Throughout history, humankind has used oral communication as a method for passing on traditions, rules, and inherited knowledge. From its origins, we have been using language to understand our surroundings and to create shared meaning around our experience of life. The ability to tell stories has helped us to define our world, and create ritual, belief, and society. We continue to do so every time we communicate. Through the use of narrative, we determine our perspective, and shape our life’s outcome. What is it about language that makes it such a powerful tool in shaping our experience as human beings?
What we know of as the modern man first became evident around 40,000 years ago when homo erectus evolved into homo sapien. The ability to communicate, forming thoughts and words about what we are doing and who we are, marks the beginning of self awareness in the human animal. This process, however, started long before that. Six million years ago, as our ancestors first became bipedal, other aspects of our species began to change. Our neck and head shape evolved to accommodate for this change in posture and slowly the voice box and vocal chords began to develop. With the ability to perform more complex tasks using our hands, our brains began to grow as the parts used for thinking, processing and storing information formed. With the presence of these regions required for language and communication, the human brain became the largest of any of our ancestors. A huge part of what makes us human is having the capacity for telling stories and the storage space to retain the stories of others.
“This development was crucial to language ability because a tremendous amount of brain power is required to process, store, produce, and comprehend the complex system of any human language and its associated culture.”
-Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology
All animals communicate in one form or another, from noise to signaling with body language. However, there is a key demarcation between the language of animals and humans. Animals have a closed system of communication which means that no new meaning can be attributed or created. Humans use an open system, allowing us to create new messages and meanings (Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology- Language, 4). This feature of language plays a big role in the existence of culture and what we know of the human world today. The two aspects of human language that portray it’s creative potential are displacement and productivity (Language, 6). Displacement allows us to project ourselves beyond the here and now, communicating about things either in the past or the future. Productivity is the production of ideas that have not yet been thought of. Both of these features show us that language is improvisational and thus meaning is built through the act of conversation.
Language is a tool that we utilize to construct our human world, but to what extent does it influence us?
Language sets the context for one’s understanding of the world. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a study that demonstrates this interaction between language and people. It hypothesizes that culture not only influences the language spoken, but that language also shapes and changes the culture of the people speaking it (Language, 13). This means that the way a people see and understand their world is correlated to how they communicate about it. The very construction of a language will reflect how people think and behave.
A good example of this is seen through the use of verb tense. In North American cultures, language refers to past, present and future. However, there are eastern languages in which these tenses are not used, the present tense being the main focus of communication. This changes how the speaker interacts with time. Their relationship to their actions is based off of the present moment. In the English language, use of the past or future allows the speaker to distance themselves from their actions, shaping daily interactions as systems of time are used to measure one’s every action. If someone smokes cigarettes in the U.S., they may get cancer in the future. But that is not happening now so they are able to mentally remove themselves from these consequences. Mandarin, a language that does not have future tenses, requires the speaker to link any future actions to the present moment. Through this example we can see how language changes one’s relationship to reality.
Another way that meaning is created through words is with the use of metaphor. We show the listener the point we are trying to get across by connecting our message to a deeper set of symbols. The way a person talks about something and the metaphors used will tell you a lot about a culture or a person’s worldview.
To illustrate this let’s again take a look at time. In North American cultures, time is conveyed by using words like spent, wasted, or passed. Through this we can see that the understanding of time in these cultures is that of a commodity. It is viewed as finite, something that is constantly in danger of running out. Instead of sharing time with someone, you are spending time. This reflects the culture’s relationship to consumption, interacting with time as something to be bought and used up. In Ghana, West Africa, time is not so easily used up and not so precisely measured. Meetings start when people show up; no one is late, there is no set schedule. From the perspective of those who refer to time in measurement, we may observe this and see it as wasteful, or disorganized. However, from their perspective, time is not running out. There is always more time. Both cultures relationship to time is completely different based on the symbols used for understanding it.
Metaphors in everyday speech can be said to predispose a speaker’s world view and attitudes on a variety of human experiences. The metaphors in a language can reveal aspects of the culture of its speakers.”
-Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, pg. 14
So far, we have looked at how language informs culture and vice versa. What role does language play in the life of the individual?
As language is such an integral part of what it means to be human, our understanding of the world is largely developed through the use of stories. History has been recounted to us this way. A people tell a story of what happened during a specific time and how it has led to where they are today. As a method for passing down knowledge, stories are passed on from person to person and that reality continues to come alive. It is no wonder that we would take this trait of humanity as a whole and apply it to our individual lives. Who we are continues to be formed by the stories we tell. Both as a society and as individuals, what we talk about matters. Our individual story is a big part of who we are. We tell people this is me, this is my story, this is my world. In doing so we create a form around ourselves. We use self awareness as a tool to create a life that we want, a life that produces the right amount of social capital to thrive within our environment. The world around us molds us like a potter molding his clay. But how we reiterate those events, how we look at what has come to pass and recount it is like putting pottery into a kiln. Our brain solidifies this reality, giving it shape, turning our experience into a story-line.
Language is the process through which we encode our experiences, both individual and cultural. With language we are able to pass on information and store important learned data. Through communication we pass on culture from one generation to the next and ensure the survival of our species. It allows us to survive beyond our individual life span. But narrative is the most powerful part of this. How we choose to transmit information, the symbols and tenses we use, will all determine how we perceive ourselves and interact with the world around us. Our reality is based on language. Without it’s development, we would not be homo sapiens. With its continued use, we shape and mold the world that we live in and what it means to be a part of the human species.
