Lecture: Language and Communication
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 4
Opening
Picture a group chat you've joined late. Every word is in a language you speak, and you still can't follow it. The abbreviations, the inside jokes, the nicknames all mean something to everyone but you. A week later, you're using them yourself without thinking. That small experience holds most of what this lecture is about.
You'll meet these ideas wherever you work with people. A nursing student explains a procedure one way to a colleague and another way to a worried family. A business major talks differently in a job interview than in a team chat. A future teacher stands in front of students who bring several dialects and languages into one room. Each of them is switching styles, and each of them is listening for words that carry a shared world.
In Week 1 you met the anthropological perspective. In Week 2 you learned that culture is learned, shared, and symbolic. In Week 3 you learned fieldwork, and you marked the insider words in an interview with a market vendor. This lecture listens to those words again, this time as language.
Here's the plan. I'll start with what makes language different from communication. Then we'll hear the vendor's words as language, shift between dialects and registers, and weigh a famous debate about language and thought. We'll finish with messages that use no words at all, and with languages that are changing or at risk. Next, in Week 5, Making a Living, the course turns to how people feed themselves.
1. Language and communication
Your phone buzzes twice, and you know a message came in. A dog barks at the door, and the whole house knows someone is outside. A friend raises an eyebrow across a room, and you know exactly what they mean. All three pass information along. None of them is language.
Here are the two terms. Communication is any passing of information from one living thing to another, by sound, sight, touch, or smell; many animals communicate without using language. Language is a symbolic system of learned words and rules that lets people say and understand an unlimited number of new things, including things not present. So language is one kind of communication. It isn't another name for it.
What makes it special? Hockett wrote an article in 1960 called "The Origin of Speech." He called the special features design features: the features that set human language apart from other animal communication. This course teaches five of them, and I'll give you each one with a plain test.
Arbitrariness means there is no natural link between a word and its meaning. Nothing about the sound of "apple" is red or sweet. The meaning is set by the people who use the word.
Displacement lets you talk about things that are not here and not now. You can describe a trip you took last year or a plan for next month.
Productivity lets you make and understand sentences you've never heard before. You've understood several brand-new sentences in this lecture already.
Traditional transmission, often called cultural transmission, means a language is learned from other speakers, not inherited. A baby raised among speakers of any language learns that language.
Duality of patterning means a small set of sounds that mean nothing on their own combine into a huge number of words. "Bell" and "sell" differ by one sound, and that one change makes a new word.
Now hold the phone's buzz up against those five. Two buzzes can't talk about last year, can't make a new sentence, and weren't learned from other speakers. That's communication, and only communication.
Pause and try this. A friend texts you a full sentence about a concert they went to last month. Which design feature lets them talk about something that isn't here and isn't now?
Think about time and place in that message.
Here's the answer. That's displacement. The concert is over and far away, yet the sentence carries it to you.
So the wrong turn to avoid is treating language and communication as synonyms. Communication is the big category. Language is one special kind inside it.
2. The field words as language
Let's go back to the course's illustrative market and the interview from Week 3. It's made up for teaching, with an unnamed vendor who has sold at the market for 20 years. The interview has 5 questions and 5 answers.
Last time you counted the insider words. There were 4 of them, and here they are with their meanings. "Regulars" are buyers a vendor knows by sight and greets by their usual order. "Seconds" are bruised or misshapen produce sold at a lower price. "The swap" is a vendor-to-vendor trade of goods of matched value, with no money. And "the bell" is the manager's 8:00 a.m. signal that selling may begin.
Here's something new. 4 of the 5 answers carry one of those words. Divide 4 by 5, and you get 0.8, or 80 percent of the answers. Only the last answer, about the vendor's sore back, has none. That tells you how much of market life is packed into its own words.
Now watch the design features at work. Field-note entry 5, at 8:35 a.m., at the produce stall, records a bin of bruised tomatoes marked "Seconds," at 2 dollars a pound. That's half the price of the display tomatoes, so the display tomatoes cost 2 times 2, or 4 dollars a pound. A pound of seconds saves the buyer 2 dollars.
But nothing about the sound of "seconds" means bruised. Another market could call the same bin something else entirely. That's arbitrariness. A first-time buyer has to be told what the word means.
The vendor's last answer talks about years of hauling crates. Those years aren't here and aren't now, so that's displacement. And a new vendor learns "the swap" from the other vendors by working beside them. That's traditional transmission.
There's a wrong turn here too. It's tempting to think a word fits its meaning naturally, so "seconds" was the natural name. But a newcomer can't guess it. Every insider word needs a gloss.
Pause and try this. A new vendor joins the market and hears "Bell's rung!" for the first time. Which design feature explains why the new vendor has to learn what the call means?
Ask whether the sound itself carries the meaning.
Here's the answer. Arbitrariness. Nothing in the sound means "start selling," so the meaning is a convention the vendors share and teach.
Keep those four words close. They come back in almost every part of this lecture.
3. Dialect, register, and code-switching
Think about how you talk in a job interview, and then how you text a close friend that evening. In the interview, every sentence is full and careful. In the text, you might send three letters and an emoji. Both are you, in one language, in one afternoon.
Anthropologists name the varieties inside a language. A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language; every dialect follows its own rules, so a nonstandard dialect is not broken or lazy language. A register is the style of speaking or writing a speaker shifts into for a particular setting or listener, such as a job interview or a text to a friend. A dialect follows who you are and where you grew up. A register follows where you are and who's listening.
The market shows a register shift. In field-note entry 4, at 8:20 a.m., a vendor greets a shopper with "The usual?" That greeting is 2 words. The vendor bags two pounds of apples before the shopper asks. Now, in an illustrative contrast, picture the same vendor with a first-time buyer. The vendor names the produce, explains that seconds are bruised tomatoes at half price, and says the price out loud. The shorthand gives way to the gloss a newcomer needs. Same vendor, same language, different register.
Now the dialect idea. People often call a dialect they didn't grow up with "wrong" or "lazy." Linguists find the opposite. Every dialect has regular patterns of sound, words, and sentences that its speakers follow without thinking. Calling a dialect lazy judges it by another dialect's rules. That's the ethnocentrism you met in Week 2, aimed at speech.
Speakers also move between varieties inside one conversation. Code-switching is moving between two languages, or between two varieties of one language, within a single conversation. Picture an illustrative family that speaks two languages at home. At dinner, the parents and teenagers talk about school in one language. When a grandparent sits down, everyone moves into the grandparent's first language. The switches follow the listener and the topic. They're a skill, not a slip.
Pause and try this. The vendor says "The usual?" to a regular and gives a full explanation to a first-time buyer. Is that a change of dialect or a change of register?
Think about what changed: the speaker's background, or the listener.
Here's the answer. It's a change of register. The vendor's dialect stays the same; the style shifts to fit a listener who doesn't share the market's shorthand.
4. Linguistic relativity
Here's an old and lively question. If your language has a word for something, do you notice it more? And if your language lacks a word, can you still think about that thing?
That question has a name. Linguistic relativity is the idea, associated with Sapir and Whorf, that the language a person speaks shapes their thought; anthropologists debate how large the effect is. Whorf's essays were collected and published after his death.
The whole debate is about size, so it comes in two forms. The strong form of linguistic relativity is the claim that language determines thought, so speakers cannot perceive or think what their language has no word for; the evidence does not support it. The weak form of linguistic relativity is the claim that language influences habits of attention, sorting, and memory without fixing what a speaker can think; it has limited support.
Let me give each side its best case. Words are tools for sorting the world, and people practice the sorts their language makes. Someone who uses a term every day may notice its category faster. That's the weak form. But people learn new words, borrow them, and describe anything with a longer phrase. If language set the limits of thought, nobody could translate or learn a second language. That's why the strong form fails.
Try both on the market's word. The word "seconds" may help a vendor sort bruised tomatoes fast. That's a habit of attention, the weak form. But a first-time buyer who lacks the word still sees the bruises. The word doesn't decide what anyone can perceive, so the strong form doesn't hold here.
The wrong turn is hearing linguistic relativity as "language determines thought." That's only the strong form, and it isn't supported. The better question is always how large the effect is.
Pause and try this. Someone says, "People without a word for seconds can't see that a tomato is bruised." Which form of linguistic relativity is that, and does the evidence back it?
Ask whether the claim is about influence or about control.
Here's the answer. That's the strong form, and it isn't supported. A buyer without the word still sees the bruise; at most, the word helps a vendor sort faster.
5. Nonverbal communication and proxemics
Stand in a short coffee-shop line, in an illustrative scene. Most people leave a gap between themselves and the person in front. If someone steps right up behind you, you feel it at once, though nobody said a word. Now picture a packed stadium crowd chanting for its team. Strangers stand shoulder to shoulder, and nobody minds.
Both scenes send messages without words. Nonverbal communication is messages sent without words, through gesture, facial expression, posture, and the use of space; their meanings are learned and differ across cultures. One part of it has its own name. Proxemics is the cultural use of personal space, such as how close people stand when they talk or wait. Hall named it in a book from 1966, The Hidden Dimension.
Read the two scenes the way you'd read a field note. What was observed: a gap in the line, and closeness in the stadium. What it might mean: respect for a stranger's space in one setting, shared excitement in the other. The concept: the right distance is a learned expectation for a setting, not a fixed rule of nature. And the same person may keep both rules on the same day.
Gestures work the same way. A hand movement that means "come here" or "all good" in one community can mean something else, or nothing, in another. So a careful fieldworker records the movement first and asks what it means before assuming.
The wrong turn is thinking gestures are universal, that a wave or a thumbs-up means the same thing everywhere. Gestures feel natural, like part of the body. But they're learned, the way words are learned.
Pause and try this. Why can people stand pressed together in a stadium but feel crowded when a stranger stands that close in a coffee-shop line?
Think about what sets the right distance.
Here's the answer. Proxemics: the comfortable distance is a learned expectation that changes with the setting, so the same closeness reads as fine in one place and rude in another.
6. Language change and endangerment
Read a letter your grandparents wrote as teenagers, and some words will look odd. Scroll back through your own old messages, and some slang will already feel dated. Every language changes as its speakers live. A language that changes isn't decaying. Both the older words and the newer ones follow rules.
Loss is a different matter. Language endangerment is the situation of a language whose speakers are few or are shifting to another language, so that it may stop being spoken. Thousands of languages are spoken around the world. Counts differ by source, so the course says the figure in words and never treats it as exact. Many of those languages have few remaining speakers.
Communities are working to bring their languages back. Language revitalization is a community's work to bring a language back into everyday use, for example by teaching it to children and new speakers.
Why does an anthropologist care? Think back to the market. "Seconds," "the swap," and "the bell" hold a piece of the vendors' shared world. A whole language holds a community's words for its whole world. When a language stops being spoken, all of its insider words go with it. That's why many communities treat their language as part of who they are.
The wrong turn here is treating the count of the world's languages as one exact, settled number. A single figure looks like a fact. But sources draw their counts differently, which is why the course never keys one.
Pause and try this. Teenagers in a neighborhood use a newer word for something their grandparents call by an older word. Is that language endangerment?
Ask whether the language is losing its speakers.
Here's the answer. No. That's ordinary language change, a sign of a living language; endangerment means fewer and fewer people speak the language at all.
Closing
Let's pull it together. Communication is any passing of information, and language is one special kind, marked by design features such as arbitrariness, displacement, productivity, traditional transmission, and duality of patterning. The vendor's 4 insider words show those features at work, and every one needs a gloss. A dialect is a variety of a language, every dialect follows rules, and a register is the style you shift into for a setting, as the vendor does between "The usual?" and a full explanation. Code-switching moves between languages inside one conversation. The strong form of linguistic relativity isn't supported, and the weak form has limited support. Proxemics shows that personal space is learned, and gestures aren't universal. And every language changes, while many are endangered and being revitalized by their communities.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then in Week 5, Making a Living, the course begins a new unit on how people feed themselves.
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