Introduction Family members gather at a sweet potato festival in Gushegu in northern Ghana. This highly social event brought together families, farmers, chiefs, and community members to celebrate the harvest of sweet potatoes. (credit: Official photographer of the US Embassy in Ghana/USAID in Ghana/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Talk, talk, talk. As human beings, that is what we do all day (and sometimes all night). Even when we are alone, we might be listening to the radio, watching a video, reading, or texting—all activities that incorporate language. Language is often considered to be one of the quintessential elements of humanity, key to our social interactions and cultural development. No other animal does it the way we do. A few apes have been taught words in sign language, mainly using simple word combinations to ask for particular treats or desired activities. Is that anything compared to what we do with language? Consider a situation from the author, Jennifer Hasty’s own fieldwork. While conducting research in Ghana, I once attended a large family gathering to honor the birth of a child, an event called an “outdooring.” After everyone had arrived and socialized a bit, a middle-aged man stood up and took the microphone in his hand to pour libation. Libation is the ritual offering of drink to the ancestors, welcoming them to the ceremony and asking for their blessings. As he took the cup in his hand, he surveyed his audience, then stopped short, appearing extremely embarrassed. Looking down at his feet, he sputtered, “Oh! When the tongue is present, the teeth do not make noise.” Everyone laughed. It was a proverb I’d heard before, but I had no idea what it meant in this context. The speaker stepped aside as an even older man rose from a table at the edge of the gathering and slowly made his way to the microphone. The first speaker had assumed he was the eldest member of the family present at the gathering, but in fact, his older brother was there. By the rules of seniority, it was the older brother who should present the libation. What did the proverb mean in that situation? In most cultures, people do not usually explain proverbs, so the listener has to piece together the meaning. In this case, the proverb was used metaphorically to compare the production of words in the mouth and the roles of the people involved in this particular performance of libation. The nimble tongue is central to human speech, while the teeth play a more fixed and supportive role, providing surfaces used by the tongue to make certain sounds. Alone, the teeth can only clash against each other meaninglessly. A tongue is needed to produce speech. Using the proverb, the first speaker was comparing his elder brother to the tongue—he was more central to the gathering and more proficient in the production of ceremonial speech such as libation. The younger man assigned himself the role of a tooth, only able to make noise rather than ceremonial speech. In humans, language has developed into an extremely complex feature of sociocultural life. Just as the tongue is central to the production of human speech, language is central to the production of human culture. The subfield of linguistic anthropology examines the role of language in sociocultural life. Linguistic anthropologists are interested in how language affects our thinking and our experience of the world around us. Some explore the different categories of formal and informal speech that people have developed to organize rituals and ceremonies as well as everyday activities. Others listen carefully to various kinds of conversation, looking for patterns in the way people interpret and build on one another’s speech acts. The discipline linguistics is devoted to the study of language. Linguistics is the science of language, including subfields devoted to speech sounds, word forms, word arrangement, meanings, and practical language use. One subfield of linguistics, sociolinguistics, examines the social context of language use, such as how language varies according to age, gender, class, and race. While sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology share an interest in the social side of language, linguistic anthropologists tend to focus on language as an aspect of larger cultural processes. Rather than looking at language as a sole object of study, linguistic anthropology studies language as one cultural element among many, all interwoven into the sociocultural life of a people. language a complex, systematized form of communication involving the use of vocal or gestural units (words or signs) that can be combined and recombined in larger structures (sentences) that can convey an infinite array of complex meanings.

Social Sciences


The Emergence and Development of Language Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to do the following: Describe the communicative abilities of wild animals such as birds and primates. Distinguish primate communication from human language. Identify the biological features of early hominins that were central to the emergence of language. Identify the archaeological evidence for the emergence of language. There are some seven thousand languages spoken in the world today. Most people are proficient in at least one of them, possibly more. But people are biologically capable of mastering any of them, and have been since birth. Humans are born language ready. For a human baby, any language will do. With passive exposure to language (simply hearing it without any formal instruction), human toddlers learn the complex rules and vast vocabularies of the language spoken (or signed) around them. This astounding feat is made possible by specific biological features in the brains and bodies of human babies, features designed to help them understand and produce language. The learning of language then triggers further changes in our brains, making possible certain kinds of reasoning and thought as well as communication with others. When teaching language to their children, some parents teach signs (such as those of American Sign Language) as well as spoken words for objects. The theory is that sign language and spoken language are processed in different parts of the brain. Teaching these two forms of language together may provide deeper cognitive reinforcement and greater chance of recall. This baby is making the sign for “bird.” (credit: “Bri signs ‘Bird’” by Bev Sykes/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Drawing on biological and archaeological evidence, researchers seek to understand how, why, and when humans developed the biological features associated with language and, once language emerged, how the practice of language changed the way of life of early humans. Language became a building block for human culture of increasing complexity. Innovations such as stone tools, hunting, and using fire for heat and cooking were made possible by language. In turn, these new skills enhanced the survival of those who practiced them, increasing the likelihood that those people would live to pass on their genetic makeup to their offspring. This means that certain biological features were key to the invention of human culture and that human culture was key to the biological development of humans. We think of this as a reciprocal system of biocultural coevolution. Put another way, biology and culture developed in tandem, with language as the link between the two. No one really knows when or how humans invented language. The problem is that language, whether spoken or gestural, leaves no direct trace in the archaeological record. Lacking direct evidence, researchers must be creative, combining various indirect forms of evidence to suggest theories about how language may have begun in humans. Based on such methods, researchers think that language may have emerged between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago. The largeness of this window of possibility is due to the indirect nature of the evidence and a great deal of controversy about which elements may have been most important in the process of language development. In this section, we look at these forms of indirect evidence, starting with communication in the animal kingdom. Animal Communication All animals communicate with each other and even with other species (Tallerman and Gibson 2011). Many use vocalizations like calls, growls, howls, and songs. Many also use gestures such as dances, postures, and facial expressions. Some change the color of their scales, skin, or fur. Some produce strong-smelling body fluids sprayed in their environment or rubbed on their own bodies. All of these activities are used to tell other animals about territory, food sources, predators, and mating opportunities. Canada geese fly in a V formation to conserve energy and to keep track of all the birds in the formation. Coordination and communication are essential for the group. (credit: “Canada Geese” by Alex Galt, US Fish and Wildlife Service/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Many people might be tempted to think that animals speak to each other just as we do, that their various forms of communication are roughly equivalent to language. Does your dog bark and jump excitedly whenever you pick up the leash? Isn’t that a way of saying, “C’mon! Let’s go for a walk!” Some forms of animal communication are fairly simple, such as this canine leash mania. Others are far more complex, such as the way an octopus can change the color of and patterns on its skin for hunting, courtship, and camouflage. Fireflies use bioluminescence to attract mates and as a defense mechanism. Some fish generate electric fields to advertise their species and sex. Many animals use a vast lexicon of postures and gestures to communicate messages to one another and even to other species. When a bird issues a predator-alert call, squirrels respond as well. Many mammals pay attention to the predator warnings of birds. Are these complex forms of communication equivalent to language? Take a closer look at one famous example of complex animal communication and compare it to human language. A Waggle is Not a Word: The Complexity of Language Consider the famous “waggle dance” of the honeybee. Upon finding a good source of nectar such as a grove of wildflowers, a worker bee returns to the hive and performs a special flight pattern consisting of a figure-eight waggle followed by a return loop alternating right and left. The direction and duration of the waggle communicate the direction and distance to the location of the desirable food source (Seeley 2010; Frisch 1993). Diagram of the waggle dance of the honeybee. The movements performed by the bee during this dance communicate the direction of and distance to a food source to its fellow hive members. (credit: “20180622-FS-WashingtonDC-KTC-024” by Kelly Chang, US Forest Service/flickr, Public Domain) The waggle dance is certainly a complex and effective form of communication, but does it qualify as language? Communication refers to the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver. Communication can be voluntary or involuntary, simple or complex. Language is a specific, complex, systematized form of communication involving the use of vocal or gestural units (words or signs) that can be combined and recombined in larger structures (sentences) that can convey an infinite array of complex meanings. Language is a form of communication. Not all communication is language. Central to the infinite possibilities of language is a set of rules that govern just how sounds, signs, words, and phrases may be combined. These rules structure the order of words, dictating, for example, where to put subjects and actions in an utterance so that listeners will be able to find them. Rules also tell us whether words indicate a single thing or multiple things and whether actions occur in the past, present, or future. Complex forms of animal communication such as the waggle dance do contain some systematic rules governing the sequence, duration, and intensity of certain segments of the communication, but they are highly constrained to very limited contexts. For example, the waggle dance can be used to signal nectar sources near and far, but it cannot be used to discuss the weather or comment on the laziness of the queen. Unlike the relatively “closed” systems of communication common among animals, human language is open-ended. Our languages have the distinctive quality of allowing actors to combine units in an infinite number of ways to produce new meanings. Simple Signs and Pant-Hoots: Language in Primates Biological anthropologists posit that we share a common ancestor with the other great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans) about five to eight million years ago. As nonhuman primates do not produce language in the wild, the biological and cultural features that promoted language must have emerged after that. However, studies aimed at teaching human language to nonhuman primates have revealed that individuals of these species are able to master basic vocabulary and use simple words and word combinations to obtain the things they want. So the great apes must have some biological features that enable them to learn human language in a partial and limited way. You may have heard of Koko , the gorilla famous for learning to use sign language. Sign language is used in such studies because nonhuman primates lack the distinctive vocal tract required to make the sounds of human language. Researcher Penny Patterson taught Koko to use about a thousand signs, roughly the vocabulary of a three-year-old child (Patterson and Linden 1981). Patterson reported that Koko could comment on things that were not currently present in her environment, such as personal memories. According to Patterson, Koko could joke and lie and teach other gorillas to sign. She could even invent new signs. Many of these claims are disputed by other researchers. Some point out that the evidence is largely anecdotal and relies on the interpretation of Patterson herself, hardly an objective observer. Though controversial, Patterson’s path-breaking work with Koko provided a wealth of data and opened up new possibilities for understanding the language abilities of nonhuman primates. Koko learning to play the guitar. Koko became famous for learning to communicate with humans using roughly 1,000 signs taught to her by researcher Penny Patterson. (credit: “ODCnewBegin9” by FolsomNatural/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Human-reared chimps, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans have all been taught to use gestures or tokens to refer to things in the world around them, often combining those signs in a rule-based way to make comments and requests. Even though many linguists are skeptical of these studies, the use of symbolic systems in cooperative interactions to achieve goals does seem to indicate that great apes have the basic capacity to generate some sort of protolanguage. Protolanguage refers to a very simple set of gestures or utterances that may have preceded the development of human language. But do apes display these abilities due to some innate capacity or because we have taught them symbolic systems? Perhaps learning a symbolic system has changed the brains of these individual animals in distinctive ways. Chimpanzees use gestures and facial expressions as well as vocalizations to communicate with one another. (credit: “Chimpanzees” by foshie/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Many primatologists conduct research on the vocal and gestural forms of communication used by primates in the wild, looking for those biological features that might underpin the human capacity for language. Wild chimpanzees, for instance, produce a wide range of calls, including hoots, pant-hoots, pant-grunts, pant-barks, rough-grunts, nest-grunts, alarm barks, waa-barks, wraas, screams, and soft panting play sounds (Acoustical Society of America 2018). Primatologists have listened closely to these calls. Some argue that chimp vocalizations are not much like human language, as calls are fairly fixed and limited in their meanings. Chimps may use a rough grunt to indicate a food source, but they do not seem to have specific grunts for specific food types. Monogamous pairs of gibbons, a smaller species of ape, are known to perform elaborate morning duets. Gibbons have an array of predator calls as well. Research comparing duets with predator calls suggests that gibbons compose their songs to convey specific information, each note carrying a certain meaning (Clark et al. 2006). While impressive, the ability to manipulate notes to convey a limited range of meanings is still a far cry from the infinite productivity of human language. The limitless recombination of signs that produces the flexible, open-ended quality of language is missing in the communication systems of wild primates. Human Biology and the Emergence of Language There must be something special about us to make possible the distinctively flexible and open-ended communication system of language. Research has focused on our throats, our brains, and our genes, looking for the biological features that allowed for the emergence of language. The Vocal Tract Humans have evolved a very unusual vocal tract with a descended larynx (otherwise known as the “voice box”) and a large and rounded tongue positioned in the mouth to enable a remarkable array of sounds (Lim and Snyder 2015). Some researchers suggest that our throats may have evolved in response to walking upright or changes in diet or a combination of those two factors. Humans also have more deliberate control over breathing than nonhuman primates. In order to better understand when hominins developed this distinct vocal apparatus, researchers examine the hyoid bones of hominins to see if they resemble those of modern humans. The hyoid is a U-shaped bone in the human throat that helps us swallow and move our tongues. The few hyoids that have been found in the fossil record suggest that our distinctive vocal tract may have been developed around 500,000 years ago. This means that Neanderthals likely had the same vocal abilities as modern humans. Evolutionary changes in the vocal tract enabled the development of spoken language in humans. The image on the left shows the vocal structures an early ancestor to humans. The image on the right shows the vocal tract of modern humans. The position of the vocal structures in the early ancestor allows for eating and breathing at the same time. The position of these structures in modern humans allows more sounds to be produced and more words to be spoken in sequence. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY NC-SA 4.0 license) Brain Structure Several features of the human brain are considered prerequisites to language, including the overall (large) size, the division into specialized hemispheres, and certain structures like Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Broca’s area is a region of the brain associated with the production of speech. Wernicke’s area is essential to the comprehension of language. Both are most often located in the left hemisphere of the human brain (for left-handed people, both can be located on the right side). How did we acquire these brain features so essential to language? A great deal of controversy surrounds this question, as researchers debate when and how these structures evolved. The locations of Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area in the human brain. Broca’s area, responsible for the articulation of speech, is next to the motor area, where the movements of the body are controlled. Wernicke’s area, associated with language comprehension, is situated beside the primary auditory area, where sounds are processed. (credit: “1605 Brocas and Wernickes Areas-02” by OpenStax College/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0) Most recently, research has focused on “ mirror neurons ,” special brain cells that seem to enable mimicry (Lim and Snyder 2015). Many researchers think that the ability to understand the actions of others and recreate those actions ourselves is a fundamental prerequisite for language. That is, in order to be able to talk to each other, early hominins must have been able to evaluate and interpret each other’s actions and reproduce them in similar contexts. In primates like monkeys, scientists have discovered a system of specialized neurons called the “mirror neuron system” that enables primates to recognize and imitate actions. Monkeys and apes cannot talk, but they can recognize, interpret, and imitate actions performed by other primates. The neurological studies that revealed mirror neurons are too invasive to perform on humans, but neuroimaging studies suggest that a similar mirror neuron system does exist in humans. Mirror neurons are most likely involved in the spread of contagious yawning. Mirror yawning happens between humans and can even happen across species. You can make your dog yawn! (credit: “Sleepy” by Toshimasa Ishibashi/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Brain imaging studies on humans have located evidence for the mirror neuron system in a region of the brain close to Broca’s area. So it is possible that the mirror neuron system inherited from primates provided a foundation for the later emergence of a brain structure devoted to language production in hominins. If imitation and language are in fact connected in this way, then a system of gestures may have paved the way for the development of language. Some researchers now hypothesize exactly this: that hominin language evolved from a system of gestures to a system of vocalizations. The “Language Gene” In the late 1980s, medical researchers became aware of a particular speech disorder common among members of one family in West London. Many members of this family could not pronounce words. Many stuttered. Many had very limited vocabularies. Geneticists traced the disorder to a genetic mutation on chromosome number 7 of the human genome. (See Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence for more on chromosomes and genes.) The mutation was located on a gene named FOXP2 , prompting some researchers to dub this “the language gene.” Some hypothesize that FOXP2 may have played a role in the development of language in humans (Lim and Snyder 2015). At first, researchers thought that only humans had the FOXP2 gene, but subsequently a form of this same gene has been identified in many vertebrates, including mice, bats, fish, and songbirds. In mice, the gene appears to be related to vocalizations. In birds, it seems to be linked to birdsong. All primates have FOXP2, but the human copy is slightly different than that of nonhuman primates. Some researchers think this mutation occurred around 260,000 years ago and may have enabled the development of spoken language in Neanderthals and Homo sapiens . Other researchers are skeptical of the notion that one gene could be responsible for the emergence of spoken language (Tallerman and Gibson 2011). Many anatomical developments and cognitive processes—connected to different parts of the human genome—are involved in human language. These developments and changes would have required mutations in other parts of the genome of early Homo. While the mutation of FOXP2 in Homo may have played a role in language development, other mutations would have been important as well. Hominin Material Culture Evidence from the material culture of hominins such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus is also used to speculate about the emergence of human language. Early hominins developed stone tool technologies and created stunning works of art. The production and use of such tools and artwork must have required a complex set of social and cognitive abilities. Those same types of social and cognitive skills are important to human language. It is possible that language emerged as part of a whole complex of material culture. Archaeological evidence and linguistic theory come together in a model suggesting that the invention of tools by early hominins was linked to the invention of language. Some linguistic theorists suggest that the evolutionary changes in brain structure that allowed for the development of tool use also support the emergence of language. Furthermore, the innovations of tools and language are entwined in a reciprocal relationship; evolutionary pressure to develop tools stimulated the development of language, and the development of language facilitated increasingly complex tool making and tool use. There are two theories to explain the connections between advances in tool use and language. The first rests on the assumption that tool making requires a considerable degree of cognitive planning. You cannot make a useful tool by just picking up a rock and randomly chipping away at it. Hominins like Homo habilis and Homo erectus must have known just what kind of rocks would work as base and chipper and how to execute a set of precise chips in a certain sequence to achieve a sharp blade without breaking the core. The mental processes important to this sort of planning are hypothesized to have also enabled hominins to do the sort of quick planning involved in the production of complex speech (Tallerman and Gibson 2011). A second theory linking tool use and language emphasizes the importance of imitation in passing along the complex set of skills involved in tool making. Neuroscientist Michael Arbib suggests that the ability to imitate may have generated the first gestural language among hominins (2011). And he has developed a model to describe how imitation and tool making may have evolved together over time. About 2.5 million years ago, Homo habilis began making basic stone choppers, cores with flakes removed, used for butchering carcasses. Such choppers are called Oldowan tools, named after the site in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania where they were first found. Arbib has theorized that the production of Oldowan tools required the ability for hominins to imitate each other’s actions. Simple imitation would make it possible for a learner to reproduce the actions of an accomplished tool maker through observation and mimicry. This ability to imitate is biologically rooted in the system of mirror neurons discussed earlier. As hominin brains acquired the ability of simple imitation involved in tool production, they might also become capable of the kind of gestural communication we see in apes today—not language, but a precursor to it. Investigate this diagram for more about the evolution of language . The array of action-oriented mirror neurons, tool innovation, and language all progressed together in hominin evolution. As tool technology developed, Homo erectus began making distinctive pear-shaped hand axes about 1.6 million years ago. A more intricate form of imitation would have been necessary to teach this sort of tool making to others, corresponding to the emergence of protolanguage. This protolanguage might have been a set of simple one-word utterances corresponding to concepts such as “yes,” “no,” “here,” or “there.” We don’t have any hominin brains to examine, but remember that in the human brain, the system of mirror neurons is assumed to be situated near Broca’s area, which is associated with human speech. So very likely, protolanguage emerged in the same part of the brain as the ability to imitate. The explosion of innovations in tool making over the past 100,000 years is linked to the emergence of complex human language. While the development of mirror neurons and the ability to learn tool making required biological changes to the brain, Arbib argues that the last step, the emergence of language, was purely cultural. communication the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver; can be voluntary or involuntary, simple or complex. FOXP2 a gene on chromosome number seven that is found in many vertebrates; sometimes called “the language gene” because the human mutation seems to be associated with language. mirror neurons special brain cells that seem to enable mimicry. protolanguage a very simple set of gestures or utterances that may have preceded the development of human language.

Social Sciences


Language and the Mind Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe the role of language in categorizing items in the natural world. Explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Provide at least two examples of linguistic universals. Describe how metaphor shapes how we talk about abstract concepts. As discussed in the previous section, certain cognitive abilities were crucial to the development of language in humans. And reciprocally, once language emerged, it shaped our thoughts and actions in ways that helped our species cooperate, invent, learn, and adapt to the environment. Language must have been a fundamental element in the creation of human culture (singular) and the eventual development into human cultures (plural) as different groups of humans moved into different geographical areas and began adapting to different conditions. One key advantage of language is that it provides a way of encoding specific information about the environment and sharing that information with others so that it endures over time. If, say, there are snakes in an area, it would certainly be important to distinguish the venomous ones from the harmless ones, so probably there would be separate words for those two categories of snake or at least words for each specific snake so that people could alert each other to the presence of a dangerous one. This means that early language must have been developed relative to environmental conditions. Linguistic anthropologists are interested in the way that language varies across cultures, reflecting different environmental, historical, and sociocultural conditions. This is called linguistic relativity . On the other hand, languages are also constrained by human anatomy and cognitive abilities. Say there were two species of snake in an area, one poisonous and the other harmless, but you could not tell them apart by looking at them. (This is actually an adaptive strategy deployed by harmless animals called adaptive mimicry.) In this case, early humans probably would have had just one word for snake, indicating that sometimes a snake’s bite made you sick and sometimes it didn’t. As this example shows, the human visual apparatus shapes our understanding of the world, which, in turn, shapes our language. Consider another example from the natural world—the beetle. There are over 300,000 types of beetles in the world. How many can you name? All of them? Ten of them? Two of them? Outside of written scientific taxonomy, there is no language in the world that contains separate terms for each kind of beetle. This is not only because there are only a few thousand of each type of beetle living in any one environment but also because of limits to the number of terms any person can learn and remember. Our vocabulary is constrained by the limits of human memory. So many beetles. How many can you name? There are over 300,000 types of beetles in the world. Outside of written scientific taxonomy, no language in the world contains separate terms for each kind of beetle. (credit: “display drawer 3” by Joana Cristovao, Natural History Museum/flickr, CC BY 2.0) So language is shaped not only by environmental conditions but also by how humans interact with their environments. Our common human anatomy influences our comprehension of the world, and that comprehension is expressed in language. This insight suggests that all languages must have some things in common by virtue of the fact that all humans have the same anatomy and cognitive abilities. Some linguistic anthropologists are interested in discovering these linguistic universals . In the next section, we take a look at some intriguing research on both linguistic relativity and linguistic universals, seeking to better understand how language interacts with our human minds. Linguistic Relativism and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis As seen in previous chapters, it was lamentably common for scholars in the early 20th century to think of non-Western societies as backward and primitive, incapable of complex, abstract thought. Franz Boas worked hard to disprove these racist notions, seeking to demonstrate the equal sophistication of all peoples and cultures. Boas trained a student named Edward Sapir who was particularly interested in how non-Western languages conveyed forms of complex, abstract thought that were different from the Euro-American habits of thought. Sapir, in turn, trained a student named Benjamin Whorf who further elaborated on this theme in his own research (Ahearn 2017). The result is what we have come to call the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that the particular language you speak influences how you think about reality (Lucy 2001). Thus, different languages encourage different habits of thought. This is an essential tenet of linguistic relativity. Whorf based his argument on a comparison between the Native American language of Hopi and what he called “Standard Average European” (SAE), a broad category of European languages including English. Whorf was interested in how speakers of each language might think differently about time. In English vocabulary, time is divided into units that can be counted. English speakers talk about the number of seconds, minutes, or days before an event or consider the number of months or years since something occurred. In Hopi, according to Whorf, time is conceived as indivisible and enduring, a whole process unfolding. The Hopi talk about the flow of events in a completely different way, a processual way Whorf termed “eventing.” Whorf argued that these linguistic features profoundly influenced sociocultural life in each of these two contexts. Holding with the understanding of time as process, Hopi culture emphasized preparation, endurance, and intensity. Coordinating with the SAE expression of time as countable units, Euro-American culture emphasized schedules, accounting, and record keeping. Many people use a calendar to keep track of meetings, appointments, and assignments. Whorf would argue that the English language encourages us to think of time and events in this way, as a spatialized set of boxes to be filled up with discrete objects. In connection with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it is sometimes said that the “Eskimos” have 400 words for snow. This notion is both problematic and untrue. The first problem is that “Eskimo” is considered a derogatory term by the Inuit and Aleutian peoples to whom it has been applied. And, secondly, the claim turns out to be wrong. Anthropologist Laura Martin (1986, also described in Ahearn 2017) has debunked the myth by documenting that Arctic peoples really have just two root words for talking about snow, one for snow that is falling and the other for snow that is on the ground. They use these roots much as English-speakers would, to talk about snowstorms, snowflakes, snow drifts, and snow melt. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not typically applied to the vocabularies of different cultures anymore. Recall the earlier example about snakes. We hypothesized that a culture might not distinguish between two species of snakes if those snakes looked identical. But if people gradually came to notice that the poisonous snakes were always found in trees while the harmless snakes were always found on the ground, it is likely that a different term would come to be used for the tree-dwelling kind of snake, the one with the harmful bite. That is to say, even if a culture previously had only one term for snake, the people in that culture could easily understand that there were, in fact, two kinds and would be able to change their language to mark that difference in their vocabulary for future reference. Their vocabulary would not limit their thinking to such a degree that they could not conceive of two different kinds of snake. Rather than specific vocabulary words, researchers who study linguistic relativity have come to focus on larger abstract topics like space. In languages such as English, when people want to tell someone where a particular object is, they most frequently use language focused on their own bodies. English-speakers say, “You have a bit of arugula on the left side of your mouth” or “Grab the pink top hat on the shelf above you.” This way of talking relies on the human body as a point of reference and therefore is relative to the bodies of the speaker and/or hearer. This creates confusion when the speaker is facing the person they are talking to, sometimes prompting someone to say, “No, my left, not your left!” Steven Levinson has conducted research on languages that do not use the human body to talk about direction at all (2003). Instead, they use the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) and specific features of their environments (mountains, oceans) to talk about where things are. A speaker of the Australian indigenous language of Guugu Yimithirr might say, “Watch out for the snake just north of your foot!” This way of talking about space is absolute, not relative. Such speakers never have to say “No, my north, not your north,” as there’s only one absolute north. Research suggests that these different ways of reckoning give us different kinds of mental maps, such that a Guugu Yimithirr speaker might be better at absolute navigation than an English speaker, and perhaps more adept at finding her way back home if she lost her way. Linguistic Universals and Folk Taxonomies While linguistic relativists explore how different linguistic patterns shape different thought patterns (and vice versa), other linguists are interested in how all languages are constrained by our common human biology and in finding universal linguistic patterns. There are specific domains of language that lend themselves particularly well to this kind of inquiry. One of them is color. The reason for this is that color relies directly on our human visual system, invariant across cultures. And yet there is enormous diversity in the ways that different cultures divide up the spectrum of possible color. Some cultures have hundreds of color terms, while others have only two or three. Researchers Brent Berlin and Paul Kay analyzed the color term systems of 98 languages and found that the diversity of color term systems is governed by one set of rules. All of these color term systems are comprised of a few basic colors with specific colors added to the scheme over time (Kay 2015, Berlin and Kay 1969). The color schemes of all cultures are based on the distinction between black and white (or light and dark). If a culture has only two terms, those two terms will always be black and white. The next most important color is red. If a culture has three color terms, those terms will be black, white, and red. Next comes green and yellow, then blue, then brown, then purple, pink, orange, and gray, always in that order. Berlin and Kay suggested that these rules form a pattern for the way all languages develop over long periods of time. Although the scheme proposed by Berlin and Kay has been revised a little in the past 50 years, the basic tenets have held up pretty well (Haynie and Bowern 2016). Berlin and Kay’s developmental scheme for the elaboration of color terms. Some cultures only distinguish black from white. When another term emerges, that color is red. After that, green and yellow are added, either one first. Then blue and brown are added, in that order, and then one of these four: purple, pink, orange, or gray. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY NC-SA 4.0 license) Vox: The Surprising Pattern behind Color Names around the World The surprising pattern behind color names around the world Oddly, though this finding lends very strong support to the notion of linguistic universals, the very same research has also been used to argue for linguistic relativity. Paul Kay later teamed up with another linguist, Willet Kempton , to consider how different color schemes might affect how people “see” color in the environment around them (1984). They presented people with color chips on the spectrum between true blue and true green. They asked subjects how they would group all the colors into two categories. People who spoke languages that had terms for both blue and green drew a more distinct boundary between the two colors than people who had just one word for both blue and green. Clearly, relativity and universalism are both aspects of human language. Our common biology plays a role in how humans interact with the world, providing regularity to the way all languages categorize not only color but also plants, animals, weather, and other natural phenomena. Researchers who study the systems of categories people use to organize their knowledge of the world have a term for those cultural systems: folk taxonomies . The folk taxonomy for any area of human knowledge reflects both human biology and the surrounding environment and sociocultural practices. There are folk taxonomies for plants, animals, clouds, foods, and the cries of babies. Folk taxonomies are not just vocabulary terms; they frequently structure any kind of distinction that is meaningful within a culture, even those that rely on simple qualifiers like “good” and “bad.” One example is death, surely invariant across cultures. Societies all over the world distinguish between a “good” death and a “bad” death. These notions reflect cultural beliefs and values—such as the American notion that a good death is a painless one. Among the Akan peoples of Ghana, a good death is the death of someone who has led a very long life, achieving all of the culturally valued accomplishments in life, such as getting married, having children, accumulating property, and providing support to friends and family members (Adinkra 2020). Imagine a very old great-grandmother surrounded by her many descendants as she lies in her bed, heaving one final breath as she drifts away peacefully into death. That is a good death. A bad death is tragic and violent, the sudden death of a person who has not had the chance to really live a full life. Think of a young person drowning or dying in a traffic accident. That is a very bad death. If someone has had a good death, that person is eligible to become an ancestor if the correct rituals are performed. The body must be washed, publicly mourned, and buried in a beautiful casket in a public cemetery, often with grave goods like tools and money to help the person in the afterlife. Ancestors are important, as they watch over their living relatives, possibly helping them out if called upon through libation or other ritual means. If someone has had a bad death, however, they may become an angry ghost, haunting family members with bad luck. The funeral rites of bad deaths are rushed, minimal, and private in order to avoid commemorating or communicating with the agitated spirit. Categorization is central to our perceptions, thoughts, actions, and speech. The way humans categorize objects and experiences is limited by the way our brains and bodies work, resulting in linguistic universals like the developmental scheme of color terms. However, the complex meanings associated with cultural categories vary widely, resulting in a great deal of linguistic relativity. Linguistic relativism and universalism are often described as opposite positions, but in fact, they are both essential and complementary features of human language. Meaning and Metaphor How are you feeling today? Are you feeling up or feeling down ? If you’re feeling low , try doing something fun to lift your spirits . Take care of yourself so you don’t fall into a depression . An old theory suggested that languages are primarily referential; that is, each language contains a set of vocabulary terms that correspond to elements in the natural world. According to this theory, language functions as a mirror of reality. We have seen in the last section, however, that different languages divide up the natural world in different ways, from the natural domains of color and plants to the human domains of life and death. Moreover, humans use language to talk about abstract issues like mood, social relationships, and communication itself. It is fairly easy to use our terms for spatial organization to talk about the location of concrete objects like arugula on somebody’s face. But what about more abstract issues? How do we talk about becoming friends with someone? How do we discuss an argument we’re making in a term paper? How do we talk about how we’re feeling today? Mood is like color insofar as the human physiology of mood structures a set of near-universal basic categories including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. And yet, because mood occurs on a spectrum, it is divided up in different ways by different cultures. Consider “schadenfreude,” a German word combining the roots for “damage” and “joy.” Schadenfreude refers to taking pleasure in another’s misfortune. There is no equivalent word in English. We don’t just use language to identify the emotions we’re feeling. We also talk about the process of developing an emotion, how one mood leads to another, and how we can prevent ourselves from feeling a certain way. These are mysterious and abstract processes. How do we do this? We use metaphor. A metaphor is a linguistic idiom where we use what we know about something concrete to think and talk about something abstract . Cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphor is the primary way we create complex meaning in language (1980). In terms of mood, we use our concrete language of direction to talk about our abstract experience of mood. A positive mood is understood as up , while a negative mood is considered down. If you’re feeling really happy, you might say you’re on top of the world . If you’re really sad, you might say you’re down in the dumps . In fact, the word for prolonged sadness, depression , literally refers to a sunken place or the act of lowering something. Metaphor is one of those things that you don’t notice until you start paying attention to it. And then you realize that it’s everywhere: in the way you think about time, number, life, love, physical fitness, work, leisure, sleep, and thought itself, just to name a few highly metaphorical topics. Just about any abstract area of experience is structured by metaphorical thinking. Here are three common metaphors in English, with examples. LIFE IS A JOURNEY He took the wrong path in life. As you move ahead , you should follow your dreams. When I left home, I came to a crossroads in life. If you work hard, you’ll arrive at a sense of accomplishment later in life. LOVE IS SWEET She’s my sweetheart . The newlyweds went on a honeymoon . Sugar , would you pass the salt? Our love was sweet , but then it went sour . ARGUMENT IS COMBAT The candidate launched a personal attack against her opponent. His position on taxes is indefensible. Armed with facts, she won the argument. His criticism really hit the mark . There are thousands and thousands of metaphors in English. Many abstract domains rely on a combination of various metaphors used to describe different aspects of the experience. You can think of love as sweet (as above) but also as a journey (as in “Will the couple go forward together, or will they go their separate ways ?”) or as combat (as in “He slew me with his come-hither glance”). Metaphor is found in all human languages. Some specific metaphors, like the directional metaphors used to describe mood, are found in many, many cultures. A study by Esther Afreh (2018) found that the king of Asante (in Ghana) frequently uses metaphorical language in his public speeches, including such familiar ones as “life is a journey,” “life is a battle,” “ideas are food,” “knowing is seeing,” and “death is sleep.” Though the speeches were delivered in English, Afreh notes that these metaphors also exist in Akan, the local language of the Asante people. Alongside her analysis of the English-language speeches, she notes many proverbs and phrases in Akan that use the same metaphors. As with our discussion of categorization in the last section, metaphor is both relative and universal. Lakoff and Johnson argue that our common human biology structures our experiences of things like emotion and life. When you’re feeling really sad, you might literally feel like lying down, and when you’re really happy, you might jump with joy. We may use the notion of a journey to structure our understanding of life, social relationships, and time in general because in our everyday life, we move forward in space to pursue objects and activities. Sometimes the reasons for cross-cultural similarities are not so directly linked to human biology. English and Chinese have similar metaphorical systems for talking about moral issues. In both languages, the adjective meaning “high” is associated with things that are lofty, noble, or good, while the adjective “low” is used to describe things that are mean, contemptible, or evil (Yu 2016). Alternatively, it is also possible in both languages to describe moral behavior as “straight,” while immoral behavior can be termed “crooked.” On the other hand (to deploy a useful metaphor), different cultures do rely on different metaphors to talk about some domains of experience, metaphors that emphasize certain aspects of those abstract topics. Consider the English notion that “time is money.” This is a metaphor, pure and simple, but many English speakers believe it to be absolutely true. You can spend time, waste time, save time, and invest time. So time does seem like money in capitalist cultures. But time is not literally money. Nor is time a journey or a horizontal line in space, though these are common ways of thinking about time in the English language. Time is just time, an abstract idea. Certainly Whorf did not find the Hopi talking about time as money. English speakers think of time in terms of money because they live in a society in which time is treated as money, a society that tends to monetize nearly everything, from land and labor to advice, attention, and even body parts like human sperm. folk taxonomies systems of categories that people use to organize their knowledge of the world. linguistic relativity the way that language varies across cultures, reflecting different environmental, historical, and sociocultural conditions. linguistic universals common elements found in all human languages, attributable to human anatomy, perception, and cognition. metaphor a linguistic idiom using something concrete to think and talk about something more abstract . Sapir-Whorf hypothesis the theory that the particular language you speak influences how you think about reality.

Social Sciences


Language, Community, and Culture Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain the role of culture in the acquisition of language. Describe how language can form the foundation of sociocultural groups in speech communities. Describe how people code-switch among speech communities. While language is critical to individual human thought, its basic function is to communicate messages in human communities. That is, language is fundamentally social. Through social interaction, humans learn the language of their community. And through language, humans express community identity and coordinate their activities. Language Acquisition and Language Socialization Imagine that someone handed you a babbling baby and said to you, “Teach this baby the basic rules and values of our culture.” What would you do? Likely, you’d start by teaching the baby your language. Without language, it’s pretty hard to teach rules and values (unless you are a really good mime). Luckily, babies come into the world with special cognitive abilities that make them ready to learn language. Most babies undergo a rapid process of language learning between the ages of nine months and three years. Babies proceed through a set of stages that allow them to learn language just by being exposed to surrounding talk. Many scholars study the problem of language acquisition , examining precisely how humans manage to learn language in a diversity of sociocultural contexts. So your babbling baby would probably learn language just by being exposed to it. But what if someone wanted to hasten the process or make sure their baby was particularly excellent with language? An American would probably interact with the baby in a particular way, sitting the baby on their lap facing them, pointing to objects and asking basic questions in a quiz-like fashion. “See the cookie? Where did the cookie go? In my tummy!” The person might say these types of things while talking in a high-pitched, sing-song voice. Linguists call this type of talk “motherese.” In many other cultures, caregivers do not interact with babies in this way. In some cultures, oversimplified “baby talk” is considered detrimental to language learning. The context of language learning might involve a whole host of characters beyond the baby and the caregiver, encompassing all household relatives, neighbors, visitors, and even strangers. Language is not always “taught” to babies, but is often witnessed and overheard. Rather than quizzing her baby American style, a mother in Kaluli society in Papua New Guinea is more likely to sit her baby on her lap facing outward, talking “for” the baby in conversations with siblings (Ochs and Schieffelin [1984] 2001). In West Africa, babies spend large parts of the day wrapped on the backs of their mothers where face-to-face interaction with her is impossible. But they overhear the talk around them all day long, and people frequently engage their attention in brief interactions. In the field of language socialization , researchers go beyond the various stages of language learning to focus on the social contexts in which language is acquired. As social contexts shape the way children learn language, language itself becomes a means of learning about sociocultural life. Whether facing their caregivers or facing out to the social world around them, babies in all cultures learn to be proficient in their languages. And yet, in American culture, the notion persists that language proficiency relies on very precise forms of interaction between caregiver and baby, the American model of motherese. Every culture has specific ideas about language, how it is acquired, how it varies across social groups, how it changes over time, etc. These ideas are termed language ideologies . Some of these ideas, like the notion that babies have a special “window” of opportunity for learning language, are supported by linguistic research. Others, however, are challenged by ethnographic and cross-cultural research. Speech Communities and Code Switching A ten-year-old girl described one of her stuffed animals as “derpy.” Here is a snippet of her conversation with her mother: Thisbe: Look at his face. He’s so derpy. Jennifer: Derpy? I don’t know that word. What does it mean? Thisbe: Like, kind of stupid. Kind of dumb. Jennifer: Oh, ok. Like Clover [our dog], when she fell off the couch. Was that derpy? Thisbe: No, that’s not derpy! It’s like ... Mom, I just can’t explain it to you. You just have to know. All speakers of a particular language form a hypothetical community, sharing a common grammar and vocabulary, as well as a set of understandings about how language is used in different situations. Within this large group are smaller groups of speakers who use the common language in special ways unique to that group. Anthropologists use the term speech community to describe such a group (Muehlmann 2014). Speech communities often have distinctive vocabularies, grammatical forms, and intonation patterns. Using these features appropriately, members of the speech community demonstrate their membership in the group. The concept of speech community was originally used to describe the distribution of dialects in a language. A dialect is a form of language specific to a particular region. For instance, in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, it’s common for local people to pronounce the word “water” as “woohder,” as if it nearly rhymes with the word “order.” It’s also common to use the phrase “yooz” for the second-person plural (as in, “Yooz better drink some woohder!”). Linguists William Labov , Sharon Ash , and Charles Boberg famously mapped out these dialectical differences in different regions of the United States (2006). Over time, a dialect can accumulate such unique linguistic features that it develops into a separate language. Indeed, the distinction between a well-developed dialect and a language is largely political. Nation-states may downplay regional differences as mere dialects in order to maintain linguistic unity, while separatist political movements may champion their way of speaking as an entirely different language in order to justify their demands for independence. Map of American dialects. While English is one of the most commonly used languages in the United States, the particular way it is spoken varies from region to region. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY NC-SA 4.0 license) Other researchers have focused on the speech communities of ethnic groups and immigrants. Researchers use the term vernacular to describe dialects that are not necessarily regional but associated with specific social categories, such as groups based on ethnicity, age, or gender. Anthropological research on African American Vernacular English (AAE), Chicano English, and Native American English have all shown how these vernaculars shape distinctive forms of storytelling, arguing, and criticism (Chun and Lo 2015). Rather than seeing ethnic vernaculars as “incorrect” forms of English, researchers demonstrate how vernaculars like AAE are highly structured linguistic systems with regular grammatical patterns and innovative vocabularies (Labov 1972a). In formal settings like American classrooms and courtrooms, these alternative ways of using English are too often stigmatized as lazy, unintelligent, or just plain wrong. Believing their own English to be the “correct” form, authority figures often forbid the use of alternative vernaculars of English and refuse to engage in any effort to understand those forms. More recent research on vernaculars has explored how speakers maneuver among the styles of language they encounter in their daily lives, engaging in various languages, dialects, vernaculars, and other elements of style. We all use a variety of linguistic styles, and many speak more than one language. Addressing different audiences, U.S. President Barack Obama used linguistic strategies to “Whiten,” “Blacken,” “Americanize,” and “Christianize” his public identity, thus subverting racial stereotypes and indicating his membership in a diversity of communities (Alim and Smitherman 2012). In parts of the world that were previously colonized by Europeans, European languages have been maintained as the formal language of government and education even as most people speak local languages in their everyday interactions with kin, neighbors, merchants, and other community members. In these postcolonial contexts, people tack back and forth between various styles of their local languages as well as shifting between the local language and the European one. Such strategic maneuvering among linguistic styles, called code-switching , is done by people in many difference contexts. For many people, the style of language spoken in elite settings such as schools and government institutions has the effect of disempowering and marginalizing them. Linguistic anthropologists examine how vernaculars associated with elite and professional groups become a means of in-group solidarity and out-group exclusion. Anthropologist and lawyer Elizabeth Mertz (2007) conducted participant observation in first-year classes at several American law schools, looking at how law students are taught to “think like a lawyer.” Using a version of the Socratic method, law professors teach their students to set aside the moral and emotional elements of cases to view them purely as texts subject to abstract, professional analysis. The ability to master the linguistic maneuvering and arcane vocabulary of this form of analysis becomes a prerequisite for becoming a lawyer. The American justice system is thus dominated by people who are trained to set aside humanistic concerns in favor of textual authority and manipulation. Mertz’s study shows how people are socialized by language throughout their lives, not just in childhood. And it alerts us to the way that language can be used to elevate the learned perspectives of elites, dismissing the moral and emotional perspectives of others. code-switching the practice of tacking back and forth between various linguistic styles depending on contexts and interlocutors. dialect a form of language specific to a particular region. language acquisition the process of learning a language. language ideologies specific ideas about language that are widespread in a culture, including how language is acquired, how it varies across social groups, how it changes over time, etc. language socialization the social contexts in which language is learned as well as the role of language in social learning. speech community a community of speakers sharing a common grammar and vocabulary, as well as a set of understandings about how language is used in different situations. vernacular dialects that are not necessarily regional but associated with specific social categories such as groups based on ethnicity, age, or gender.

Social Sciences


Performativity and Ritual Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Provide examples of the performative function of speech acts. Describe how ritual language can be performative. Identify the informal ways that people “talk back” to formal speech. The Performativity of Language: Speaking as Action Consider the following pairs of sentences. What are the differences between the two sentences in each case? Boris and Natasha are married. Boris and Natasha, I now pronounce you husband and wife. Natasha: Boris lost his job. Natasha: Boris, you’re fired! Boris: Natasha, I ate the last pickle. Boris: Natasha, I apologize for eating the last pickle. In all the above pairs, the first sentence is a report about an event. The second sentence makes an event happen. In the sentences about the pickle, the second sentence does not make the pickle disappear, but it does create an apology for that action, hopefully altering the consequences of the pickle-eating. In the previous section, we explored how we use language to think and reason about the world around us. This is an essential function of language, but it is not the only one. We also use language to do things—that is, to perform actions in the world. Way back in the 1930s, Bronislaw Malinowski explored how people use language in culturally specific ways to play an active part in their societies (Duranti 2012). Malinowski described how the people of the Trobriand Islands used magical language to compel the growth of yams, bananas, taro, and palms in their carefully cultivated gardens. Magical spells, like all ritual language, aim at making something happen through the special manipulation of public speech. We see the same use of language in other ritual settings like marriages and naming ceremonies. The plot of many a Hollywood romantic comedy hinges on the moment the partners say “I do” and the officiant pronounces them married. In American marriage ceremonies, it is clear that ritual language is the tool that marries people—not the rings, or the pageantry, or the blessings of family and friends, or any other aspect of the ritual. In his influential book How to Do Things with Words (1962), philosopher of language J.L. Austin coined a term for action-oriented language: performatives. The most obvious performatives use phrases like “I pronounce,” “I order,” “I promise,” “I warn,” or “I appoint.” Sentences that begin with these phrases are explicitly uttered with the intention of doing something through the act of speaking. As he dug deeper into the performative function of language, however, Austin realized that performatives are not so much a separate category of utterances but an aspect of most of the things we say. Even when people are making a simple descriptive statement, they are saying it for a reason. The power of speech to make things happen is called performativity . Consider the following sentences: The exam is next week. The dog is pawing on the door. The above sentences are statements about an event or situation. However, if a professor announces to the class, “The exam is next week,” this is not merely an observation, but a warning—a cue to students to study in preparation for the upcoming exam. And if someone tells their roommate, “The dog is pawing on the door,” they are essentially telling that person to let the dog out. Like metaphor, performativity is one of those aspects of language that permeates everyday speech. Once you learn about it, you recognize performativity in just about everything you say. Spend a few hours paying attention to each utterance as you go about your activities. You’ll find that you rarely use language to merely describe what’s going on. You speak in order to generate a response or result, even when you just say “Hi.” The Performativity of Ritual Language Just as Malinowski studied the special language used in garden magic among the Trobrianders, many contemporary linguistic anthropologists study the role of performative language in various ritual settings. In a recent article, Patience Epps and Danilo Paiva Ramos examine the performance of incantations among the Indigenous Hup community of the northwest Amazon (Epps and Ramos 2020). An incantation is a patterned set of phrases or sentences used to compel a magical result. Among the Hup, incantations are used by elders for protection, healing, and causing harm. While Epps and Ramos were conducting fieldwork in the area, Hup elders expressed concerns that the young men in the village were not learning the repertoire of important incantations properly, thus endangering the health and safety of the community. The elders invited Epps and Ramos to write down their incantations for healing and protection in order to preserve them for future generations. Epps and Ramos documented and analyzed these incantations in consultation with Hup elders. In the article, Epps and Ramos analyze an incantation used by the Hup to protect travelers on paths through the rain forest. This incantation is recited by an elder before a group of Hup people embark on a journey. After providing the original text and its English translation, Epps and Ramos describe the incantation’s structure and poetic features, including the use of metaphor and repetition of phrases. As a whole, the incantation lists various dangers and helpful entities and enacts certain magical practices through the speech itself. At the beginning of the incantation, the elder states that he is enclosing the entire path in a protective “canoe,” much as a traveler on a river would ride in a canoe. This canoe is named after a particular snake, the mussurana snake ( Clelia clelia ), a constrictor snake that eats other snakes and is immune to their venom. Thus, the incantation is creating a metaphorical shield of protection around the travelers, making them safe from venomous snakebites. In the second section of the incantation, the elder lists all classes and subtypes of snakes that might be encountered in the rain forest, asserting a kind of taxonomic mastery over the snakes. Summoning the snakes one by one, he tells of lining them up, sitting them down, and feeding them sticky coca and tobacco. The snakes then sit quietly, their jaws stuck together by the sticky substance so that they are unable to bite anyone. The incantation goes on to deal with several other malevolent entities and engage with beneficial entities to help the travelers in their journey. Informal Back-Talk: Teasing, Grumbling, and Gossip Linguistic anthropologists most frequently rely on long periods of fieldwork, living in the communities they study and witnessing and even participating in ritual events where performative language is deployed. Such events include protection and healing magic, but also naming ceremonies, puberty rites, weddings, funerals, and other rituals that mark the passage of persons from one social status to another. Anthropologists term such rituals “rites of passage” (discussed in detail in Anthropology of Food ). At such ritual events, elders or religious specialists are called upon to perform the ritual language necessary to publicly move persons from the previous category to the new one. Naming ceremonies are a great example of the power of performative language in rites of passage. In many West African societies, a baby is not considered a true person until they have been publicly named by an elder or religious official in a naming ceremony performed a certain number of days after the baby is born. Extended family and friends attend the ceremony as markers of their relationship to the baby. Guests bring gifts such as rice and cloth for the baby, and they are rewarded for their attendance with prepared food and kola nuts. During his fieldwork in southeastern Senegal, linguistic anthropologist Nicholas Sweet witnessed the naming ceremony for a baby in a Pular-speaking village (2019). When the family were gathered in the compound of the baby’s father, the imam rose, faced east, gave the blessings of the prophet, and then performed the naming of the baby girl (in Arabic, English translation below): In the name of God, the gracious and the compassionate O Allah, send blessings on our master Muhammad O Allah, send blessings on our master Muhammad O Allah, send blessings on our master Muhammad The name of the child has come here, her mother and her father have named her Aissatou The name of the child has come here, her mother and her father have named her Aissatou This is what was written on the tablet of Allah May God grant her blessings While carefully recording the formal performative language so important to this naming ceremony, Sweet was also attuned to the more informal kinds of language that surrounded the main action. For instance, just before the imam’s performance, some friends of the family were gathered around the baby, remarking on her beauty. As a way of showing their admiration, some of the men joked and teased one another about the prospect of marrying her someday. Other relatives teased the baby’s parents with demands for kola nuts and other food. As dramatically performative as the official naming was, this informal language was also performative, providing a way for guests to socially configure their various relationships to the new person in their community. Someone important had been left out of the ceremony—the great-aunt of the baby, also named Aissatou. As the baby was her namesake, Auntie Aissatou had been invited and should have been a featured guest at the ceremony. But when the time came to perform the ceremony, she had not arrived yet, and so they went on without her. Afterward, as guests were making their way home, they crossed paths with Auntie Aissatou, who was just then on her way to the event. Realizing that the naming had already been performed, she complained that she had been waiting for someone to fetch her and bring her to the ceremony. Auntie Aissatou was angry that she had missed the ceremony as well as the gifts distributed afterward. Wrapping a scarf around her head in imitation of an imam, Auntie Aissatou continued on to the compound of the baby’s father. Striding ceremoniously into the compound, she addressed a number of elders still gathered there. In a parody of the official naming performance, she faced east, delivered the blessings of the prophet, and then announced: The name of the child has come here. It is Buubu Nooge (Trash Owl). The audience of relatives erupted in laughter but also protest, interrupting Auntie Aissatou to correct her with the baby’s true given name. But Auntie Aissatou persisted, saying over and over again that the baby’s name had come and it was “Trash Owl.” Why Trash Owl? In this community, it is believed that witches turn themselves into owls when they fly through the night. “Trash” seemed to refer to the joke gifts of garbage (broken flip-flops, an old sock) in a small gourd that Auntie Aissatou presented in lieu of the usual baby gifts of food, cloth, and soap. In the days following the naming ceremony, the teasing name for the baby became a running joke in the community, especially among people who had not been invited to the ceremony but felt that they should have been. In order to quash the teasing nickname, the baby’s family was compelled to make a number of visits around the community with appeasing gifts of kola in an effort to get everyone to recognize the baby’s proper name. Once Auntie Aissatou and the others had received their visits and kola, they abandoned the name Trash Owl, recognizing the baby as Aissatou, the namesake of Auntie Aissatou. This incident illustrates the power of parody and gossip to steal performative power from the authoritative realm of formal speech, giving excluded and marginalized people a way to “talk back” to authority. There are many ways of doing this. Often, audiences to formal speech will deliberately misunderstand or creatively interpret the proclamations of authority figures. incantation a patterned set of phrases or sentences used to compel a magical result. naming ceremony a public ritual that officially grants personhood by bestowing a name. performativity the functional power of language to make things happen.

Social Sciences