After trying to read a 600-year-old document, the fi rst known printer of English works, William Caxton, lamented in 1490, “And certainly it was written in such a way that it was more like German than English. I could not recover it or make it understandable” (translated from Old English).

The comparative analysis of such texts is the closest that researchers can get to tracing the evolutionary path of a language. By studying the evolution of words and grammar over the past 1200 years of recorded history, linguists hope to understand the general principles underlying the development of languages. “Since we can assume that language and language change have operated in the same way for the past 50,000 years, modern language change can offer insights into earlier changes that led to the diversifi cation of languages,”

23 From Heofonum to Heavens

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. “From Heofonum to Heavens.” Science 303, no. 5662 (27 Feb. 2004):1326–1328. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

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160 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

because the Scandinavians had diffi culties keeping track of all the verb forms—and settled on a simplifi ed system closer to what we use today.

In the absence of invasions and other external infl uences, languages can remain stable for long peri- ods. Japanese and Icelandic, for instance, have hardly changed since 800 c.e. But researchers point out that isolation does not guarantee the status quo; grammati- cal shifts can also be triggered by internal forces such as minor changes in the way a language is spoken.

French is a case in point. In the sixteenth century, the language changed from a system in which the verb always had to be in second place (known as a verb-second structure) to one in which the verb (V) could be in any position as long as it came after the subject (S) and before the object (O); Modern French and Modern English both have this SVO structure. For example, “Lors oirent ils venir un escoiz de tonnere” (Then heard they come a clap of thunder) became “Lors ils oirent venir un escoiz de tonnere” (Then they heard come a clap of thunder). Roberts, who documented the transition by comparing a representative text from each century between the thirteenth and the seven- teenth, believes that the change arose because speakers of Middle French reduced the emphasis on sub- ject pronouns—“they” in this example—to the point where children learning the language barely heard the pronouns. Roberts inferred this decline in phonetic stress from usage changes in the written language. For example, subject pronouns were earlier used with modifi ers, such as “I only,” but later they did not carry such modifi ers. The result of this reduced emphasis, says Roberts, “was that for sentences beginning with a subject pronoun, the verb sounded like the fi rst word of the sentence to the listener.” That ambiguity dealt a fatal blow to the verb-second rule, paving the way for the emergence of an SVO grammar.

JOHN THE BOOK BUYS

But a new grammatical feature cannot emerge over- night. For a variant such as an innovative construction by a single speaker or a novel form of syntax produced by a new adult learner to become part of the language, it must get picked up by other speakers and be trans- mitted to the next generation. Historical texts show that it can take centuries for a change to sweep through the entire community.