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Week 4 · Module overview

Week 4 — Language and Communication

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Welcome to your Week 4 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A nursing student explaining a procedure to a worried family and a business major shifting style between a job interview and a team chat both use this week's ideas.

In plain language

People everywhere send each other messages, but humans also have language (a learned system of words and rules that lets us say things no one has said before). This week you will see what sets language apart from communication (any passing of information, which many animals do too). You will learn why there is no such thing as a "broken" dialect (a regional or social variety of a language), and why you change your register (your style of speaking for a setting) many times a day. You will weigh a famous debate about whether your language shapes your thinking, notice the messages people send without words, and learn why many of the world's languages are at risk. By the end, you will be able to listen to everyday talk the way an anthropologist does.

  • Already covered: Week 3 taught fieldwork, field notes, and the vendor's emic terms.
  • This week: design features, register and dialect, linguistic relativity, and messages without words.
  • How they connect: this week hears the vendor's words as language.
  • Where we're going next: Week 5, Making a Living.

Focus

What makes human language more than communication, and what do our words and ways of speaking carry?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] tell language from communication using five design features
  • [ ] explain why an insider word like "seconds" needs a gloss
  • [ ] tell a register shift from a dialect, and spot code-switching
  • [ ] weigh the strong and weak forms of linguistic relativity

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 4 (about 30 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
  2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
  3. Do the Ethnography Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: explain why a vendor's shift from "The usual?" to a full explanation is a change of register.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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