Linguistic

Categories and
Culture
 Native American and Australian Aboriginal
languages are often cited as examples which
roundly refute popular misconceptions about
primitive languages.

 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 languages are
amongst the most interesting and grammatically
complex that has been researched.
Dyribal, an Australian Aboriginal
language, has four categories.
The four classifiers:
 
I. Bayi: (human) males; some animals
II. Balan: (human) females, birds, water, fire,
fighting
III. Balam: non-flesh food
IV. Bala: everything else
 Dyirbal noun classes
I bayi II balan III balam IV bala
Men Women edible fruit parts of the body
kangaroos Bandicoots fruit plants meat
possums Dogs tubers bees
Snakes platypus ferns mud
Fishes birds cigarettes grass
Insects spears wine wind
Storms water cake noises
the moon fire honey language
fishing spears stars    
boomerangs sun    
 Clearly Kunwinjku has many more
terms to label distinctions among
kangaroos and wallabies than
English does. The reasons are
obvious: kangaroos are an important
part of the Aboriginal people’s
environment.
 Kunwinjku kangaroo
terms
Kunj (general term covering all kangaroos and wallabies)
Linnean and Male Female Child
English names
Macropus antilopinus karndakidj kalaba karndayh Djamunbuk
(antilopine wallaroo) (large individual male)   (juvenile
      male)
Macropus bernardus nadjinem bark djukerre  
(black wallaroo)      
       
Macropus robustus kalkberd kanbulerri wolerrk narrobad
(wallaroo) (large male)   (juvenile
male)
Macropus agilis warradjangkal/ merlbbe/ nakornborrh
(agile wallaby) kornobolo kornobolo nanjid (baby)
nakurdakurda
(very large individual)
 Language does not determine what is perceived, but
it is the physical and socio-cultural environment
which determines the distinctions that the language
develops.

 From this perspective, 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.

In Maori culture, relative age is very important. Even
the status of the tribe or iwi to which you belong will
be identified in teina and tuakana terms relative to
other tribes.


Maori kinship terminology distinguishes between
siblings in different ways from English.

I.teina younger sister of a female, younger brother of a male

II.tuakana older sister of a female, older brother of a male

tuahine sister of a male
III.

tungane
IV. brother of a female
 Njamal has distinct terms for younger vs
older siblings and younger cousins.

For Example:

Maraga, refers to a younger brother or

sister, and to some younger cousins.
 The Cost
of
Language Loss
Ubykh is a language of the north-western Caucasus and it
is famously linguistically complex.

Ubykh language (81 conconants and more than 20 verb

prefixes). And the complex morphology of Ubykh allows
one-word expressions such as
aqhjazbacr’aghawdætwaaylafaq’ayt’madaqh

Which translates as:

‘if only you had not been able to make him take it all out
from under me again for them’.
 The fact that every language offers some new
interesting linguistic and often cognitive
distinctions, a unique ‘window on the world’,
provides yet another reason to lament language loss.

 The Amazonian tribe who speak Hixkaryana, a Carib

language, linguists had speculated that no human
language used a word order which involved the object
(O) at the beginning of the sentence and the subject
at the end (S) with the verb (V) in between: i.e. OVS.
 In terms of the environment too, language loss can
be costly.

Example:
 
‘All around the world indigenous people transmit,
through the words and expressions of their language, the
fruits of millennia of close observation of nature and
experimentation with its products’.

 Language loss also entails the loss of insights about

human perception.
Tuyuca speakers:
1. díiga apé-wi [visual affix]
‘I saw him play soccer with my own eyes’

2. díiga apé –yi [apparent affix]

‘I have seen evidence that he played soccer: e.g.

The shoe print on the playing field, but didn’t see him play’

3. díiga apé-hiyi [inferential affix]

‘It is reasonable to assume he played soccer’
 Another important reason for deploring language
loss is the fact that when people lose their
language, their distinctive socio-cultural identity is
also put at risk.

 Language and culture are clearly closely related.

 These are crucial symbols of identity and the loss

of a language and the related erosion of cultural
identity is often devastating.
Thank You!!!