What is language?
You might answer by listing different world languages, like Spanish, Hindi, or American Sign Language. Maybe you’d mention the varieties of language associated with geographic areas or social groups, like a Southern accent, African American English, or the intentionally confusing ways lawyers talk (“legalese”).
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to defining language and understanding why it matters in the world.
Anthropologists who study language (linguistic anthropologists) would say language does things in the world. We’re interested in the ways people use language – sometimes consciously but often not – to achieve their goals and express themselves as social beings. We’re also interested in how major social institutions like governments, media, and schools use language to shape our social worlds.
Research by linguistic anthropologists shows that language is always at work, molding our individual and collective lives in subtle but powerful ways.
So how does language matter?
People use language to share ideas or information, but language also does behind-the-scenes work to tell people who we are and how we understand the world. What do you learn, for example when someone describes a baby as “wicked cute” (besides that the baby is cute!). What if they had said “hella cute” or “mad cute” or “very cute”? Based only on this one word, you may assume very different things about who the speaker is: where they live, how old they are, the relationship between them and the person they are speaking to, and more. Many aspects of language signal these kinds of social meanings about speakers: words and phrases (mad vs. hella), pronunciation (car vs. cah), nonverbal communication like gestures (fist-bumps), postures (manspreading), facial expressions (seeking or avoiding eye contact), or even silence.
These kinds of unspoken meanings, which anthropologists call “indexical,” can be read very differently depending on people’s experiences with language and their positions in the world. For instance, students in California may understand “hella” as pointing to someone’s connection to Oakland and membership in Black communities, while students from the East Coast may associate the term with younger people or possibly with the West Coast in general.
How people understand unspoken or indexical meanings is based on beliefs that they have about language itself. For instance, many students and their teachers may think that words like “hella,” or “mad” are not appropriate for school and will instead switch to “very” in this context, even if they might use these or other slang terms in their everyday life. Beliefs about language also impact people who speak more than one language, like English and Patwa (a Jamaican language), or speak two languages at the same time, like Spanglish.
All of us have beliefs about language, and these often stand in for our beliefs or judgements about speakers of those languages. Assumptions about which ways of speaking are good or bad or wrong or right, which languages sound pretty or ugly, what language can be used where and how are called “language ideologies.” Some language ideologies—for example, “never end a sentence with a preposition,” “nice girls don’t talk like that,” “don’t mix two languages” “speak ‘proper’ English”—we learn by being explicitly taught, often by people in positions of power like teachers or parents.
But we also absorb many unspoken rules about language as we go about our lives, picking them up from patterns we implicitly observe in the ways people use language in different contexts. On the DLP website you can read about how Disney movies use language to portray indigenous characters as primitive savages (Meek), how television commercials about skin products can reproduce white supremacy (Shankar), and how children learn to speak and act respectfully in Vietnam, which shapes Vietnamese social life (Shohet).
Language ideologies can cause serious problems because they are often used to reinforce social inequalities. People whose language is labeled as wrong – incorrect, too “street,” or uneducated – often face negative consequences in powerful institutions, like school, work, the doctor’s office, or in court. Judgements about language often make language into a tool for stigmatizing communities that already face other kinds of marginalization: people of color, poor people, immigrants, queer and trans folks, neurodiverse individuals, and others. On the DLP website you can read articles about the ways that language supports institutions and those in power while marginalizing others. These include testimony given at the trial of George Zimmerman, charged for the murder of Trayvon Martin (Sharese King), Spanish-English bilingualism in schools (Flores and Rosa), talk about healthy foods in a Danish classroom (Sif Karrebaek), how students in mixed immigrant status families use silence in public schools (Figueroa), and talk around Black-on-Black violence in schools (Smalls).
Language can also be used as a resource to resist these injustices. People can change what they believe about language. We can use language to create equity and inclusion rather than inequality and exclusion. Institutions may be resistant, but people, including young people, can create change. For instance, in 2010, Race Forward launched a campaign called “drop the i-word” to urge journalists to stop using the word “illegal” to refer to immigrants because it is dehumanizing, racially charged, and legally inaccurate. By 2013 this campaign succeeded in getting several major news outlets and the Associated Press style guide to commit to using more humanizing language instead. How we talk about people, what language we use, matters!
We can all use language to support everyday acts of resistance. Changing language can challenge inequalities. On the DLP website you can read about debates over singular they/them gender-neutral pronouns as a way to be inclusive and why these words upset some people (Conrod), how people borrow the language or style of others to play with racial stereotypes, like Asian boys who use African American English (Chun), how language and communication can take on anti-Muslim racism (Durrani), or how drawing on students’ experiential expertise can create more meaningful learning in schools (Delfino).
To really understand how language and power work, we need to closely observe, listen, and ask people about their language use. The method that anthropologists use to do this is called ethnography, and it includes spending a lot of time in one place and really getting to know how a specific community or social institution uses language by observing and talking to individuals, including what people post on social media, as well as by conducting interviews or recording everyday interactions. Ethnography helps researchers develop awareness about the beliefs that they or others might have about the “right” (or wrong) ways to use language, while also grounding research in the concrete details of specifically how people are doing things with language. This sort of close attention to language can help us to understand more deeply how social inequities are kept in place, often supported by unremarkable ways of using language. It can also help us imagine how language can be used to create a better and more just world.
The articles on this website all reflect the kinds of insights that can come from close, ethnographic attention to language practices. We hope that reading them helps you recognize the ways that language is at work in your communities and in the world around you. We invite you to contribute to our understanding of what language is and how it matters by investigating language in your life!
