A number of traditions in linguistics,
social theory, and anthropology converge on the study of language as an essential
key to understanding human social life and
psychology. These traditions insist
that we study language in particular social settings,departing from the approaches that
have focused on broad structural characteristics of language.
Those previous approaches
often attempted to use very abstract and general models of how
Language (with a capital “L”) works as the foundation for insights about human
society or cognition. By contrast, this recent work in anthropology,
sociolinguistics, and related fields investigates languages on the ground, in practice, as they are
used by particular people in their daily lives.
From a careful study of the way
languages mediate social interactions, there emerges a quite different view of the role of
language in human life, one in which language is valuable not because it affords
insights into universal structures, but because it is particularly sensitive to different
social settings, particularly imbued with the social life of which it is a part.
Perhaps one of the most famous
formulations of the relationship between language and culture emerged from the works of
language scholars Benjamin Lee
Whorf and Edward Sapir and their
followers.
Controversial from the outset, this school of linguistics examines the
contribution of language structure to understanding the way speakers in different cultures
think about and approach the practicalities of social life.
Early on, the Whorfian
approach was interpreted using rigidly determinist readings, in which the influence of
language on thought and behavior was conceived as set in stone and
painfully straightforward (e.g., a particular grammatical category is thought of as rigidly and
single-handedly determinative of how speakers
are capable of thinking about a
certain aspect of the world).
Critics of this approach rightly rejected any
implication that language categories could mold people’s brains in so simple and rigid
a fashion. However, recent reinterpretations of the Whorf-Sapir tradition have
restored for us the more subtle vision inherent in Whorf’s careful explication of the “habitual”
character of language patterning.
Whorf did not intend to link
differences in language with rigid limits on mental functioning—as if a speaker raised in
one language could never learn different ways of talking and understanding. Rather,
in his view, the regular use of the categories and ways of talking found in a
particular language-and-culture broadly shape speakers’ habitual understandings of the world.
These habitual understandings can be amended or shifted, and can fluctuate
or vary through different uses, contexts, and parts of societies. However, Whorf
teaches us that even these shifts will occur in and through language, and thus can be
studied there.
Another contribution of this tradition
is an insistence that we examine more than just words or concepts in
studying language, so that we can capture the habitual
patterning of cultural understanding
that occurs through the use of whole systems of language (grammars) day
after day throughout speakers’ lives. Current work in anthropological linguistics
warns against a focus on individual words, as Introduction
if they ould by themselves embody
realms of thought, or as if meaning inhered in those segmented chunks of language
rather than emerging from the active, creative use of a whole web of related sounds
and meanings.
Thus, if we are to understand how language shapes our social world,
our focus must be not on mere
combinations of words, but on a
complex linguistic structure that conveys meaning in multiple interconnected ways. In
addition, we must take account of the fact that meaning is conveyed and created by the
way linguistic structure is operationalized in the actual use of language every time we communicate.
This adds yet another
level to the analysis. Some schools of
thought in essence throw up their hands when it comes to language use, by implication
viewing it as too unsystematic or vast or unimportant to be included in a theory of language
meaning.
By contrast, research in anthropology and sociolinguistics has elucidated
the regularities and processes at work in actual language use. I will briefly summarize key
aspects of this approach.
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