Language and Social Order

Language and Social Order

One of the most important goals of anthropology is to identify the range of possible forms of social organization in human societies. The study of language use is important in clarifying these and in showing how they are reproduced or overturned.

Even small and homogeneous communities exhibit internal linguistic diversity. The repertoires of ways of speaking found in Australian aboriginal groups include languages revealed only to initiates of secret societies, special forms for talking to in-laws, and extensive multilingualism. Edward Sapir reported that the Yana, a culture of Native American hunters and collectors in California, had special forms of speech for men and women. Like Sapir, contemporary linguistic anthropologists conclude that the unpredictable ways in which such differences are manifested cross-culturally means they have nothing to do with biological differences between the sexes. Speakers of Malagasy in Madagascar and Taiap in New Guinea believe that the extremes of rudeness and profanity appear in women's speech. This contrasts sharply with the assumption widely shared among English and Japanese speakers, for instance, that women are innately more polite than men.

When people speak, they tend to reveal and "reproduce" their social position, since the most important social differences within a community, such as gender, age, ethnicity, caste, and class, are usually reflected in language use. Dell Hymes has argued that differences in "communicative competence," the capacity to use effectively the language forms appropriate to a context, are a key source of inequalities in human communities. Exactly how a particular type of context will be made manifest can, however, be quite unpredictable in cross-cultural perspective. An excellent example is diversity in the way that social prestige is expressed. In the traditional African kingdom of Burundi, noble speech was valued for elegance and fluency, and people of low rank were expected to display their inferiority through clumsy speech. In contrast, among the Wolof of West Africa, fluency is the province of the low caste of griots. Nobles take care to stutter and make grammatical errors, and they employ griots to speak for them on occasions when eloquence is required.

Differences in ways of speaking may be an important clue to social differentiation that is covert or even denied. Thus in Mexican communities where both Spanish and Nahuatl, a Native American language, are spoken, members claim that they are all "farmers." However, differences in how speakers combine resources from the two languages (including the frequency of Spanish loanwords in speech considered to be in Nahuatl, and the way that these loanwords are pronounced) clearly distinguish people who make their living primarily from cultivation from those who are heavily involved in wage labor, and point to conflicts of interest between these two groups.

In addition to delineating social differences, language used effectively and appropriately can create the contexts in which efficacious interactions can move forward. For instance, among the Ilongot of the Philippines, traditional orators use highly indirect metaphorical speech to avoid offending political opponents. Through their expertise, "political arenas"—occasions when people gather to make decisions and negotiate disputes—can be constituted even though the authority to compel attendance is weak.

Almost any detail of linguistic form may be recruited to social purposes. The assignment of social meaning to differences in pronunciation is of course well known, but details of syntax may also have special social functions. In Samoan, a Polynesian language, the ergative case marks the agent of a transitive verb, contrasting with the absolute case, marking the subjects of intransitive verbs together with the objects of transitive verbs. In most languages that make this case distinction, its use is neutral in value, having only a grammatical function. In Samoan, however, the ergative case is generally avoided unless speakers are eager to assign blame or claim credit. Samoan children hardly use the ergative case marker at all because it is inappropriate for children to make value-laden judgments about responsibility.

Communication does not, of course, take place only among members of small communities. A research program originated by John Gumperz explores problems in cross-cultural communication, such as that between English speakers from India and England. Here, conflict may emerge partly because interactants, even though they are speaking the same language, do not share the same principles for interpreting conversational moves. Linguistic anthropologists have learned not to assume that the dominant ideologies about language and its use in any community will be universally accepted by its members. Much current research examines conflict stemming from resistance by subordinate groups against the linguistic values of elites. An excellent example is the language use encountered on "free radios" in the Basque region of Spain. By promiscuously mixing Basque and Spanish, and by using slangy and nonstandard forms of both languages, young people who run the illicit transmitters challenge the linguistic purism (and conformity to nationalist ideologies) of both Basque- and Spanish-speaking elites.

Language, Species, and Population

While quite complex symbolic abilities have been demonstrated in other animals, including at least the great apes and some birds, the capacity to acquire full human language is unique to Homo sapiens. Thus research on language is important for anthropologists who study human evolution. We do not know why language evolved, but since modifications of the organs of the vocal tract that apparently are required for human speech production detract from the efficiency of respiration, and cause an increased risk of choking on food (which can be fatal), the adaptive pressures in favor of full language must have been quite powerful. The phonetician Philip Lieberman has made the controversial suggestion that the anatomical structures required for modern human language do not appear in Neanderthals. If he is correct, full human language may be less than 40,000 years old.

The capacity for language can be manifested through gesture as well as speech, as in the sign languages of deaf communities, such as American Sign Language. Some scholars have argued that such gestural languages may predate oral forms in evolution. However, all human languages known today manifest the same evolutionary grade; no "primitive" languages have survived.

Boas and other founders of modern anthropology dismissed the possibility of a relationship between language and race. Because many people around the world are multilingual, and because abundant evidence exists from recent history of massive language shift (as in the spread of official national languages and the extinction of minority languages in Europe, or the acquisition of European languages by Native American groups and by Africans forced into slavery), it seems unlikely that any group defined as "all speakers of languages descended from a common ancestral tongue L" would match the group defined as "all human beings descended from a common ancestral biological population who spoke L." Recent highly controversial work has called this assumption into question. In collaboration with anthropological linguist Joseph Greenberg, human geneticists have suggested that there is a strong correlation between (1) phylogenetic groupings of languages at the highest level and (2) the large-scale, global distribution of genetic markers in human populations. If this finding is upheld, the study of historical linguistics will become an increasingly important tool for understanding the recent history of the human species.

However, many scholars doubt the validity of the methods used to establish phylogenetic groupings at the time depth claimed by Greenberg and other long-distance comparativists. Widely accepted historical linguistic techniques may be useful only for the very recent period, perhaps the last 8,000 to 10,000 years at most. Linguists often collaborate with archaeologists in the reconstruction of prehistory within this time depth. Research into the Bantu's expansion in Africa illustrates this type of collaboration. Bantu languages are spoken today over a very wide area in Central, East, and South Africa. Some scholars have argued that their spread was facilitated by the development of iron metallurgy in the proto-Bantu community. However, others challenged this view, claiming that a common word for iron can be reconstructed only for the Eastern Bantu. If this is true, the spread of the Bantu from a probable point of origin in the northwestern end of their range, in what today is the Cameroons, must have been made possible by some other technology, perhaps by an agricultural complex suited to the tropical forest environment, evidenced by proto-Bantu linguistic roots for "yam" and "oil palm," or by a marine technology that permitted the exploitation of tropical rivers, attested in proto-Bantu roots related to fishing and boating. The spread of iron technology into Central Africa would then be secondary and would come from the east. These claims yield models for archaeological interpretation.