INTRODUCTION
Sociologists deal with how speakers in a particular language community organise their social relationships in language use. Another group of people who work closely with sociologists are anthropologists and ethnographers. Ethnography and Anthropology are closely related. In fact the ethnographic approach to communication is a method grounded in Anthropology. The Ethnographic approach is a perspective, which seeks to establish the study of communication in its wider social and cultural context. The approach based on a detailed study, which reflects the patterns of custom and communication of the culture being studied is generally referred to as Ethnography of Communication.
In this study, we shall be looking at the concept of speech community, the involvement of ethnographers in language study and the field that emerged from this involvement – Ethnography of Communication.
3.1 What is Linguistic Anthropology?
The term Linguistic Anthropology is used to refer to the North American approach to linguistics, which according to Hymes (1964: xxiii) falls outside the active concern of Linguistics. It can be defined as the study of language within the context of Anthropology. Anthropological linguistics is the study of language through human genetics and human development. It is a branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use. According to Duranti (2001: 5), Linguistic Anthropolgy has to do with “the roles played by language and other semiotic resources in the constitution of society and its cultural representations” .
Linguistic Anthropologists are concerned with ethnographic field-work, and we would soon see in this unit, there is a very close relationship between the subject and Ethnography. Anthropological linguistics focuses more on the interplay of language and culture. It is traditionally divided into three branches: descriptive linguistics, the systematic study of the way language is constructed and used; historical linguistics, the study of the origin of language in general and of the evolution of the languages people speak today; and sociolinguistics: the study of the relationship between language and society.
3.1.1 Ethnography
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology that studies people in their natural settings and gives a descriptive account of social life and culture in a defined social system, based on qualitative methods by detailed observations, unstructured interviews, analysis of documents. The term “Ethnography” derives from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphein = writing). Ethnographers are those who practice Ethnography and also study sub-cultures, such as drug cultures, soccer hooligans, sex workers etc and other institutions, such as the Police, etc.
Cultural and Social Anthropology place a very high value on research through the ethnographic methods. He studied the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea in the southwest Pacific. One of the earliest scholars who saw the link between language and ethnographic practice was Malinowski, who founded the field of Social Anthropology known as Functionalism, holding the belief that all components of society interlock to form a well-balanced system. He emphasised characteristics of beliefs, ceremonies, customs, institutions, religion, ritual and sexual taboos. He used a holistic approach in studying the native’s social interactions including the annual Kula Ring Exchange, finding it to be associated with magic, religion, kinship and trade. He contributed to a cross-cultural study of psychology through his observations of the relationships of kinship.
3.1.2 Speech Community
To fully have an understanding of how language relates to social and cultural values, you need to understand the concept of speech community. You will be aware that the way people speak vary from one community to another. To know why a group of speakers use their language the way they do, we have to look into their speech communities. What are their practices and what is their worldview, etc. What then is a speech community?
Hymes (1972: 54) defines as speech community as “A community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation at least one linguistic of speech, interpretation of variety”. A Speech Community refers to a group of speakers, whether located in one area or scattered, who recognise the same language or dialect of a language as a standard. It is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves.
A speech community can comprise members of a profession with a specialised jargon, distinct social groups like university students, or even tight-knit groups like families and friends, co-workers. In addition, in the modern age of technology, online and other mediated communities, such as the Internet forums, people who exchane mails and text messages often constitute speech communities. Members of speech communities will often develop slang or jargon to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.
Definitions of speech community tend to involve varying degrees of emphasis on the following:
• Shared community membership
• Shared linguistic communication
Scholars differ in their definitions of speech community. Some believe that a speech community must be a real community, i.e., a group of people living together in the same geographical location – village, town, city, country, etc. Others would argue that all people are indeed part of several communities (through home location, occupation, gender, class, religious belonging, and more), and that they are thus also part of simultaneous speech communities.
Similarly, what shared linguistic communication entails is also a variable concept. Some would argue that a shared first language, even dialect, is necessary, while for others the ability to communicate and interact (even across language barriers) is sufficient.
The underlying concern in both of these is that members of the same speech community should share linguistic norms. That is, they share understanding, values and attitudes about language varieties present in their community. While the exact definition of speech community is debated, there is a broad consensus that the concept is immensely useful, if not crucial, for the study of language variation and change.
A person can (and almost always does) belong to more than one speech community. For example a Nigerian youth belongs to the following speech communities – his mother tongue community, the Internet community, the English language speakers’ community, etc.
One major characteristic of a speech community, according to Gumperz is the frequency in the social interaction among the members. It is therefore the case that members of a given speech community communicate more within the group than with other speech communities. Speakers of the same speech community also have a set of shared norms, which could be observed in their linguistic behaviour.
3.1.3 Communicative Situation
Communicative situation is any situation predisposed towards communication. Situation here should not necessarily be equated with location, even though location is a part of situation. Situation changes and it is possible for the same location to play host to more than one situation. This means that situations can be created within a particular location. For instance, one location can serve as a worship center, a classroom, and even a public lecture venue. The happenings in a communicative situation are constant, even when the location changes. The situation determines the roles of the participants. For instance, the location of the NTA Network News is NTA Abuja, but the situation is the news, which can as well and does takes place in other locations.
3.1.4 Communicative Event
Communicative events are named by conventional meanings, such as wedding, symposium, lecture, etc. Communicative events are therefore seen as events in which communication takes place. Communicative events are defined by a unified set of components. They have the following major features:
(a) the general topic is maintained
(b) the same participants are involved
(c) the same rules of interaction operate in the same kind of setting
(d) the participants use the same language variety.
A communicative event therefore terminates when there is a change in the major participants and their role relationships.
3.1.5 Communicative Act
A communicative act is also called a speech act. This could easily be illustrated as a single interactive function, such as a request, a command, a statement, and so forth. A communicative act uses verbal signals to achieve a purpose. Communicative acts are not mono-dimensional. Here, we are dealing with the actions that the communication produces. For instance, if someone makes any of these statements:
(a) I would love an orange.
(b) Do you have an orange?
(c) Can I please have an orange?
They would all accomplish the same act of communication, but in three different ways.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE
Identify a conversation and describe the communicative situation, communicative event and communicative act.
3.2 Ethnography of Communication
The object of the ethnography of communication is to document and analyze communicative practices and to investigate how they fit into broader social contexts. Such communicative practices run the gamut from ritual invocations of ancestral spirits to idle gossip. Ethnographers of communication also examine the complexities of communication between anthropologists and the people that they study.
Anthropologists do not themselves have a unified conception of ethnography, especially of ethnography in relation to the study of institutions of our own society, such as education. One difficulty with the notion of ethnography is that it may seem to be a residual category, associated with the study of people not ourselves and with the use of methods other than those of experimental design and quantitative measurement.
The key goal of ethnographers is to examine how members of a speech community interpret meaning from their experience and how they communicate such interpretations. Hymes provides a particular methodology for the study of communicative events and the units, which make them up: the SPEAKING grid.
S setting/scene physical circumstances
P participants speaker/hearer, producer/receiver
E ends purposes, goals
A act sequence message form and content
K key tone, manner, spirit of encounter
I instrumentalities channel (verbal/non-verbal,
Spoken/written)
N norms of interaction production and perception of
language
G genre discourse textual categories
4.0 CONCLUSION
Language and Anthropology have a meeting point – Linguistic Anthropology. This meeting point has become an approach to the study of language. This approach had its root in the United States. Fieldwork is emphasised in Linguistic Anthropology. It also approaches language through the study of speech communities, communicative event, communicative act, communicative situation and Ethnography of Communication. The goal of Anthropological Linguists is to study how language functions in speech communities.
5.0 SUMMARY
In this unit, we looked at language as a social phenomenon. We considered an approach to language which connects it with the culture of the speakers. We examined such concepts as speech community, speech act, communicative situation, and communicative event. We also discussed Hymes’ Ethnography of Speaking.
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
1. Differentiate between communicative event and communicative situation.
2. Using Hymes’ Ethnography of Communication, identify 2 communicative situations and analyse them.
3. Explain the term ‘Ethnography”
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING
Gumperz, J. J. (1968). “Types of Linguistic Communities.” In: J.A. Fishman, (Ed.). Readings in the Sociology of Language. Mourton: The Hague.
Hymes, D. (1972). “Models of Interaction of Language and Social Life.” In: J. J. Gunmperz & D. Hymes. (Ed.). Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston.
Hymes, D. (Ed.). (1964). Language, Culture and Society. New York: Harper and Row.
Lyons, J. (1981). Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Yule, G. (1985). The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press.
Leave a comment behind