Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dr.Smith!
Anth 1070 !
E-Portfolio !
!
!
Talking About Talking!
!
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
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
!
!
!
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
Language also ditactes our relationships we have with one anotherone on one and
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.!
Thats why I feels things like accents and dialects give us a sense of self and identity. In
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.!
!
Another essay in the book I felt illustrated the ideas of language and culture wasThe
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
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
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
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