THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

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.