WEST VISAYAS STATE UNIVERSITY/2024

UNIT I: INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND

SOCIETY

Any discussion of the relationship between language and society, or of the various
functions of language in society, should begin with some attempt to define each of these
terms. Let us say that a society is any group of people who are drawn together for a certain
purpose or purposes. By such a definition ‘society’ becomes a very comprehensive concept,
but we will soon see how useful such a comprehensive view is because of the very different
kinds of societies that we will discover. We may attempt an equally comprehensive definition
of language: a language is what the members of a particular society speak. However, as we
will see, speech in almost any society can take many very different forms, and just what
forms we should choose to discuss when we attempt to describe the language of a society
may prove to be a contentious matter. Sometimes too a society may be plurilingual; that is,
many speakers may use more than one language, however we define language. We should
also note that our definitions of language and society are not independent: the definition of
language includes in it a reference to society (Wardaugh, 2006).

Lesson 1: Why study language?: Nature, Characteristics, and Views

The Nature of Language and Linguistics

Language is God’s special gift to mankind. Without language human civilization, as we now
know it, would have remained an impossibility. Language is ubiquitous. It is present
everywhere––in our thoughts and dreams, prayers and meditations, relations and
communication. Besides being a means of communication, and storehouse of knowledge, it is
an instrument of thinking as well as a source of delight (e.g. singing). It transfers knowledge
from one person to another and from one generation to another. Language is also the maker
or unmaker of human relationships. It is the use of language that ‘Italics a life bitter or sweet.
Without language man would have remained only a dumb animal. It is our ability to
communicate through words that makes us different from animals. Because of its
omnipresence, language is often taken for granted.

Definition of Language
Since linguistics is the study of language, it is imperative for linguist to know what language
is. Language is a very complex human phenomenon; all attempts to define it have proved
inadequate. In a nut-shell, language is an ‘organised noise’ used in actual social situations.
That is why it has also been defined as ‘contextualised systematic sound‘.

In order to understand a term like life, one has to talk of the properties or characteristics of
living beings (e.g. motion, reproduction, respiration, growth, power of self-healing, excretion,
nutrition, mortality, etc. etc.). Similarly, the term language can be understood better in terms
of its properties or characteristics. Some linguists, however, have been trying to define
language in their own ways even though all these definitions have been far from satisfactory.
Here are some of these definitions:

1. Language is a symbol system based on pure or arbitrary conventions... infinitely

extendable and modifiable according to the changing needs and conditions of the
speakers. (Robins)
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According to this definition, language is a symbol system. Every languages selects

some symbols for its selected sounds. The English sound /k/ for example has the
symbol k for it. These symbols form the alphabet of the language and join in different
combinations to form meaningful words.

The system talked of here is purely arbitrary in the sense that there is no one to one
correspondence between the structure of a word and the thing it stands for. The
combination p.e.n., for example stands, in English, for an instrument used for writing.
Why could it not be e.p.n. or n.e.p.? Well, it could also be e.p.n. or n.e.p. and there is
nothing sacrosanct about the combination p.e.n. except that it has now become a
convention—a convention that cannot be easily changed.

As stated here, language conventions are not easily changed, yet it is not impossible to
do so. Language is infinitely modifiable and extendable. Words go on changing
meanings and new words continue to be added to language with the changing needs of
the community using it.

2. Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating

ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.
(Sapir)

There are two terms in this definition that call for discussion: human and non-
instinctive. Language, as Sapir rightly said, is human. Only humans possess language
and all normal humans uniformly possess it. Animals do have a communication
system but it is not a developed system. That is why language is said to be species-
specific and species-uniform. Also, language does not pass from a parent to a child. In
this sense it is non-instinctive. A child has to learn language and he/she learns the
language of the society he/she is placed in.

3. Language is the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with

each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols. (Hall)

This definition rightly gives more prominence to the fact that language is primarily
speech produced by oral-auditory symbols. A speaker produces some string of oral
sounds that get conveyed through the air to the speaker who, through his hearing
organs, receives the sound waves and conveys these to the brain that interprets these
symbols to arrive at a meaning.

4. A language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and

constructed out of a finite set of elements. (Noam Chomsky)

Chomsky meant to convey that each sentence has a structure. Human brain is
competent enough to construct different sentences from out of the limited set of
sounds/symbols belonging to a particular language. Human brain is so productive that
a child can at any time produce a sentence that has never been said or heard earlier.

5. A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human

communication. (Wardaugh)
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6. A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social

group cooperates. (Bloch and Trager)

Both the definitions 5 and 6 above prominently point out that language is a system.
Sounds join to form words according to a system. The letters k, n, i, t join to form a
meaningful ‘word knit, whereas combinations like n-k-i-t, t.k.n.i. or i.n.k.t. do not
form any meaningful or sensible combinations. Although initially the formation of
words, as said earlier, is only arbitrary, convention makes them parts of a system.
Words too join to form sentences according to some system. A sentence like: Cricket
is a game of glorious uncertainties is acceptable but one cannot accept a string of
words like: a game is of cricket uncertainties glorious. It is in this sense that language
is said to be a system of systems.

7. Language is undoubtedly a kind of means of communication among human

beings. It consists primarily of vocal sounds. It is articulatory, systematic, symbolic
and arbitrary. (Derbyshire)

Derbyshire, while accepting that language is the property of human beings and that it
is primarily speech, brings out the point that it is an important means of
communication amongst humans. Before the start of civilization, man might have
used the language of signs but it must have had a very limited scope. Language is a
fully developed means of communication with the civilized man who can convey and
receive millions of messages across the universe. An entire civilization depends on
language only. Think of a world without language—man would only continue to be a
denizen of the forest and the caves. Language has changed the entire gamut of human
relations and made it possible for human beings to grow into a human community on
this planet.

Some More Definitions

8. Language is a system of conventional spoken or written symbols by means of
which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture,
communicate. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

9. Languages are the principal systems of communication used by particular

groups of human beings within the particular society (linguistic community) of
which they are members. (Lyons)

Anthropologists regard language as a form of cultural behaviour, sociologists as an

interaction between members of social, city, students of literature as an artistic
medium, philosophers as a means of interpreting human experience, language
teachers as a set of skills. Truly, language is such a complex phenomenon that to
define it in terms of a single level as knowledge, behaviour, skill, habit, an event or an
object, solve the problem of its definition. None of the above definitions are perfect.
Each of them just hints at certain characteristics of language. Hence instead of
defining language, it would he worthwhile to stand its Major characteristics.

Major Characteristics of Language

1) Language is a Means of Communication

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Language is a very important means of communication between humans. A can communicate

his or her ideas, emotions, beliefs or feelings to B as they share a common code that makes
up the language. No doubt, there are many other means of communication used by humans
e.g. gestures, nods, winks, flags, smiles, horns, short-hand, Braille alphabet, mathematical
symbols, Morse code, sirens, sketches, maps, acting, miming, dancing etc. But all these
systems of communication are extremely limited or they too, in turn, depend upon language
only. They are not so flexible, comprehensive, perfect and extensive as language is.
Language is so important a form of communication between humans that it is difficult to
think of a society without language. It gives shape to people’s thoughts and guides and
controls their entire activity. It is a carrier of civilization and culture as human thoughts and
philosophy are conveyed from one generation to the other through the medium of language.
Language is ubiquitous in the sense that it is present everywhere in all activities. It is as
important as the air we breathe and is the most valuable possession of man.

Animals too have their system of communication but their communication is limited to a very
small number of messages, e.g. hunger, fear, and anger. In the case of humans, the situation is
entirely different. Human beings can send an infinite number of messages to their fellow
beings. It is through language that they store knowledge, transfer it to the next generation and
yoke the present, past and the future together.

2) Language is Arbitrary
Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no inherent relation between the words of a
language and their meanings or the ideas conveyed by them (except in the case of
hieroglyphics where a picture of an object may represent the object). There is no reason why
a female adult human being be called a woman in English, aurat in Urdu, Zen in Persian and
Femine in French. Selection of these words in the languages mentioned here is purely
arbitrary, an accident of history. It is just like christening a new born baby who may be
christened John or James. But once a child is given some name in a purely arbitrary manner;
this name gets associated with the child for his entire life and it becomes an important,
established convention. The situation in the case of the language is a similar one. The choice
of a word selected to mean a particular thing or idea is purely arbitrary but once a word is
selected for a particular referent, it comes to stay as such.

It may be noted that had language not been arbitrary, there would have been only one
language in the world.

3) Language is a System of Systems

Language is not an amorphous, a disorganised or a chaotic combination of sounds. Any brick
may be used anywhere in a building, but it is not so with sounds or graphic symbols standing
for the sounds of a language. Sounds are arranged in certain fixed or established, systematic
order to form meaningful units or words. Similarly, words are also arranged in a particular
system to frame acceptable mean-ingful sentences. These systems operate at two levels:
phonological and syntactical.

At the phonological level, for example, sounds of a language appear only in some fixed
combinations. There is no word, for example, that starts with bz–, lr-– or zl– combination.
There is no word that begins with a /ŋ/ sound or ends in a /h/ sound. Similarly words too
combine to form sentences according to certain conventions (i.e. grammatical or structural
rules) of the language. The sentence “The hunter shot the tiger with a gun” is acceptable but
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the sentence “the tiger shot a gun with hunter the” is not acceptable as the word order in the
latter sentence does not conform to the established language conventions.

Language is thus called a system of systems as it operates at the two levels discussed above.
This property of language is also termed duality by some linguists. This makes language a
very complex phenomenon. Every human child has to master the conventions of the language
he or she learns before being able to successfully communicate with other members of the
social group in which he or she is placed.

4) Language is Primarily Vocal

Language is primarily made up of vocal sounds only produced by a physiological articulatory
mechanism in the human body. In the beginning, it must have appeared as vocal sounds only.
Writing must have come much later, as an intelligent attempt to represent vocal sounds.
Writing is only the graphic representation of the sounds of the language. There are a number
of languages which continue to exist, even today, in the spoken form only. They do not have
a written form. A child learns to speak first; writing comes much later. Also, during his life
time, a man speaks much more than he writes. The total quantum of speech is much larger
than the total quantum of written materials.

It is because of these reasons that some linguists say that speech is primary, writing is
secondary. Writing did have one advantage over speech—it could be preserved in books or
records. But, with the invention of magnetic tapes or audio-cassettes, it has lost that
advantage too. The age-old proverb ‘pen is mightier than the sword’ does not hold much
ground when one finds that the spoken words, at the beck and call of a really good orator, can
do much more than a pen. Just think of Mark Antony’s speech in ‘Julius Caesar’ that inspired
the whole mob into action and spurred them on to a mood of frenzy to burn and kill the
enemies of Julius Caesar. A number of modern gadgets like the telephone, the tape recorder,
the Dictaphone, etc. only go to prove the primacy of speech over writing.

5) Language is a Social Phenomenon

Language is a set of conventional communicative signals used by humans for communication
in a community. Language in this sense is a possession of a social group, comprising an
indispensable set of rules which permits its members to relate to each other, to interact with
each other, to co-operate with each other; it is a social institution. Language exists in society;
it is a means of nourishing and developing culture and establishing human relations. It is as a
member of society that a human being acquires a language. We are not born with an instinct
to learn a particular language––English, Russian, Chinese or French. We learn a language as
member of the society using that language, or because we want to understand that society, or
to be understood by that speech-community. If a language is not used in any society, it dies
out.

Language is thus a social event. It can fully be described only if we know all about the people
who are involved in it, their personalities, their beliefs, attitudes, knowledge of the world,
relationship to each other, their social status, what activity they are engaged in, what they are
talking about, what has gone before linguistically and non-linguistically, what happens after,
what they are and a host of other facts about them and the situation they are placed in.

6) Language is Non-instinctive, Conventional

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No language was created in a day out of a mutually agreed upon formula by a group of
humans. Language is the outcome of evolution and convention. Each generation transmits
this convention on to the next. Like all human institutions languages also change and die,
grow and expand. Every language then is a convention in a community. It is non-instinctive
because it is acquired by human beings. Nobody gets a language in heritage; he acquires it,
and everybody has been provided with an innate ability to acquire language. Animals inherit
their system of communication by heredity, humans do not.

7) Language is Systematic
Although language is symbolic, yet its symbols are arranged in a particular system. All
languages have their system of arrangements. Though symbols in each human language are
finite, they can be arranged infinitely; that is to say, we can produce an infinite set of
sentence by a finite set of symbols.

Every language is a system of systems. All languages have phonological and grammatical
systems, and within a system there are several sub-systems. For example, within the
grammatical system we have morphological and syntactic systems, and within these two sub-
systems we have several other systems such as those of plural, of mood, of aspect, of tense,
etc.

8) Language is unique, creative, complex and modifiable

Language is a unique phenomenon of the earth. Other planets do not seem to have any
language, although this fact may be invalidated if we happen to discover a talking generation
on any other planet. But so far there is no evidence of the presence of language on the moon.
Each language is unique in its own sense. By this we do not mean that lan-guages do not have
any similarities or universals. Despite their common features and language, universals, each
language has its peculiarities and distinct features.

Language has creativity and productivity. The structural elements of human language can be
combined to produce new utterances, which neither the speaker nor his hearers may ever
have made or heard before any, listener, yet which both sides understand without difficulty.
Language changes according to the needs of society. Old English is different from modern
English; so is old Urdu different form modern Urdu.

9) Duality
The language that human beings use consists of two sub-systems - sound and meaning. A
finite set of sound units can be grouped and re-gourd into units of meaning. These can be
grouped and re-grouped to generate further functional constituents of the higher hierarchical
order. We can produce sentences through this process of combining units of a different order.
Animal calls donot show such duality, they are unitary.

10) Productivity
A speaker may say something that he has never said before and be understood without
difficulty. Man uses the limited linguistic, resources in order to produce completely novel
ideas and utterances. Fairy tales, animal fables, narratives about alien unheard of happenings
in distant galaxies or nonexistent worlds are perfectly understood by the listeners.

11) Displacement
One can talk about situations, places and objects far removed from one’s present
surroundings and time. We often talk about events that happened long time ago and at a
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distant place ; bombing incident in Ireland’s Londonderry twelve years’ back, for instance; or
the sinking of the Spanish Armada in the sixteenth century. Bees, of course, perform dances
about the source of nectar that is also removed from the place of dance (beehive). But they
cannot convey what happened in the previous season through their dance features. Human
beings, however, can narrate events in which they were not involved.

12) Language is Both Linguistic and Communicative Competence

A language is an abstract set of psychological principles and sociological consideration that
constitute a person’s competence as a speaker in a given situation. “These psychological
principles make available to him an unlimited number of sentences he can draw upon in
concrete; situations and provide him with the ability to understand and create entirely new
sentences. Hence language is not just a verbal behaviour; it is a system of rules establishing
correlations between meanings and sound sequences. It is a set of principles that a speaker
masters; it is not anything that he does. In brief, a language is a code which is different from
the act of encoding; it is a speaker’s linguistic competence rather than his linguistic
performance. But mere linguistic or communicative competence is not enough for
communication; it has to be coupled with communicative competence. This is the view of the
sociolinguists who stress the use of language according to the occasion and context, the
speaker and the listener, the profession and the social status of the speaker and the listener.
That language is the result of social interaction established truth.

13) Language is Human and Structurally Complex

No species other than humans has been endowed with language. Animals cannot acquire
human language because of its complex struc-ture and their physical inadequacies. Animals
do not have the type of brain which the human beings possess and their articulatory organs
are also very much different from those of the human beings. Furthermore any system of
animals communication does not make use of the quality of features, that is, of concurrent
systems of sound and meaning. Human language is open-ended, extendable and modifiable
whereas the animal language is not. The difference between human and animal system of
communication is explained below.

Why study language?

It is hardly a rhetorical question. Most people never formally study language, and they seem
to get along fine. But do they? For example, have you ever arranged to meet someone “next
Tuesday,” only to find that your friend was planning to 2 Chapter 1: Introducing Linguistic
Anthropology show up a week later than you had anticipated? Or why do we need lawyers to
translate a contract for us when the document is written in a language that all parties share?
David Crystal (1971:15) points out that communication between patients and physicians can
be extremely difficult, given the differences in training and perspective of the persons
involved. The doctor often has to take a general phrase, such as “a dull ache in my side,” and
formulate a diagnosis and treatment based solely on this description. And when responding to
what the patient has said, the doctor must choose her words carefully. What a doctor calls a
“benign growth” might be heard as “cancer” by the patient. At school we are confronted with
language problems the minute we walk in the door. Some are obvious: “I can’t understand
Shakespeare. I thought he spoke English. Why is he so difficult?” Other problems are not so
obvious: “What is the difference between who and whom? Doesn’t one make me sound
British?” “Why do I have to say ‘you and I’ instead of ‘me and you’?” Some problems, such
as the subtle sexism found in some textbooks, may be beyond our everyday psychological
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threshold. Problems of ethnicity and community identity can be seen in such controversial
issues as bilingual education or the teaching of Ebonics. Language is involved in a wide
variety of human situations, perhaps every situation. If something permeates every aspect of
human life and is so complex that we cannot fathom its influence, we should study it. The
scientific study of language is one of the keys to understanding much of human behavior. The
study of language will not in itself solve all the world’s problems. It is useful enough to make
people aware that these problems of language exist and that they are widespread and
complex. Besides being of intellectual interest, then, the study of language offers a special
vantage point of “linguistic sensitization” (Crystal 1971:35) to problems that are of concern
to everyone, regardless of discipline and background.

Modern Myths Concerning Language

This may be a good place to provide information about languages in general to set
some basic matters straight. Every human being speaks a language, but what people think
about languages—particularly those about which they know little or nothing—is quite
another matter. Consider the following statements. Which ones do you think are true?

o Almost everywhere in the world, everyone is monolingual or monodialectal,

just as in America.
o Spelling in English is basically phonetic and governed by clear rules.
o Most writing systems in the world are based on some kind of alphabet.
o If you really want to learn Spanish, don’t take a class in school. It is better to
just go, say, to Mexico for a month or two.
o Some languages are naturally harder to learn than others.
o Some languages are naturally more “primitive” than others. Language itself is
not ambiguous; it is people’s misinterpreting things that causes problems.
o Some dialects are, well . . . stupid, demonstrating that a person is uneducated.
The use of language somehow reflects one’s intelligence.
o People who are fluent in another language may not have complete mastery of
their native language.
o The ability to learn a foreign language is a special kind of skill that some of us
have, and others don’t.
o As our grade school teachers taught us, if you want to get it right, go to the
dictionary!
o People who use double negatives (“I don’t need no anthropology classes”) are
really not thinking logically.
o It is easier to learn Chinese if you come from a Chinese family background
than from a European family.
o Languages seem to have special characteristics or personalities: for example,
French is romantic; German is scientific; Russian is soulful; Spanish is hot-
blooded; Italian is emotional; Chinese is simple and straightforward; Japanese
is mysterious, spiritual, and Zen-like; English is logical; Greek is
philosophical, and so on.
o All Native Americans generally speak the same language; that’s why they
could communicate with each other using sign language (like in the movies).
o The more words you know, the better you know your language.

Most anthropologists and linguists would say that all of these statements are suspect, if not
outright wrong. Let us briefly consider a few of these misconceptions concerning languages
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in more detail because they appear to be widespread, even among those who are otherwise
well educated and knowledgeable. These misconceptions we can refer to as myths, in the
sense of being unfounded, fictitious, and false beliefs or ideas.

1. Primitive Languages . . . Or Not?

The most common misconception is the belief that unwritten languages are “primitive,”
whatever that may mean. Those who think that “primitive” languages still exist invariably
associate them with societies that laypeople refer to as “primitive”—especially the very few
remaining bands of hunter-gatherers. There are of course differences in cultural complexity
between hunting-and-collecting bands and small tribal societies, on the one hand, and modern
industrial societies, on the other, but no human beings today are “primitive” in the sense of
being less biologically evolved than others. One would be justified in talking about a
primitive language only if referring to the language of, for example, the extinct forerunner of
Homo sapiens of a half million years ago. Even though we do not know on 4 Chapter 1:
Introducing Linguistic Anthropology direct evidence the nature of the system of oral
communication of Homo erectus, it is safe to assume that it must have been much simpler
than languages of the past several thousand years and therefore primitive in that it was
rudimentary, or represented an earlier stage of development.

Why are certain languages mistakenly thought to be primitive? There are several reasons.
Some people consider other languages ugly or “primitive sounding” if those languages make
use of sounds or sound combinations they find indistinct or “inarticulate” because the sounds
are greatly different from those of the languages they themselves speak. Such a view is based
on the ethnocentric attitude that the characteristics of one’s own language are obviously
superior. But words that seem unpronounceable to speakers of one language—and are
therefore considered obscure, indistinct, or even grotesque—are easily acquired by even the
youngest native speakers of the language in which they occur. To a native speaker of English,
the Czech word scvrnkls “you flicked off (something) with your finger” looks quite strange,
and its pronunciation may sound odd and even impossible because there is no vowel among
the eight consonants; for native speakers of Czech, of course, scvrnkls is just another word.
Which speech sounds are used and how they are combined to form words and utterances vary
from one language to the next, and speakers of no language can claim that their language has
done the selecting and combining better than another.

2. The Grammar of Non – Western Languages

Another myth has to do with grammar. Some think that languages of peoples whose societies
are not urbanized and industrialized have “little grammar,” meaning that such languages have
few, if any, of the sort of grammar rules students learn in school. According to this
misconception, members of simple societies use language in rather random fashion, without
definite pattern. To put it differently, grammar in the sense of rules governing the proper use
of cases, tenses, moods, aspects, and other grammatical categories is erroneously thought to
be characteristic of “civilized” languages only. Once again, nothing could be further from the
truth. Some languages have less “grammar” than others, but the degree of grammatical
complexity is not a measure of how effective a particular language is. What sorts of
grammars, then, characterize languages spoken by members of tribal societies? Some of these
languages have a fairly large and complicated grammatical apparatus, whereas others are less
grammatically complex—a diversity similar to that found in Indo-European languages.
Edward Sapir’s description of the morphology of Takelma, based on material collected in
1906, takes up 238 pages (Sapir 1922). In Takelma, the now extinct language spoken at one
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time in southwestern Oregon, verbs were particularly highly inflected, making use of
prefixes, suffixes, infixes, vowel changes, consonant changes, and reduplication (functional
repetition of a part of a word). Every verb had forms for six tense-modes, including potential
(“I can . . . ” or “I could . . . ”), inferential (“it seems that . . . ” or “I presume that . . . ”), and
present and future imperatives (the future imperative expressing a command to be carried out
at some stated or implied time in the future). Among the other grammatical categories and
forms marked in verbs were person, number, voice (active or passive), conditional, locative,
instrumental, aspect (denoting repeated, continuing, and other types of temporal activity), and
active and passive participles. Sapir’s description of verb morphology fills more than 147
pages—yet is not to Modern Myths Concerning Languages 5 be taken as exhaustive.
Although the brief characterization here is far from representative of Takelma verb
morphology, it clearly indicates that Takelma grammar was anything but simple. A similar
and more detailed demonstration of morphological complexity could easily be provided for
hundreds of other so-called primitive languages.

3. Vocabulary Deficiencies
When it comes to the vocabulary of languages, is it true, as some suppose, that the
vocabularies of so-called primitive languages are too small and inadequate to account for the
nuances of the physical and social universes of their speakers? Here the answer is somewhat
more complicated. Because the vocabulary of a language serves only the members of the
society who speak it, the question to be asked should be: Is a particular vocabulary sufficient
to serve the sociocultural needs of those who use the language? When put like this, it follows
that the language associated with a relatively simple culture would have a smaller vocabulary
than the language of a complex society. Why, for example, should the Inuit people (often
known by the more pejorative term “Eskimo”) have words for chlorofluoromethane, dune
buggy, lambda particle, or tae kwon do when these substances, objects, concepts, and
activities play no part in their culture? By the same token, however, the language of a tribal
society would have elaborate lexical domains for prominent aspects of the culture even
though these do not exist in complex societies. The Agta of the Philippines, for example, are
reported to have no fewer than thirty-one verbs referring to types of fishing (Harris 1989:72).
For Aguaruna, the language serving a manioc-cultivating people of northwestern Peru, Brent
Berlin (1976) isolated some 566 names referring to the genera of plants in the tropical rain
forest area in which they live. Many of these genera are further subdivided to distinguish
among species and varieties—for example, the generic term ipák “achiote or annatto tree
(Bixa orellana)” encompasses baéŋ ipák, čamíŋ ipák, hémpe ipák, and šíŋ ipák, referring
respectively to “kidney-achiote,” “yellow achiote,” “hummingbird achiote,” and “genuine
achiote.” Very few Americans, unless they are botanists, farmers, or nature lovers, know the
names of more than about forty plants. Lexical specialization in nonscientific domains is of
course to be found in complex societies as well. The Germans who live in Munich are known
to enjoy their beer; accordingly, the terminology for the local varieties of beer is quite
extensive. Per Hage (1972) defined ten “core” terms for Munich beers according to strength,
color, fizziness, and aging. But when local connoisseurs also wish to account for the degree
of clarity (clear as against cloudy) and the Munich brewery that produced a particular beer,
the full list now exceeds seventy terms. Such a discriminating classification of local beers is
likely to impress even the most experienced and enthusiastic American beer drinker.

Some Misconceptions about Language

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Having discussed the major characteristics of language, it would be proper to hint at some
major misconceptions which ate cherished by otherwise well-informed people. These
misconceptions arise because of improper and inadequate reflection on the nature and
structure of language. For some people, language is so familiar an object that it is not worthy
of reflection and investigation. For others, reflection about lan-guage would only mean the
vaguely understood statements made in a grammar class which they attended sometime in
their schools or colleges. For the linguist, however, both these views are unacceptable. He
regards the study of language as essential and exciting. He wants to study lan-guage to find
out what it is like, what its parts or units or elements or components are like, and bow they
are combined together. He is interested in discovering its structure. He speculates about
language then he analyzes and describes it. If need be he compares it with other languages,
and discovers its core grammar.

More than this the linguist raises very many pertinent and valid questions to be answered by
researchers in the future. He raise the questions such as those listed here. Does every linguist
analyze a language into the same number and kind of parts? What is the relationship of one
analysis to another when there is more than one way of analyzing a language? Out of the
existing analysis and descriptions which is the better one? How is a language learnt? What is
the difference between the first language acquisition and the second language learning? Why
is second language learning difficult? Can the knowledge of one language help a person in
acquiring the knowledge of the other language? How, why and to what extent does the
learner’s knowledge of the mother tongue inter­fere with the learning of a second language?
Are there sonic people who do not know even a single language? What happens to a child
when he is brought up in isolation? Is there a particular age at which children start the process
of learning a language and another by which they complete it? Why can’t animals imitate
human language? What is the difference between human language and animal system of
communication? What are the similarities and dis-similarities between one lan-guage and
another? Are there some language universals among the languages of the world? By which
they complete it? Why can’t animals imitate human language? What is the difference
between human language and animal system of communication? What are the similarities and
dis-similarities between one language and another? Are there some language universals
among the languages of the world?

A linguist tries to ask these and similar other questions. It is not incumbent upon him to find
out satisfactory answers to all the questions. It is a contribution of no little value to raise
questions that arc valid and important. In all sciences, raising questions is more important
then sun-plying answers to the questions previously raised. This is how scientific inquiry
progresses. If a question is raised today, some future linguist will find out not only its answer
but also the ways and means to analyze and study languages scientifically, ask valid
questions and raise new controversies.

There are misconceptions of yet graver magnitude than those mentioned in the preceding
paragraphs. The common ones are, that written form is more prestigious than the spoken
form; that literary language is the only language; that one language is superior to another; that
traditional alphabet is adequate; that the job of a linguist is not to describe hut. to prescribe
the grammatical rules to preserve the purity of a language that children learn language merely
by imitation; that language is an in-stinctive and inherited property of man; that there is little
in common between the languages of the world; that there are no language universals at all;
that no two languages have any similarities; that the purity of a language should somehow be
preserved and that historical forms of usage are to be preferred and remembered whereas
 WEST VISAYAS STATE UNIVERSITY/2024

contemporary usage should be ignored as unworthy of attention. Even wore is the

misconception that only a historical treatment of language is the right treatment and that a
language should riot be studied isolating it as it were, at a particular stage or point of time,
and that what one school of linguists se the absolute and the only truth and what the other
says is a falsehood and heresy. Some other misconceptions are that all languages can he
ana-lyzed as one would analyze European languages such as Latin and French; that Greek
and Latin are ideal languages; that sounds a particular language are in themselves easy or
difficult; and that languages are static. The earlier a student of language removes such
misconception, the easier it is for him to acquire wholesome and scientific attitude towards
language.

Task:
1. In 200 words, discuss the nature and characteristics of language. (20 points)
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2. As future English teacher, what do you think is the relevance of studying language in
language teaching?(20 points)

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 WEST VISAYAS STATE UNIVERSITY/2024

References:

https://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/the-nature-of-language-and-linguistics/

Stanlaw, J.; Adachi, N.; and Salzmann, Z. (2017). Language, culture, and society: an
introduction to linguistic anthropology. New York, NY: Routledge