To state that language is important is merely to acknowledge the obvious, yet the significant influence language has on human behavior is frequently overlooked. The ability to speak and write is often taken for granted. Through our use of sounds and symbols, we are able to give life to our ideas-as Henry Ward Beecher once wrote, “Thought is the blossom; language the opening bud; action the fruit behind it.” Or as Cart mill has observed:
Language lets us get vast numbers of big, smart fellow primates all working together on a single task-building the Great Wall of China or fighting Word War II or flying to the moon. It lets us construct and communicate the gorgeous fantasies of literature and the propound fables of myth. It lets us cheat death by pouring out our knowledge, dreams, and memories into younger people’s minds. And it does powerful things for us inside our own minds because we do a lot of thinking by talking silently to ourselves. Without language, we would be only a sort of upright chimpanzee with funny feet and clever hands. With, it we are the self-possessed masters of the planet.
Functions Of Language
Language is extremely important to human interaction because of its labeling, interaction, and transmission functions. The labeling function serves to identify or name a person, object, or act, so that he, she, or it may be referred to in communication. The interaction function is concerned with the sharing and communication of ideas and emotions. And transmission is the process by which you pass information to others. Although these functions are generally considered the primary purposes of communication, there are other functions and purposes that, neverthesless, are equally important.
Language diversity in the united states
Language diversity has become a prominent issue in the United States. "At least 38 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home."And, over 3 million students in the United States speak little or no English. Spanish is the native language of 70 percent of these students followed by Asian languages constituting 15 percent. Such diversity in language has spurred change and adaptation in linguistic usage. There are numerous instances that demonstrate this adaptation process. For example, on the U.S.-Mexico border, Spanish is laced with English-sounding words, yielding a dialect known as "Spanglish." In English, we say it choose. In Spanish, the equivalent word is Escoger, and the Spanish rendition is Chusar. Even within the English language itself, there are adaptations and variations between British English and American English. For example, Canada has its own distinct usage that combines both U.S. and British English.
In the upcoming section, we examine the notion that people living within the same geographic boundaries often use language in ways that differ from those of the dominant culture. Specifically, we explore two facets of this idea. First, we will discuss alternative languages-private languages used by subgroups in the United States. Second, we will discuss co-cultures, specifically African Americans and women, and their language usage in the United States.
Alternative Language
The use of alternative language reflects a co-culture's need to have a language that permits individuals to share membership, participate in their social and cultural communities, identify themselves and their place in the universe, and communicate with one another about their own social realities. Because alternative language are usually limited to a particular co-culture, one way to gain insight into that co-culture is to examine its use of language and vocabulary. The rationale is a simple one: Because “vocabulary is a part of language that is most immediately under the conscious manipulation and control of its users, it provides the most accessible place to begin exploration of shared and disparate experiences.” To help you better understand the uses and functions of alternative languages, we will (1) examine the types of alternative languages most commonly found in the United States and (2) discuss the functions alternative languages perform within the larger cultural setting.
Types of Alternative Languages
Alternative languages consist of at least four varieties: cant, jargon, argot, and slang. These language forms persist and thrive because they serve useful societal functions.
Cant. This is a specialized vocabulary of some disreputable or under word co-culture. It is the language of pickpockets, murderers, drug dealers, and prostitutes. It includes such expressions as college (meaning prison), stretch (meaning a jail sentence), to mouse (meaning to escape from prison), and lifeboat (a pardon). Prostitutes frequently use the word gorilla to indicate someone who beats them up and outlaw to designate a prostitute who works without a pimp.
Jargon. Jargon is the technical language of a professional class such as nuclear physicists, physicians, lawyers, economists, and carpenters. Terms such as gluons, quarks, inflationary spiral, party of the first part, and cripple wall are examples of such professional jargon.
Argot. This is a more or less private vocabulary peculiar to many nonprofessional (usually noncriminal) groups such as taxi drivers, truck drivers, ham radio operators, military personnel, and circus and carnival workers. Argot used by truck drivers might include smoky to represent the highway patrol. Ham radio operator use terms such as QSL to represent a radio conversation, old man and Y L (young lady) to represent male and female ham radio operators, and QRM to designate static or other radio interference. And, circus and carnival workers frequently use terms such as dip for a pickpocket and monkey for someone who gets fleeced in a confidence game.
Slang. Slang designates those terms derived from cant and argot that are understood by most people but not often used in normal society or in formal written communication. Slang involves such linguistic terms as booze for alcohol, broad for woman, stud for man, phat for good, random for completely of the wall, hoopty for a car, joints for any popular brand of sneakers, and byte bonding for computer nerds who are discussing things no one else can understand.
Function of Alternative Language
Alternative languages reveal another way in which language and behavior are linked together. They can serve a variety of functions for co-culture. Although we discuss for of the most prominent, keep in mind that the alternative language of a specific co-culture may serve only one or two of these functions, not necessarily all four.
Empowerment.
Alternative languages can function as a form of empowerment. Nushu is a 3,000-year-old language used exclusively by Chinese women. “Ancient Chinese women were bared from formal education and were treated as illiterate and unthinking by men. So women of this region empowered themselves by creating their own language uses a different set of characters. Nushu empowered women by giving them a way to detail their private lives on a personal basis. It was used as a powerful source of support between women “who were bound as property to their husbands, bound to draconian cultural roles, and cripplingly bound about their feet.
Self-Defense.
Alternative language help in developing a sense of self-defense by providing a code that helps the co-culture survive in a hostile environment. The use of Yiddish by the European Jews during periods of harsh discrimination is an obvious example. There are, however, even more subtle and contemporary instances.
Solidarity and Cohesiveness.
Gangs have become prominent as co-cultures in the past several years because of the violence associated with their drug dealing and territoriality. Buster refers to a gang member who does not stand up for his gang, but sells them out.
Social Viability.
Alternative language help establish groups as real and viable social entities. During the 1960s, for example, when drug use became a way of life, people gathered at specific locations and immediately developed what became known as drug language. As these individuals became more than a group of people simply taking drugs, they developed a rather elaborate glossary of terms that helped transform them in to a counterculture.
Co-Cultures and Language Use
When discussing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, we indicated that language is a guide to dealing with and understanding social reality. From this notion comes the corollary idea that cultures evolve different languages unique to their own needs. As Nanda and Warms point out:
All human groups have language and all language are equally sophisticated and serve the needs of their speakers equally well. A language cannot make its speakers more or less intelligent, sexist, sophisticated, or anything else. Individual knowledge of vocabulary may vary, as may the artfulness with which an individual communicates, but every human speaks with equal grammatical sophistication.
Co-cultures exist within nearly every society, but, as we indicate in Chapter 2, they function both within and outside of the dominant culture. Members of most co-cultures operate in two or more very distinct groups. Hence, their enculturation can be strikingly different from that of the dominant culture. Their process of language evaluation trends to be shaped by the dominant culture’s attitudes toward them. In many co-cultures, the name given to an experience clearly demonstrates how they perceive and interact with the dominant culture.
African Americans
There is little question that many African Americans and whites speak differently creating different speech communities. According to Shade,
Theses communities employ different varieties of speech, follow different rules for interaction, possess different core cultural elements that influence white and black communication behaviors, and possess different world views which accounts for the differences in communication and the way blacks and whites process and interpret messages.
African Americans have evolved a particular language referred to as African American English Vernacular (AAEV) which allows them to create, maintain, and express their culture and to deal with European America.
Hecht, Collier, and Ribeau point out that sentence structure and semantics in African American English have been particularly influenced by early African tribal language. This has led to the development of a language style that has a number of unique identifiable characteristics. Some of these characteristics are outlined below.
1. Shortening of the third-person present tense by dropping the s: “He walk,” ”She go,” “She go, He talk.
2. Use of the verb to be to indicate continuous action: “He be gone” for He is gone frequently/all the time.
3. Deletion of the verb to be in the present indicative: “He tired” for He is tired.
4. Use of been to express a meaning of past activity with current relevance: “I been know your name.
5. Use of a stressed been to emphasize the duration of something: “He been married” for “He has been married for a long time (and still is).
6. Use of done or be done to emphasize an action that has been completed: “She done finished the book,” “We be done washed all those cars soon.
7. Use of double and triple negatives: “Won’t nobody do nothing about that,” “He can’t got no money.”
8. Simplification of consonant at the ends of words: “door” becomes” do.
9. The final ng sound drops the g: “talking” becomes “talking.”
10. The final th is sometime replaced with f: “with” becomes” wif.
11. Substitution of the x sound for the s sound: “ask” becomes “axe.”
Women
In speaking of communication between men and women, Tannen notes, “Different words, different worlds.” Communication for women has different purposes and rules than communication for men. Females put a greater and different emphasis on conversation. In a general sense, it is safe to say that women an men constitute linguistic groups.
We begin our exploration of female communication by indentifying the purpose of communication for women. For most women, communication is a primary way to establish and maintain relationships with other .Wood identified seven features of women’s communication that foster connection, support, closeness, and understanding. First, equality is an important feature of female communication. Women achieve symmetry and equality by matching experiences. For instance, a women may said ,”I’ve done the same thing many times.”This establishes equality in the sense that the speaker is not alone in how he or she feels. This creates an interactive pattern in conversations rather than right turn taking.
Second, showing support for orther is characteristic of women’s speech. Phrases like, ”Oh, you must feel terrible” and ”I think you did the right thing” demonstrate under standing and sympathy. Third and closely related to the feature of understanding and sympathy is the presence of question that probe for greater understanding of feelings. Questions such as, ”How did you feel when it occurred? ”and” Do you think it was deliberate?”address content while paying serious attention to the feelings involved. Fourth, women’s speech is characterized by conversational maintenance work. That is, women engage in efforts to sustain the conversation by prompting others to speaker elaborate, and by initiating topics for others. Phrases like, ”Tell me about your day,” or ”Was your faculty meeting interesting ?’serve to initiate and maintain interaction. Responsiveness is a fifth feature of women’s talk. Females are ussualy socialized to care about others and to make thm fell valued. As such, they ussualy respond to what others have said. A woman might say, ”That’s interesting,” or she might nod to show she is actively engaged in the conversation. A sixth characteristic of women’s talk is a personal and concrete style. Interpersonal closeness is created by the use of ”details, personal disclosures, anecdotes, and concrete reasoning ”This personal tone in women’s conversation cultivates connection and identification so that communication’ feeling are emphasized and clarified.
Finally, tentativeness has been identified as a feature of women’s communication. Tentativeness can take a number of forms. Verbal hedges are phrases like I think, I believe, I feel, I guess, I mean, and I wonder. Qualifying terms include words like well, you know, kind of, perhaps ,and possibly. An example of a qualifying statement is ”I am probably not the best judge of this, but…Intonation also indicates tentativeness. For example, when a woman is asked, ”What is the organizational plan for the new chapter?”she might respond by saying, ”An introduction and then the four basic assignments?”The intonation turns the answer into a question, as if to say, ”Is that okay with you?”tag questions also serve to keep the conversation provisional. ”that was a pretty good movie, don’t you think?”leaves the door open for further conversation.
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