The term language universal refers to those features or properties of language that are common to all languages. The notion that languages might share universal features creates a tension of sorts with conceptions of language, as developed by Boas and other early linguistic anthropologists, that held that languages (along with their respective cultures) were infinitely
Social psychology is conventionally defined as the scientific study of how the actual or imagined presence of others influences an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The social psychology of language (SPL) concentrates on the role of language in the dynamics between individuals and their social world; language use is argued to affect and be affected
The term “language varieties” covers “language” and “dialect.” A variety may be characteristic of a particular social group, or associated with a particular speaking style across groups of speakers in a community. “Variety” makes no direct or indirect assertions about the relative status of the linguistic system being described (“dialect” often refers with negative overtones
Attempts by linguists and anthropologists to understand humankind have always focused on two areas: culture and society and language and communication. It is somewhat unnatural, however, to separate the study of language from the study of culture, as doing so can limit attempts to characterize the development of peoples and how they create communities and
Many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities systematically study language, each having its own theoretical foundations, goals, and research traditions. The resulting landscape is a maze of paths that start and then split off either to reemerge as hybrids combined with other specialties or to reach a dead end. For instance, psychology and anthropology
Work in animal behavior, and in particular cognitive ethology, has shown that most of the differences in kind once thought to distinguish humans from other animals are actually differences in degree. The one behavior where a huge gap still seems to exist is language. Language is best defined as a communication system that employs arbitrary
To classify the languages of the world, it is of foremost importance to first decide what constitutes a “language.” Most classification schemata involve spoken languages—alive, endangered, and extinct. The estimated number of spoken languages varies from 3,000 to 10,000, and there are languages spoken by a few societies that are still unidentified. There are some
Language represents a fundamental character of modern humans, Homo sapiens. All animals engage in some form of communication. For example, single-cell organisms may relate to individuals around them via chemicals, whereas birds prefer more vocal communication. Researchers who study communication in nonhuman animals, such as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (in bonobos) and Irene Pepperberg (in parrots), may
Language types and language typology refer to characterizing languages of the world by similarities and differences in their structural forms and in their functional uses. They also refer to characterizing them according to language families where there is evidence that the languages have common structural relationships that are consistent with some “parent” language (i.e., genetic
Language, like culture, is something that is easier to discuss than to define, and no unitary definition is offered here. Instead, what anthropologists and linguists mean by language is better understood by trying to be clear about what does and does not count as language. In some cases, this involves disentangling folk uses of the