A presentation for chapter 13 from Janet Holmes book introduction to sociolinguistics , by Fatimah Abu-Srair

1. Language, cognition
and culture
An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (Janet Holmes)

2. Linguistic categories and
culture
Native American and Australian aboriginal
language are often cited as examples which
roundly refute popular misconception about
primitive language .
For example : mistaken claims that ‘simple
societies cant have complex grammars’ .

3. Kwakiutl a native American language , for example ,
requires a grammatical classification of noun based
on whether they are visible or not . And while
French requires every noun be assigned to one of
two genders , Dyirbal , an Australian aboriginal
language , has four such categories .

4. Using western criteria the traditional nomadic
lifestyle of the aboriginal people of Australia seems
very simple . Their culture , however , is thousands
of years old and their language are amongst the
most interesting and grammatically complex that
have been researched .Every noun in Dyirbal
belongs to one of the four classes . Consequently
whenever a Dyirbal speaker uses a noun in a
sentence the noun must be preceded by one of the f
our classifiers ; bayi ,balan ,balam or bala .

5. Language provides a means of encoding a
community's knowledge ,beliefs and values
i.e. its culture .Tahitians don’t make a distinction
between ‘sadness’ and ‘sickness', for instance using
the same word for both .this accurately represents
their belief that ‘sadness/sickness can be attributed
to an attack by evil spirits , a belief that may initially
seem odd to someone from western culture .

6. The Cost of Language Lost
e.i.:
Ubykh
Without George Dumezil’s
commitment to language description,
we would never have known about
the linguistic complexities of Ubykh.

7. Until 1959, When people discovered the
Amazonian tribe who speak Hixkaryana,
a crib language, linguists had speculated
that no human language used a word
order wich involved the object (O) at the
beginning of a sentence and the subject
at the end (S) with the verb (V) in
between: I.e. OVS. Hixkaryana scuttled
that theory and forced desciptive and
theoretical linguists to think again about
linguistic possibilities.

8. And perhaps even more
importantly, this discovery
forced cognitive linguists to
reconsider the range of formal
constraints on human cognition,
and the kind of rules the human
brain can cope with. Information
on possible cognitive limitation
on human thinking is relevant in
a number of areas, including
research on the brain,

9. Where it suggests ways of treating brain
damage, and information technology,
where the limits of what human beings
can conceptualise clearly affects what it
possible in computer programming.
In terms of the environment too, language
lost can be costly.

10. e.i. 10
When we lose a language which makes
subtle distinctions between plants on
the basis of medical properties, or
which encodes important biological
and environmental knowledge which
may not be obvious to outsiders, we
lose information which may be
difficult to retrieve.

11. Language also entails the loss of
insights about human perception.
e.i. 11

12. Finally, When people loss their
language, their distinctive socio-
cultural identity is also put at risk.
Language and culture are clearly
closely related. People whose
language has been swamped by
another often lose confidence in their
abilities and develop poor self-
esteem. While many other factors are
also relevant, language loss in such
cases is at least a contributing factor
in educational and socio-economic
under-performance.

13. Language ,social and cognition
In Example 13 they include that :
 Middle-class children do well in school .
 Working-class children don’t do well in
school
 Middle-class children speak a different
variety of English than the working-class
children .

14. In previous section provided an example of the
potentially punitive social implications of culturally
different ways of interacting , even when both
group are using varieties of the same language
.other have been interested in whether are possible
cognitive implications where groups use different
varieties of a language. Basil Bernstein was a
sociologist who asked this question in the 1960s .

15. Like many educationalists , he was concerned that
British children from working-class backgrounds
were not progressing well at school .it was also
widely recognissed that working-class spoke
English differently from middle-class children .
Researchers began to examine features of working –
class children’s speech , looking for an explanation
there .

16. Unfortunately , they assumed that the kind of
language working-class children used in a formal
interview situation to a middle-class adult was an
accurate representation of their sociolinguistic
competence . In such situations , not surprisingly ,
the children used short , even monosyllabic ,
responses which suggested to the interviewers that
their linguistic resources were “restricted”

17. conclusion

18. Ranyah AlQahtani
Fatimah Abusrair