Language and Culture – one of many ways that people and cultures engage with others and the world; linguistic anthropologists study how language and culture are interconnected, and the impact language has on wider society
The language of stereotypes creates the culture of stereotypes. The culture of stereotypes creates the language of stereotypes. Humans use language to understand, categorize, and explain our world to each other. When we categorize something with one word or phrase, we learn to understand a whole range of ideas and concepts from just that one word, without having to say them. When we stereotype people, we are using a very narrow understanding to engage with others, and this understanding comes from the language we use to describe people.
Language and culture go hand-in-hand. Anthropologists learn this early in their training. Language helps us communicate to each other about the world, because we use language to describe the world. Based on this shared understanding, or, speaking the same language, we can engage with each other about thoughts and ideas and create relationships. Because of this, language is hugely important for anthropologists when seeking to understand a culture.
Who has the microphone? The language of stereotypes is amplified by those whose voices are amplified by their power. This is why it’s so important to hear voices from people with less power, because it shows an experience of the world that may otherwise be silenced.
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.” — Edward Sapir
||| Explore the Literature |||
Bartlett, Lesley. 2007. Literacy, speech and shame: the cultural politics of literacy and language in Brazil, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20:5, 547-563.
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between shame, literacy and social relations by analyzing shame narratives told to the author by youth and adult literacy students during a 24‐month ethnographic research project conducted in two Brazilian cities. Employing Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and literature from the anthropology of emotions, the article asks: What is accomplished through the micropolitics of shaming? What can it teach us about theories of literacy, language and power more broadly? The article shows how speech shaming in Brazil contributed to the cultural production of inequality by individualizing, psychologizing and embodying responsibility or blame for illiteracy. It argues that sociocultural theories of literacy, language and power need to account for the influence of emotions in communicative interactions.
Boaz, Franz. 1966. Race, Language and Culture. New York: Free Press.
Summary: This is a collection of Boaz’s most influential works within anthropology, collected in one place in the 1940s. This collection explores the relationships between race, language, and culture as three primary subjects to dispel the then-common notion of “scientific racism”, which at the time, led to prejudice within wider society, to be challenged by Boaz and his followers within the field of anthropology.
DeGraff, Michel. 2005. Linguists’ most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism. Language in Society 34, 533–591.
Abstract: “Creole Exceptionalism” is defined as a set of beliefs, widespread among both linguists and nonlinguists, that Creole languages form an exceptional class on phylogenetic and0or typological grounds. It also has nonlinguistic (e.g., sociological) implications, such as the claim that Creole languages are a “handicap” for their speakers, which has undermined the role that Creoles should play in the education and socioeconomic development of monolingual Creolophones. Focusing on Caribbean Creoles, and on Haitian Creole in particular, it is argued that Creole Exceptionalism, as a sociohistorically rooted “régime of truth” (in Foucault’s sense), obstructs scientific and social progress in and about Creole communities. Various types of Creole Exceptionalist beliefs are deconstructed and historicized, and their empirical, theoretical, and sociological flaws surveyed. These flaws have antecedents in early creolists’ theories of Creole genesis, often explicitly couched in Eurocentric and (pre-0quasi-)Darwinian doctrines of human evolution. Despite its historical basis in colonialism and slavery and its scientific and sociological flaws, Creole Exceptionalism is still enshrined in the modern linguistics establishment and its classic literature, a not unexpected state given the social structure of scientific communities and the interaction between ideology and “paradigm-making.” The present Foucauldian approach to Creole Exceptionalism is an instantiation of a well-defined area of the linguistics ideology interface. The conclusion proposes alternatives more consistent with Creole structures and their development, and more likely to help linguists address some practical problems faced by Creole speakers.
Duranti, Alessandro. 2003. “Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 44, no. 3: 323–47.
Summary: In this article, Duranti outlines three primary paradigms faced by anthropologists in exploring language, as well as the way that studying language itself, as an anthropological subfield, can be useful to understanding culture through an anthropological lens.
Hill, Jane H. 1998: “Language, Race, and White Public Space.” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3: 680–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680.
Summary: This article by Hill explores the way that whiteness polices language use in the United States from an anthropological standpoint. She outlines first the way that white people police the language of Latino people and African American people, while at the same time “mixing languages” in a way that is not equally as criticized
Jourdan, Christine. 2008. Language, Culture, and Society: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Summary: This book explores the basics of linguistic anthropology as a subfield of anthropology in general. It provides the key concepts, questions, and areas of research that linguistic anthropologists work with, as well as its relationship to other fields, while exposing the reader to questions about the relationships between language and culture that anthropologists are routinely faced with.
McWhorter, John. 2017. Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca. New York: Bellevue Literary Press.
Summary from publisher: It has now been almost fifty years since linguistic experts began studying Black English as a legitimate speech variety, arguing to the public that it is different from Standard English, not a degradation of it. Yet false assumptions and controversies still swirl around what it means to speak and sound “black.” In his first book devoted solely to the form, structure, and development of Black English, John McWhorter clearly explains its fundamentals and rich history while carefully examining the cultural, educational, and political issues that have undermined recognition of this transformative, empowering dialect. Talking Back, Talking Black takes us on a fascinating tour of a nuanced and complex language that has moved beyond America’s borders to become a dynamic force for today’s youth culture around the world.
Sally McConnell-Ginet, John Whitman, Amanda Miller, Wayne Harbert, ed. 2009. Language and Poverty. Multilingual Matters.
Summary from publisher: This volume explores the complex interactions of language with economic resources. How does poverty affect language survival? How is the economic status of individuals affected by the languages they do or do not speak? The authors address these questions from multiple perspectives, drawing on linguistics, language policy and planning, economics, anthropology, and sociology.
Schwartz, Saul. 2018. The Predicament of Language and Culture: Advocacy, Anthropology, and Dormant Language Communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 28: 332-355.
Abstract: A growing literature in linguistic anthropology critically examines the rhetoric of endangered language advocacy. A number of themes remain underexplored, however, including the invocation of “culture” to justify language preservation, the interests of communities without fluent heritage language speakers, and anthropology’s contribution to potentially problematic advocacy tropes. Discourses like “language is the core of culture” and “when a language dies, a culture dies” are widespread in language activism even though they undermine communities’ efforts to maintain distinctive cultural identities in the wake of language shift and put dormant language communities in a double bind. While Boasian anthropology contains anti‐essentialist and counter‐nationalist perspectives on language, culture, and race, some Herderian advocacy tropes are borrowed from the (also Boasian) tradition of linguistic relativity in its popular Whorfian iteration. Drawing on my research on Chiwere language politics, I identify two forms of agency available to endangered and dormant language communities: one form of agency resists language loss but accepts dominant ideologies of national difference that make heritage languages essential to indigenous cultural identities, while another form of agency accepts language loss but resists Herderian nationalist expectations that authentic indigenous communities speak their traditional languages.
Spears, Arthur. 1998. “African-American language use: Ideology and so-called obscenity.” African-American English. 226-250
Abstract: This paper is about what has been called obscene language. As I indicate below, I prefer to use the term uncensored speech in order not to prejudge the actions of the users of such speech. My wish not to prejudge is not the result of unreflexive liberal humanism; rather, it reflects one of the major conclusions presented below, to wit: in many cases, rigorous analysis of form, meaning, and communicative behavior is required before one can pass judgment on the speech of members of communities other than one’s own, where the term community membership is determined by age, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, gender, and other variables. Those who are invariably offended even by mentions, let alone uses, of “obscenity” should not read further. At the outset, I should make some clarifications and disclaimers since it seems many people wish, and indeed insist upon, forcing the discussions below into the judgmental framework of their own personal norms of propriety.