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Melissa Schmunk!

Dr.Smith!

Anth 1070 !

E-Portfolio !

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Talking About Talking!

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Talking about talking is called metalanguage, or reflexivity. It refers to talking about

language using language. It is using words to talk about words. It can be parody or

satire, or my paper for my e-portfolio.!

One of the key ideas I learned this semester is the connection between language and

culture. Language is more then the structure of phonetics, morphology and phonology.

Without culture language can not be, it can not grow. They are completely intertwined,

completely dependent on one another. Language is the medium of culture. You can

learn a new language, but not become completely fluent unless you understand the

culture. !

Language is used to express language and its ideas. Language shapes who we are

as individuals. Our the dialects and accents we use say who we are. Language is a

social phenomenon. It not only says who we are as individuals, but sets our social roles

and where we belong in the class system. Language has power.!

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Language not only shapes culture, it goes as far as shaping our reality. An example

given by Benjamin Lee Whorf in his essay The Relation of Habitual Thought and

Behavior to Language, is that of the empty gas can. The can is not really empty, it still !

holds gas vapors. People would smoke around the empty cans. The word empty led to

think they were harmless.!

Language also ditactes our relationships we have with one anotherone on one and

in social settings. We base these interactions on language rules and cues.!

Language is an instuatution. Like all institutions it has rules. Phonology, syntax and

grammar are some of the rules of language. Syntax is the arrangement of words in

order to make coherent sentences. Grammar is the rules behind words. Phonology is

the study of how sounds are organized in language. These are just a few the guidelines

behind language.!

Because it is an institution, it is important not to to become a cog in the machine.

Thats why I feels things like accents and dialects give us a sense of self and identity. In

the essay The African-American Speech Community: Reality and Sociolinguistics by

Marcyliena H. Morgan, we read how important language is to African-Americans in this

country. Having their own dialect gave them a sense of themselves and their history.

However, a lot of white Americans saw (and many still do to this day) AAE as a sign of

low IQ, and many African American children were placed in in special education

classes. The essay specifically refers to the Martin Luther King Junior Elementary in

Michigan, but African American children being discriminated against because of their

speech is not just isolated to this case. Linguistic profiling happens all over the world.!
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Another essay in the book I felt illustrated the ideas of language and culture wasThe

Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Meditation of Communities by Debra!

Spitulnik. Spitulnik writes about about a particular phrase that crosses class boundaries.

The phrase, ofata yu, in Chi-Bemba (one of the main languages spoken in Zambia, !

and its translation to English, Over to you. Anywhere from to traditional speaker to

more upperclass fluent English speakers use this phrase. !

In this essay there are other examples of language crossing boundaries. There are

also examples of labels being attached to you because of the way you speak (like

African Americans being labeled for speaking AAE.) In particular the case of the

Zambian children's show Chongololo, the entertainers RP or British Received

Pronoucination. Chongololo has come to mean a person who tries to sound posh. !

She also talk about public words. These are words or phrases so well known, and

used so often that it is vital for you to use them if you are going to part of a certain

culture or subculture. Memes are a great example of public words. They are repeated,

remembered, parroted long after fact. Sometimes we know where public words come

from and sometimes the origin is unclear. If you are unclear, there is now a website that

explains specific memes and where they come from (http://knowyourmeme.com.) !

Overall I found Anthropology 1070 incredibly interesting. There were so many ideas,

it was sometimes hard to grasp certain concepts. Linguistics is not a subject that can be

covered in one semester. The correlation between language and culture is what I liked

learning about most. Language and culture mirror each other. They both share human

values and behaviors of social groups.!


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Reference:!

Duranti, Alessandro. Linguistic anthropology: a reader. Wiley-


Blackwell, 2011.

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