Living Language E-Book

Laura M. Ahearn

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Primers in Anthropology
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 589

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Accessible and clearly written, Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology introduces readers to the study of language in real-life social contexts around the world through the contemporary theory and practice of linguistic anthropology. * A highly accessible introduction to the study of language in real-life social contexts around the world * Combines classic studies on language and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship and assumes no prior knowledge in linguistics or anthropology * Provides a unifying synthesis of current research and considers future directions for the field * Covers key topics such as: language and gender, race, and ethnicity; language acquisition and socialization in children and adults; language death and revitalization; performance; language and thought; literacy practices; and multilingualism and globalization

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I Language: Some Basic Questions

1 The Socially Charged Life of Language

So, What Do You Need to Know in Order to “Know” a Language?

So, How Do Linguistic Anthropologists Study Language as Social Action?

Key Terms in Linguistic Anthropology

The Inseparability of Language, Culture, and Social Relations

2 The Research Process in Linguistic Anthropology

What Kinds of Research Questions Do Linguistic Anthropologists Formulate?

What Kinds of Data Do Linguistic Anthropologists Collect, and with What Methods?

How Do Linguistic Anthropologists Analyze their Data?

What Sorts of Ethical Issues Do Linguistic Anthropologists Face?

3 Language Acquisition and Socialization

Language Acquisition and the Socialization Process

Language Acquisition in Bilingual or Multilingual Contexts

Language Socialization throughout the Lifespan

Conclusion

4 Language, Thought, and Culture

A Hundred Years of Linguistic Relativity

The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

Investigating the Effects of Language on Thought

Language-in-General

Linguistic Structures

Language Use

Conclusion

Part II Communities of Speakers, Hearers, Readers, and Writers

5 Communities of Language Users

Defining “Speech Community”

Recent Research Drawing on the Concept of Speech Community

Alternatives to the Concept of Speech Community

6 Multilingualism and Globalization

Code-Switching, Code-Mixing, and Diglossia

“Heteroglossia” and “Transidiomatic Practice”

7 Literacy Practices

Literacy Events vs. Literacy Practices

“Autonomous” vs. “Ideological” Approaches to Studying Literacy

Some Examples of Situated Literacy Research

The Not-So-New “New Literacy Studies” and its Critics

8 Performance, Performativity, and the Constitution of Communities

Performance Defined in Opposition to Competence

Performativity

Performance as a Display of Verbal Artistry

Ethnographies of Performance and Performativity

Part III Language, Power, and Social Differentiation

9 Language and Gender

What is Gender, and How Does it Relate to Language?

Do Men and Women Speak Alike or Differently?

Do Women and Men of All Ages and All Ethnic, Racial, and Cultural Backgrounds Share the Same Gendered Differences in their Language Use?

Some Thoughts on Myths and Realities

10 Language, Race, and Ethnicity

Defining Race and Ethnicity

The Rule-Governed Nature of African American English

The Ebonics Controversy

Racist Language and Racism in Language

Language and Racial/Ethnic Identities

Conclusion

11 Language Death and Revitalization

Enumerating the Crisis: How Many Dying Languages Are There?

What Dies When a Language Dies?

Why Do Languages Die?

Can Endangered Languages Be Saved?

Conclusion

12 Conclusion: Language, Power, and Agency

What is Power?

Agency

The Grammatical Encoding of Agency

Talk About Agency: Meta-Agentive Discourse

Power and Agency in/through/by/of Language

Notes

References

Index

Blackwell Primers in Anthropology

Each volume in this series is a lively first look at a traditional area of anthropological study. These concise books provide theoretically sophisticated yet accessible and engaging introductions for nonspecialists. They will be invaluable for undergraduate instruction as well as offering pithy overviews to those unfamiliar with the primary issues in the chosen subdiscipline.

Published

1. People and Nature: An Introduction to Human Ecological Relations by Emilio F. Moran

2. Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology by Laura M. Ahearn

This edition first published 2012© 2012 Laura M. Ahearn

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Laura M. Ahearn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ahearn, Laura M., 1962–

Living language : an introduction to linguistic anthropology / by Laura M. Ahearn.

p. cm. – (Blackwell primers in anthropology)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-2440-9 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4051-2441-6 (paperback) 1. Anthropological linguistics. 2. Language and culture. I. Title. II. Series.

P35.A38 2011

306.44–dc22

2010049292

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444340532; Wiley Online Library 9781444340563; ePub 9781444340549

For Mellie,whose words and smileshave brought me indescribable joy

Figures

1.1

Cartoon demonstrating how certain styles of speech can both reflect and shape social identities

1.2

Khim Prasad during the Pounded Rice Ritual, with the bride, Indrani Kumari, and the bridal attendant

1.3

Cartoon about the varying cultural meanings associated with language use

1.4

Jakobson’s model of the multifunctionality of language

1.5

Cartoon playing off the language ideology that considers French a romantic language

1.6

Semiosis as a relation between relations

3.1

The cultural concepts of hed and save in Gapun, Papua New Guinea

4.1

Relationship between language and thought according to the (mistaken) “strong” version of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

4.2

Relationship among language, thought, and culture according to contemporary understandings of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis within linguistic anthropology

4.3

Another of the many representations in popular culture of the “Eskimo words for snow” myth

4.4

Set-up for experiment involving coordinate systems

5.1

De Saussure’s “linguistic community”

5.2

Santa Ana and Parodí’s model of nested speech-community configurations

5.3

Strong, multiplex, high-density network with individual “X” at center

5.4

Weak, uniplex, low-density network with individual “X” at center

6.1

Peter Auer’s continuum of codeswitching,language mixing, and fused lects

7.1

Nepali love letter (with all identifying features removed)

8.1

Spatial configuration at August 1990 Tij songfest in Junigau

9.1

Cartoon referring to author Deborah Tannen’s ability to understand gendered language

9.2

Cartoon showing how certain linguistic forms can index social identities

10.1

Political cartoon that appeared in the wake of the Ebonics controversy

11.1

Cartoon depicting normal and inevitable changes in a language over time

12.1

Doxa as that which is taken for granted and therefore outside the universe of discourse

Tables

4.1

English pronouns in the nominative case

4.2

Nepali pronouns in the Junigau dialect

4.3

Noun classes in Swahili

4.4

Spatial categorizing in English and Korean

5.1

Santa Ana and Parodí’s typology of speech-community configurations

7.1

‘Be + like’ as a percentage of total quotatives in face-to-face and IM talk

9.1

Findings of Hyde’s meta-analyses regarding gender differences in communicative behavior

11.1

Ten most commonly spoken languages in the world

Preface

Language as used in real-life social contexts is fascinating but extremely challenging to study. Linguistic anthropology as a discipline offers a set of concepts and tools for undertaking this challenge. My goal in this book is to provide an accessible introduction to the main principles and approaches of linguistic anthropology without overly simplifying the complex contributions of scholars in the field. To the degree that this book succeeds in accomplishing this goal, it will be useful not just to graduate and undergraduate students studying linguistic anthropology for the first time (to whom I very much hope to communicate my enthusiasm for the field) but also to all sorts of other readers who might for various reasons be interested in “living language.” These readers might include, for example, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, or political scientists who have never looked closely at language in their research but could benefit from doing so. I also hope the book will be of value to linguists whose work thus far has been more technical and abstract in nature but who would like to turn their attention to the study of actual instances of linguistic practice. And finally, I hope the book will appeal to anyone who has a natural curiosity about the central role language plays in shaping and reflecting cultural norms and social interactions.

Within the United States, linguistic anthropology is one of the four traditional fields of anthropology: archaeology, biological (also called physical) anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. When Franz Boas helped to establish the discipline of anthropology in the United States more than one hundred years ago, most anthropologists were trained in all four of these fields and often conducted research in more than one of them. As scholarship became more specialized over the past century, however, such breadth became much rarer. One of my main purposes in writing this book is to convince anthropologists in other subfields, especially cultural anthropology, of the advantages of becoming well-trained in linguistic anthropology as well as their “home” subdiscipline. After all, much of the data collected by cultural anthropologists (and by many researchers in other fields) is linguistic in nature. Linguistic anthropologists (e.g., Briggs 1986:22) have argued that such data should not be treated as a transparent window through which the researcher can reach to obtain facts or information. Rather, interviews and other sources of data for social scientists should be considered as communicative events in which meanings are co-constructed and interwoven with various forms of context. This book will, I hope, provide useful tools and examples of analyses that help researchers produce nuanced analyses of many different kinds of social and linguistic practices.

I should say a few words about nomenclature and the sometimes arbitrary nature of disciplinary boundaries. Anthropology as a discipline is not found in every university in the United States and certainly not in every country around the world. Sometimes it is subsumed under sociology; other times individual anthropologists work in academic departments ranging from political science to educational psychology. Linguistic anthropology as a subdiscipline is even more specific to the United States and is rarely identified as such in other countries. And yet, the core themes and approaches of linguistic anthropology as set forth in this book are ever more commonly at the forefront of cutting-edge research in many different fields, even when “linguistic anthropology” as such is not the label under which the research takes place. In the United Kingdom, for example, “linguistic ethnography” has become increasingly popular as a term describing the work of scholars who study language ethnographically, as linguistic anthropologists generally do (cf. Creese 2008). Some sociolinguists, who usually hold PhDs in the discipline of linguistics rather than anthropology or sociology (though there are exceptions), also produce scholarship very much in keeping with the approaches I describe in this book. In addition, linguistic anthropologists themselves have sometimes used other terms to label what they do, such as anthropological linguistics, ethnolinguistics, or “anthropolitical” linguistics, and many researchers produce important and relevant work in other related fields such as pragmatics, sociopolitical linguistics, discourse analysis, rhetoric, applied linguistics, or communication (Duranti 1997, 2003, forthcoming; Zentella 1996). I draw upon the work of many of these scholars in this book, along with researchers in other fields. While I consider myself firmly rooted in linguistic anthropology, I share with Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall (2008) a desire to take an “all of the above” approach to the study of linguistic practices in real-life social contexts. There is nothing to be lost and everything to be gained, in my opinion, from engaging in a cross-disciplinary dialogue.

As valuable as I find much of the research on language from all these different fields, I do attempt to differentiate the approach I advocate from an approach that considers language solely as an abstract set of grammatical rules, detached from any actual linguistic interaction. Linguistic structure and the insights surrounding it that have emerged from the discipline of linguistics since first Ferdinand de Saussure and then Noam Chomsky began to dominate the field so many decades ago are extremely important to most linguistic anthropologists, but as Chomsky’s hegemonic grip on linguistics as a discipline has begun to weaken, there is even more reason to offer the approach presented in this book – that of treating language use as a form of social action – as an alternative that can either complement or cause a reconceptualization of Chomsky’s perspective on language. Ideally, scholars who consider linguistic practices to be a form of social action will be able to make use of the most valuable findings on linguistic structure conducted in a Chomskyan manner while also paying close attention to the ways in which such practices are embedded in webs of social hierarchies and identities. This is a challenging task. As Michael Silverstein has noted, it can lead to “the same feeling one has in that sitcom situation of standing with one foot on the dock and another in the boat as the tide rushes away from shore” (2006:275). Silverstein goes on to state the following:

The serious metaphorical point here is that it takes a great deal of bodily force to keep standing upright, with one foot firmly planted in language as a structured code and the other in language as a medium of the various sociocultural lifeways of human groups and their emergently precipitated sociohistorical macrostructures at several orders of magnitude. (2006:275)

The goal of this book is to provide some concrete assistance in the form of theoretical insights, methodological tools, and ethnographic examples for those who would like to remain standing upright – those who wish to look closely at language both in terms of its grammatical patterning and in terms of its role in the shaping of social life.

Living Language is divided into three parts, each of which is comprised of four chapters. In the first part, “Language: Some Basic Questions,” I explain how language use can be conceived of, and productively studied as, a form of social action. The introductory chapter, “The Socially Charged Life of Language,” presents four key terms that will act as anchors for readers as they proceed through the ensuing chapters. These four key terms – multifunctionality, language ideologies, practice, and indexicality – can be applied in many different social contexts to obtain a deeper understanding of how language works. Chapter 2, “The Research Process in Linguistic Anthropology,” describes the many different methods linguistic anthropologists use to conduct their research and discusses some of the practical and ethical dilemmas many researchers face when studying language in real-life situations. Chapter 3, “Language Acquisition and Socialization,” focuses on the way that linguistic anthropologists study how young children learn their first language(s) at the same time that they are being socialized into appropriate cultural practices. This way of understanding linguistic and cultural practices as being thoroughly intertwined can also apply to adolescents and adults who engage in language socialization whenever they enter new social or professional contexts. Chapter 4, the final chapter in the first part of the book, “Language, Thought, and Culture,” looks at some of the controversies and foundational principles underlying the so-called “Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis” and the ways in which language relates to thought and culture.

The second part of the book, “Communities of Speakers, Hearers, Readers, and Writers,” moves on from these basic questions to consider the constitution of various forms of linguistic and social communities. Chapter 5, “Communities of Language Users,” explores the concept of “speech community” and surveys some of the scholarship on this topic, concluding with a discussion of the valuable alternative concept of “community of practice.” Chapter 6, “Multilingualism and Globalization,” places these communities in a global context to demonstrate how important it is to consider multilingualism in individuals and communities when conducting research on linguistic or social practices anywhere in the world. Chapter 7, “Literacy Practices,” makes a case for the importance of looking at the interwoven nature of literacy and orality. Many linguistic anthropologists focus solely on spoken language, but studying literacy practices in conjunction with verbal interactions can be quite illuminating. Chapter 8, “Performance, Performativity, and the Constitution of Communities,” the final chapter in the second part of the book, disentangles the various theoretical and ethnographic approaches to performance and performativity and discusses the importance of these themes for understanding how linguistic and social communities come to be formed.

The final part of the book, “Language, Power, and Social Differentiation,” moves more deeply into the constitution of actual communities by examining various dimensions of social and linguistic differentiation and inequality within particular communities. Chapter 9, “Language and Gender,” explores some common language ideologies concerning the ways in which women and men speak and reviews the research on the complex nature of gendered linguistic practices. Chapter 10, “Language, Race, and Ethnicity,” engages with two other common forms of social and linguistic differentiation, that of racialization and ethnicization. This chapter describes the rule-governed nature of African American English, the Ebonics controversy of 1996–1997, and the racializing aspects of Mock Spanish. Chapter 11, “Language Death and Revitalization,” looks at the reasons why so many of the world’s languages are endangered and asks what social inequalities and language ideologies underpin these discourses of endangerment. The concluding chapter, “Language, Power, and Agency,” pulls together the threads of the previous chapters to present a view of linguistic practices as embedded within power dynamics and subject to various forms of agency. This chapter provides an overview of the social theorists, including Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Sherry Ortner, and Pierre Bourdieu, who are in my view the most useful for developing a deeper understanding of language, power, agency, and social action.

In sum, this book is meant to be an invitation to all readers to explore more fully the notion that to use language is always to engage in a form of social action. Embarking on this exploration will lead to a better appreciation for what “living language” can mean.

Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making, and I could never adequately thank everyone to whom I am indebted in various ways for helping me write this book. I owe so much to the scholars who most deeply influenced me during my graduate training:Tom Fricke, Bruce Mannheim, and Sherry Ortner. During and after my years in graduate school, I have continued to be inspired by the work of Alessandro Duranti, Susan Gal, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Jane Hill, Judy Irvine, Paul Kroskrity, Elinor Ochs, Bambi Schieffelin and Jim Wilce. I am also fortunate to be situated within a cultural anthropology program at Rutgers, Critical Interventions in Theory and Ethnography, that takes seriously the need to integrate a close analysis of language into any study of social or cultural practices. My colleagues at Rutgers, especially Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Daniel Goldstein, Angelique Haugerud, Dorothy Hodgson, and David Hughes, as well as the members of the NEWT (No Excuses Writing Team) have all been extremely supportive of this project. Other colleagues, including Janina Fenigsen, Bridget Hayden (who also caught my initial misspelling of “purl” in the knitting analogy), Kathy Hunt, Dillon Mahoney, Ryne Palombit, Gary Rendsburg, Heidi Swank, Suzanne Wertheim, Jim Wilce, and John Zimmerman, have also read and commented on some or all of these chapters, or have even “test driven” them in their own linguistic anthropology classes, and for all their feedback I am enormously grateful. Jim Wilce, in particular, has been a most consistently encouraging and patient supporter throughout this long process, and his belief in this book helped me move forward at several critical periods when I was unsure of how to proceed.

My students have also provided me with inspiration and concrete advice on how to improve the book. Students in my undergraduate linguistic anthropology classes, including Liane Alves, Chris Correa, Tingting Gao, Mickey Hennessey, Christina Le, Eugene Leytin, Erika Varga, and Alysis Vasquez, were amazingly patient with me as I turned them into guinea pigs in this process; they offered extremely perceptive comments on how to make the book more accessible to college students. My brilliant graduate students were equally generous with their advice. I am particularly grateful to all the students who took my Language as Social Action seminar over the past few years, especially Chelsea Booth,Assaf Harel, Noelle Molé, and Kartikeya Saboo, for pushing me to think in new ways about the material presented in this book.

I am also thankful to Jane Huber, the editor at Wiley-Blackwell who got me interested in this project, and to Rosalie Robertson and Julia Kirk, the editor and editorial assistant, respectively, who guided it successfully through to completion. Eric Richardson wisely urged a more user-friendly title, and Ayala Fader and Liliana Sanchez offered helpful feedback. Peter Laipson, my loyal critic, read the first four chapters of this book and dictated copious comments for me using Dragon Naturally Speaking, thereby providing an excellent demonstration of the limitations of speech recognition software (but also of course improving my eloquence quotient enormously for those chapters).The anonymous readers of the prospectus buoyed me with their wonderful comments and feedback, and the five anonymous reviewers of the entire manuscript humbled me with their close readings and wise advice. I only wish I had had the time and intellectual capacity to implement more of their suggestions.

Finally, I am indebted beyond words to my family. My parents, Eileen and Fred Ahearn, have always encouraged me with loving support and intellectual stimulation. My sisters, Peggy Schroeder and Kerry Ahearn-Brown, remain my dearest friends. My husband (also known as my in-house editor and favorite correspondent), Rick Black, has offered me more guidance, inspiration, and constant encouragement than I could ever enumerate or reciprocate. I am so, so lucky to have him as my “life friend.”

And to my daughter, Melanie Anne Ahearn Black, I dedicate this book, which has been in the making in one form or another for the entire six years of her life. So much of what has come to fascinate me about language and what I have come to value in life can be traced to Mellie.

Laura M.Ahearn Rutgers University

Part I

Language: Some Basic Questions

1

The Socially Charged Life of Language

All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life...

Bakhtin 1981:293

Words do live socially charged lives, as Bakhtin observes in the epigraph that opens this chapter. Language is not a neutral medium for communication but rather a set of socially embedded practices. The reverse of Bakhtin’s statement is also true: social interactions live linguistically charged lives. That is, every social interaction is mediated by language – whether spoken or written, verbal or nonverbal. Consider the following three examples.

Example 1: Getting Stoned in San Francisco

During the 1995–1996 school year, a special anti-drug class was run as an elective in a large high school in the San Francisco Bay Area.1 Students were trained as peer educators in preparation for visiting other classes to perform skits about the danger of drugs and tobacco. The class was unusually diverse, with boys as well as girls and with students from many different class ranks, ethnicities, and racial groups. On the day that the students were preparing to perform their skits in front of an audience for the first time, they asked the teacher, Priscilla, what they should say if someone in the audience asked whether they themselves smoked marijuana. Priscilla recommended that they say they did not. Then the following exchange took place between Priscilla and the students:

Figure 1.1 Cartoon demonstrating how certain styles of speech can both reflect and shape social identities.

Source: Jump Start © 1999 United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

Priscilla:         Remember, you’re role models.

Al Capone:     You want us to lie?

Priscilla:        Since you’re not coming to school stoned – (students laugh)

Calvin:          (mockingly) Stoned?

Priscilla:       What do you say?

Calvin:           I say high. Bombed. Blitzed.

Brand One:   Weeded.

Kerry:             Justified.

Brand One:   That’s kinda tight.

Example 2: Losing a Language in Papua New Guinea

In 1987, the residents of the tiny village of Gapun in Papua New Guinea (a country north of Australia) were some of the last speakers of a language called Taiap, which at the time had at most 89 remaining speakers. Adult villagers were almost all bilingual in Taiap and in Tok Pisin, one of the three national languages of Papua New Guinea, and all children were exposed to rich amounts of both Taiap and Tok Pisin in their early years. By 1987, however, no child under the age of ten actively spoke Taiap, and many under the age of eight did not even possess a good passive knowledge of the language. The usual theories about how and why so many of the world’s languages are becoming extinct did not seem to apply to Taiap. Material and economic factors such as industrialization and urbanization were not sufficiently important in the remote village of Gapun to explain the language shift away from Taiap. Why, then, was Taiap becoming extinct? According to linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick, the adults in Gapun claimed that the shift was occurring because of the actions of their (often preverbal) children. Kulick writes: “ ‘We haven’t done anything,’ one village man explained when I asked him why village children don’t speak the vernacular, ‘We try to get them to speak it, we want them to. But they won’t … They’re [big-headed, strong-willed]’ ” (Kulick 1992:16).