12 Chapter 12: Language and Culture, Language and Context, Language and Thought

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

• Discuss the cultural significance of lexical differences between languages and identify focal vocabularies you know
• Describe the concept of linguistic relativity and provide examples of how it works
• Explain how context and the cooperative principle help show how conversations work

The Importance of Human Language to Human Culture

Human language can be considered a culture’s most important feature since complex human culture could not exist without language and language could not exist without culture. They are inseparable because language encodes culture and provides the means through which culture is shared and passed from one generation to the next. Humans think in language and do cultural activities using language. It surrounds our every waking and sleeping moments, although we do not usually think about its importance. For that matter, humans do not think about their immersion in culture either, much as fish, if they were endowed with intelligence, would not think much about the water that surrounds them. Without language and culture, humans would be just another great ape. Anthropologists must have skills in linguistics so they can learn the languages and cultures of the people they study.

All human languages are symbolic systems that make use of symbols to convey meaning. A symbol is anything that serves to refer to something else, but has a meaning that cannot be guessed because there is no obvious connection between the symbol and its referent. This feature of human language is called arbitrariness. For example, many cultures assign meanings to certain colors, but the meaning for a particular color may be completely different from one culture to another. Western cultures like the United States use the color black to represent death, but in China it is the color white that symbolizes death. White in the United States symbolizes purity and is used for brides’ dresses, but no Chinese woman would ever wear white to her wedding. Instead, she usually wears red, the color of good luck. Words in languages are symbolic in the same way. The word key in English is pronounced exactly the same as the word qui in French, meaning “who,” and ki in Japanese, meaning “tree.” One must learn the language in order to know what any word means.

Lexical Differences among Languages

Language has endowed humans with an amazing capacity, one that to date has only been found among human beings. Ove generations, they can invent a very large store of labels for individuals and categories of things in the world (and even categories of things not in the world). Equally important, they can pass on this store of labels to their children. The lexicon, or vocabulary, of a language is an inventory of the items a culture talks about and has categorized in order to make sense of the world and deal with it effectively. For example, modern life is dictated for many by the need to travel by some kind of vehicle—cars, trucks, SUVs, trains, buses, etc. We therefore have thousands of words to talk about them, including types of vehicles, models, brands, or parts.

Now let’s think about various groups of humans living in different parts of the world with little to no contact with each other. Each group will experience a different environment, containing its own potentially unique set of animals and plants and its own climate and geology. Each group will invent words for the things in its environment that matter to it, and we will naturally expect to find words for different things in each group. Modern languages also differ from each other in this way. Amharic has a word for hippopotamus because hippopotamuses are found in Ethiopia, but Inuktitut does not because hippopotamuses are not found (normally) in northern Canada.

We can also expect the cultures of the different groups to differ. This will result in several differences in their store of words. First, certain naturally occurring things will become more important. A group that makes pots out of clay will want a word for clay. Second, as culture develops, there will be more and more cultural artifacts, that is, objects produced by the members of the culture. Naturally the group will want words for these as well, and if they are not producing them, they will not have such words. Finally, culture results in abstractions, concepts that do not represent (physical) things in the world at all: political units, social relationships, rituals, laws, and unseen forces. These will vary a great deal in their details from group to group, and we can expect these differences to be reflected in the words that each group comes up with. Modern languages differ from each other in all of these ways. Amharic has the word agelgil meaning a leather-covered basket that Ethiopians traditionally used to carry prepared food when they traveled. Other languages don’t have a word for this concept, nor the basket itself. Similarly, English now has the word nerd to refer to a particular kind of person who is fascinated with technology and lacking in social skills. This is a relatively new concept, specific to certain cultures, and there is no word for it in most languages.

The most important aspects of each culture are reflected in the lexicon of its language. Sets of words that are connected with important aspects of culture are known as focal vocabularies. Among the societies living in the islands of Oceania in the Pacific, fish have great economic and cultural importance. This is reflected in the rich vocabulary that describes all aspects of the fish and the environments that islanders depend on for survival. For example, in Palau there are about 1,000 fish species and Palauan fishermen knew, long before biologists existed, details about the anatomy, behavior, growth patterns and habitat of most of them—in many cases far more than modern biologists know even today. Much of fish behavior is related to the tides and the phases of the moon. Throughout Oceania, the names given to certain days of the lunar months reflect the likelihood of successful fishing. For example, in the Caroline Islands, the name for the night before the new moon is otolol, which means “to swarm.” The name indicates that the best fishing days cluster around the new moon. In Hawai`i and Tahiti two sets of days have names containing the particle `ole or `ore; one occurs in the first quarter of the moon and the other in the third quarter. The same name is given to the prevailing wind during those phases. The words mean “nothing,” because those days were considered bad for fishing as well as planting.

Finally, we can also expect the store of words to vary among the individuals within each group and each language. As culture develops, experts emerge, people who specialize in agriculture or pottery or music or religion. Each of these specialist groups will invent words that are not known to everyone speaking the language. Modern languages have this property. A carpenter knows what a hasp is; you might have no idea. I know what a morpheme is because I’ve studied linguistics, but I don’t expect most English speakers to know this.

This brings up an important distinction, that between the words that a language has and the words that an individual speaker of the language knows. Because some speakers of languages such as Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, and Japanese have traveled all over the world and studied the physical environments as well as the cultures they have found, these languages have words for concepts such as hippopotamus and polygamy, concepts that are not part of the everyday life of speakers of these languages. Thus, it is almost certainly true that Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, and Japanese have more words than Amharic, Tzeltal, Lingala, and Inuktitut. But this fact is of little interest to linguistic anthropologists and other language scientists, who are concerned with what individual people know about their language (and sometimes other languages) and how they use this knowledge. There is no evidence that individual speakers of English or Japanese know any more words than individual speakers of Amharic or Tzeltal.

Furthermore, if a language is lacking a word for a particular concept, it is a simple matter for the speakers of the language to add a new word when they become familiar with the concept. One way for this to happen is through semantic extension of an existing word. Another way is to create a new word out of combinations of old words or pieces of old words. A third, very common, way is to simply borrow the word from another language. Thus English speakers borrowed the word algebra from Arabic; Japanese speakers borrowed their word for “bread,” pan, from Portuguese; Amharic speakers borrowed their word for “automobile,” mekina, from Italian; and Lingala speakers borrowed their word for “chair,” kiti, from Swahili.

Linguistic Relativity

Anthropologists need to learn the language of the culture they are studying in order to understand the worldview of its speakers. A linguistic anthropologist from the first half of the 20th century, Bejamin Whorf, believed that a language affects culture as well, by actually influencing how its speakers think. His hypothesis proposed that the words and the structures of a language influence how its speakers think about the world, how they behave, and ultimately the culture itself, an idea known as linguistic relativity. Simply stated, Whorf believed that human beings see the world the way they do because the specific languages they speak influence them to do so. He developed this idea through both his work with Native American Languages and his work as a chemical engineer for the Hartford Insurance Company investigating the causes of fires.

One of his cases while working for the insurance company was a fire at a business where there were a number of gasoline drums. Those that contained gasoline were surrounded by signs warning employees to be cautious around them and to avoid smoking near them. The workers were always careful around those drums. On the other hand, empty gasoline drums were stored in another area, but employees were more careless there. Someone tossed a cigarette or lighted match into one of the “empty” drums, it went up in flames, and started a fire that burned the business to the ground. Whorf theorized that the meaning of the word “empty” implied to the worker that “nothing” was there to be cautious about so the worker behaved accordingly. Unfortunately, an “empty” gasoline drum may still contain fumes, which are more flammable than the liquid itself.

Whorf’s (1944) linguistic anthropology studies involved working with speakers of Native American languages, including Hopi. The Hopi language is quite different from English in many ways. For example, let’s look at how the Hopi language deals with time. Western languages (and cultures) view time as a flowing river in which we are being carried continuously away from a past, through the present, and into a future. Our verb systems reflect that concept with specific tenses for past, present, and future. We often think of this concept of time as universal, that all humans see it the same way, but that isn’t true. A Hopi speaker has very different ideas and the structure of their language both reflects and shapes the way they think about time. The Hopi language has no present, past, or future tense. Instead, it divides the world into what Whorf called the manifested and unmanifest domains. The manifested domain deals with the physical universe, including the present, the immediate past and near future; the verb system uses the same basic structure for all of them. The unmanifest domain involves the remote past and the distant future, as well as the world of desires, thought, and life forces. The set of verb forms dealing with this domain are consistent for all of these areas, and are different from the manifested ones. Also, there are no words for hours, minutes, or days of the week. It is not that Hopi-speakers had no conception of time, just that their conception was very different from the typical English-speaking American version.

Parts of Whorf’s hypothesis were controversial from the beginning, and still are among some linguists. Since he suggested it, linguistic relativity has also been balanced by work identifying linguistic universals, aspects of human language common to all languages based upon our biological and cognitive capacities for language. Universalism draws especially on the linguistic work of Noam Chomsky. Still, in the past several decades a number of studies have been done that support Whorf’s ideas. They have shown that language can predispose (but not determine!) a speaker’s world view, attitudes, and patterns of thought on a variety of human experiences.

For more on linguistic relativity, you can check out this talk by Lera Boroditsky:

Pragmatics: Meaning in Context

Recall that pragmatics in linguistic anthropology captures the idea that the meaning of sentence is often connected with the context in which it is uttered. Those contextual meanings are often linked to culture.  It is for this reason that most linguistic anthropologists focus on language use.

Consider the following phrase:

Here, it’s not very likely that the speaker is asking about the literal meaning of this sentence when they say, “What do you mean?” — the compositional sense of the sentence is pretty clear: an individual named Mounissa exchanged some amount of money for strawberries, and these strawberries weighed 10lbs total. Instead, a natural understanding of what is meant by meaning here is about the implicature the sentence carries. An implicature is a meaning that is suggested by a sentence, based on the context. So if you know that Mounissa loves jam, Mounissa bought 10lbs of strawberries might imply that Mounissa is making strawberry jam — lots of it. Importantly, an implicature is not an entailment, the “literal”, “surface” meaning of a sentence, so the implicature of any particular sentence can change depending on the context. So in another world, maybe Mounissa isn’t making strawberry jam; maybe she’s making a bunch of strawberry lemonade at a farmer’s market, or throwing a strawberry-based food fight.

There is often a conversational logic behind why certain implicatures arise in discourse. Let’s start with the following example:

Here, Bo creates an implicature or they imply that content. Aya makes an inference or they infer that content. The basic idea of why we get this implicature in this context is that if Raj had fed the cat and cleaned the litterbox, Bo would’ve said so. He didn’t in this case, so Aya can infer that only Raj fed the cat is true, and that Raj cleaned the litterbox is false.

The Cooperative Principle

The way of analyzing how implicatures arise in discourse is called the Cooperative Principle, proposed by philosopher Paul Grice. He proposed that one way of explaining how we get implicatures in a conversation is to think that there are implicit conversational principles that discourse participants follow. According to the Cooperative Principle, the major underlying assumption that we make in a conversation is that all discourse participants are acting in a way to accomplish conversational goals. For example, let’s say that the topic of discussion was “How much money should we spend on our cat’s birthday party?”. If everyone in the conversation agrees that the goal is to figure out a reasonable cost for the party, then all discourse participants assume that everyone in the conversation is acting in a reasonable way and uttering things in order to accomplish this goal. This is what is meant by “cooperation” in the Cooperative Principle. Specifically, Grice described four maxims (or general rules of conduct) that might be the basis of many conversations: the Maxim of Quality, Maxim of Quantity, Maxim of Relation, and Maxim of Manner. The idea is that if these are the conversational rules that people follow (and if people assume that other people follow these rules too), then there is an explanation of why certain implicatures arise in discourse.

You will notice that the maxims are stated as imperatives (e.g., “do this!”, “don’t do that!”). These are not meant to be prescriptive “do’s” and “don’t’s”. They should be taken as a way to describe someone’s pragmatic knowledge in a language. It’s similar to how phonological rules can be stated like “turn voiceless consonants into voiced consonants!” or “don’t voice the consonant if you already have a voiced obstruent in the morpheme!”. Grice at one point describes the Cooperative Principle as something that is “REASONABLE for us to follow” and something that “we SHOULD NOT abandon” (Grice 1975, p.48; emphasis his). Sometimes this is misinterpreted to mean that the Cooperative Principle is a set of prescriptive rules, something along the lines of “if you don’t follow these rules, you are not a good language user”. However, that is not what he meant. A better interpretation of the Cooperative Principle goes something like this: IF discourse participants have a common immediate goal in the conversation, THEN it is in their best interest to follow something like the Cooperative Principle. Grice pondered that this type of assumption may be an extension of cooperative transactions in general, not limited to language: if you and I agreed to get a car fixed together, it would be in our best interest to act in a cooperative way to accomplish this goal.

Of course, what counts as “cooperative” in a conversation might be different depending on what kind of conversation it is (Grice 1975): what if you are fighting? Or writing a letter? Or making a witness statement in court? For the sake of exemplifying how the Cooperative Principle works, our examples in this chapter will be “ordinary” conversations (e.g., casual conversations between friends, family, or roommates). But after you are done reading this chapter, you are encouraged to think further about how the Cooperative Principle might work differently in other types of discourse!

Speaking of variation, we have seen already that conversational rules can vary from community to community, meaning that what counts as “cooperative” might vary depending on who the interlocutors are (not just the discourse genre). Anthropologists study the Cooperative Principle as applied to various linguistic communities, and you are also encouraged to think about how conversational rules might differ in your own culture(s)! The linguistic way of thinking about the Cooperative Principle is that it is subject to variation within and across language communities.

The Maxims

Grice observed that discourse participants seem to follow a conversational rule about being honest. He stated this rule as the Maxim of Quality: in a conversation, you say what you believe to be true, and only say what you have sufficient evidence for. Still, what is considered a maxim violation can vary from language to language and culture to culture. In English and many languages, failure to try is what is considered a maxim violation. That is, if you were not trying to follow Quality at all, knew the statement was false but uttered it anyway, that is what is considered a violation. Let’s assume for a moment that Raj actually didn’t feed the cat from the conversation in the last section. If Bo truly thought that Raj fed the cat, saying “He fed the cat” would technically not be a violation under the Cooperative Principle for American English speakers. But in Mopan (an indigenous language of the Mayan family in Central America, spoken by Mopan people), falsehoods are characterised as tus, ‘lying,’ regardless of whether the speaker was aware of the falsehood at the time of utterance or not.

Grice also observed that discourse participants seem to follow a conversational rule about how much information they should give when trying to meet conversational goals. He stated this as the Maxim of Quantity: in a conversation, don’t be more informative than is needed by the purpose of the conversation, and don’t be less informative than is needed by the purpose of the conversation, either. To understand how this maxim works, imagine above that Bo knew that Raj actually fed the cat AND cleaned the litterbox, and still said what he said (“He fed the cat.”). This would be a violation of the Maxim of Quantity, because the statement He fed the cat is underinformative: the more informative thing to say in this situation would be Raj fed the cat and cleaned the litterbox. If Aya found out after the conversation that Raj actually cleaned the litterbox too, Aya would likely feel that Bo was being uncooperative in the conversation they had (“Why didn’t you tell me he cleaned the litterbox too, if you knew?!”). Bo didn’t make a false statement, but the true statement that he did make wasn’t the most informative one.

Another one of Grice’s observations was that discourse participants seem to expect each other to stay on topic during a conversation. He described this as the Maxim of Relation: make your contributions to the conversation relevant to what is being discussed.

Grice’s fourth and final observation was that discourse participants seem to have an expectation about how they say things in a conversation too, not just what they say. He described this as the Maxim of Manner: be as clear, brief, and as orderly as possible when you make your contributions in a conversation. Consider the following conversation:

Bo’s instructions are truthful, in that each step he listed indeed are things you do when you wash your hands. His contribution is also appropriately informative, and relevant to the question that was asked by Aya. However, Bo said the instructions in a funny way: he didn’t list the steps in order. So the oddness of Bo’s utterance mainly comes from a violation of the Maxim of Manner. The Maxim of Manner sees quite a bit of cultural variation. For example, what is considered to be an appropriate “manner” of speaking may depend on things like cultural expectations about expressions of emotion and different values attached to veiled speech. For example, in some African cultures it is not necessarily considered “uncooperative” to make one’s utterance obscure, long-winded, and vague (Ameka & Terkourafi 2019).

Terms You Should Know

Linguistics

Arbitrariness

Lexicon

Focal Vocabulary

Linguistic Relativity

Language Universals

Pragmatics

Implicature

Cooperative Principle

Maxim of Quality

Maxim of Quantity

Maxim of Relation

Maxim of Manner

Study Questions

1. What is the cultural significance of the differences in the lexicon between languages? What are some focal vocabularies you know?
2. What is the idea of linguistic relativity, and what are some examples of it in practice?
3. What do the maxims of the Cooperative Principle tell us about how conversations work? How do they operate cross-culturally?

References

Ameka, Felix K. and Terkourafi, Marina. 2019. What if …? Imagining non-Western perspectives on pragmatic theory and practice. Journal of Pragmatics 145: 72-82.

Grice, H.P. 1975 Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole and J.L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Arts. New York: Academic Press.

Whorf, Benjamin. 1944. The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language. A Review of General Semantics 1(4): 197-215.

A Derivative Work From

Allard-Kropp, Manon. 2020. Languages and Worldview.

Anderson, Catherine, et al. 2022. Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd Edition.

Boroditsky, Lera. 2017. How language shapes the way we think. Ted Conferences.

Light, Linda. 2020. Language. In N. Brown et al. (eds.), Perspectives, an Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition.