A word
is one or more sounds that in combination have a specific meaning assigned by a
language. The symbolic meaning of words can be so powerful that people are willing
to risk their lives for them or take the lives of others. For instance, words such
as "queer" and "nigger" have symbolic meaning that is highly charged
emotionally in America today for many people. They are much more than just a sequence of sounds to
us.
A major advantage of human
language being a learned symbolic communication system is that it is infinitely
flexible. Meanings can be changed and new symbols created. This is evidenced
by the fact that new words are invented daily and the meaning of old ones change.
For example, the English word "nice" now generally means pleasing,
agreeable, polite, and kind. In the15th century it meant foolish,
wanton, lascivious, and even wicked.
Languages evolve in response to
changing historical and social
conditions. Some language
transformations typically occur in a generation or less. For instance,
the slang words used by your parents were very likely different from those
that you use today. You also probably are familiar with many technical
terms, such as "text messaging" and "high definition TV", that were not in
general use even a decade ago.
Language and speech are not
the same thing. Speech is a broad term simply referring to patterned verbal
behavior. In contrast, a language is a set of rules for generating
speech. A dialect
is a variant of a language. If it is associated with
a geographically isolated speech community, it is referred to as a
regional dialect.
However, if it is spoken by a speech community that is merely socially isolated, it is
called a social dialect. These latter dialects are mostly based on class,
ethnicity
,
gender
, age, and particular social situations. Black
English (or Ebonics
)
in the United States is an example of a social dialect.
Dialects may be both regional and social. An example is the Chinese
spoken dialect and written form called nushu. It apparently was
known and used only by women in the village of Jiang-yong in Hunan Province of
South China. Women taught nushu only to their daughters and used it to
write memoirs, create songs, and share their thoughts with each other.
While women also knew and used the conventional Chinese dialect of their
region, they used nushu to maintain female support networks in
their male dominated society.
Nushu is essentially gone now due to its
suppression during the 1950's and 1960's by the communist government
of China.
The last speaker and writer of nushu was a woman named Yang Huanyi.
She died in 2004.
Not all societies have distinct dialects. They are far more common in large-scale diverse societies than in small-scale homogenous ones.
Over
the last few centuries, deaf people have developed sign languages that are
complex visual-gestural forms of communicating with each other. Since
they are effective communication systems with standardized rules, they also
must be considered languages in their own right even though they are not
spoken.
Birth of a Language--the
emergence of a new sign language among deaf children in Nicaragua.
This link takes you to a
video at an external website. To return here, you must click the
"back"
button
on your browser
program.
(length = 4 mins, 57 secs) |
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Women
in Papua New Guinea
conversing in Pidgin English
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A pidgin
is a
simplified, makeshift language that develops to fulfill the communication needs of people who
have no language in common but who need to occasionally interact for commercial and other
reasons. Pidgins combine a limited amount of
the vocabulary and grammar of the different languages.
People who use
pidgin languages also speak their own native language.
Over the last several centuries, dozens of pidgin languages developed as
Europeans expanded out into the rest of the world for colonization and trade. The
most well known one is Pidgin English in New Guinea. However, several forms of
Pidgin English and Pidgin French also developed in West Africa
and the Caribbean. There have been
pidgins developed by non-European cultures as well, including the Zulus in South Africa,
the Malays in Southeast Asia, the Arabs in North Africa, and several American Indian
societies. The most well known pidgin developed by American Indians is
Chinook, which was
used on the Northwest Coast of North America.
At times, a
pidgin language becomes the mother tongue of a population. When that happens, it is
called a creole
language. As pidgins change into creoles over several
generations, their vocabularies enlarge. In the small
island nation of Haiti, a French-African pidgin became
the creole language. It is still spoken
there by the majority of the population as their
principle or only language. The same thing happened among some of the peoples of
Papua New Guinea
, the Pacific Islands of
Vanuatu
,
and Sierra Leone
in West Africa, where
different versions of Pidgin English became creoles. Similarly, on the outer banks
of Georgia and South Carolina in the United States, isolated former African slaves made another version of
Pidgin English into a creole known as Gullah
or Geechee
.
Creoles also developed in Louisiana, Jamaica, and the Netherlands Antilles
.
It is common for creole
speakers to also speak another "standard" language as well. In Haiti, for
instance, the more educated and affluent people also speak French among themselves.
Their creole language is used on the street in dealing with poor Haitians. The
Gullah speakers of Georgia and South Carolina speak English when dealing with
outsiders. Which language is spoken depends on the social situation. This same
phenomenon is often found in societies with different dialects of the same language.
People may quickly switch back and forth between dialects, depending on the person they
are talking to at the time. This pattern is referred to as
diglossia
or "code switching."
The African American situational use of standard and Black English is a prime
example. Black English is usually reserved for talking with other African
Americans. North American reporters and announcers on national television programs
are often diglossic. They must learn to speak with a
Midwestern, European American
dialect regardless of the region or social class they came from originally. We
become so accustomed to this that it is usually a shocking surprise to hear them speak in
their own dialects.
Typically, the dialects of a
society are ranked relative to each other in terms of social status. In the London
area of England, the upper class speak "public school" English, while the lower
class often use a Cockney
dialect. Because of the stigma against the latter,
upwardly mobile Cockneys in the business world may take language lessons to acquire the
"public school" speech patterns.
