Year: 2014
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: There is a problem with everyday notions of language and culture.Whole generations of sociolinguists have described how language is always different rather than the same across different regions, social classes, individuals, situations, audiences, etc. and yet, language is routinely pluralised -here is one language, there is another one -rather than seen as a material noun (i.e., nouns such as iron, water, air, money) that cannot very meaningfully be pluralised.This tendency also exists to some extent with the notion of culture as witnessed in utterances such as "anthropology is the study of different cultures", but this plural notion of culture finds support only among non-specialists.Anthropologists have long resolved this issue, either explicitly by stating that "culture is a verb" (Street 1993), or more practically by avoiding the use of the word culture in its nominal thing-y form.This is easy with an adjective at hand: anthropology is not the study of different cultures, but of cultural diversity, cultural behaviour or of cultural practices.The same holds for literary studies which is not the study of literatures, but of literary works, or literary language.And history is more than the study of (national) histories, the study of historical events (and their connections).Language by contrast does not have in most languages a ready-made adjective at hand, which is a Whorfian relativity effect that has influenced our everyday as well as scholarly thinking about language.Silverstein, in an article reviewing the changing interconnections between linguistic and sociocultural anthropology within the four-field configuration of American anthropology (2005), sees as common achievement of both sub-disciplines that they have declared languages and cultures (in their nominal form) dead.Instead, he puts the linguistic-
Author: Kasper Juffermans
Institution: University of Luxembourg
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W846632910