ANTH 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Human Communication, Animal Communication, Arbitrariness
Document Summary
Linguistics is traditionally considered one of the four fields. Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols that encodes a person"s experience of the world and social interactions. Language is different from speech and communication: speech is spoken language, human communication is the transfer of information from one person to another. English is a language and can be spoken but also communicated in writing, sign language, and texting. There are ~3,000 languages in the world: 2,000 of them are in africa. Non-human primates can vocalize and use calls. These vocalizations and calls are not symbolic language. Only humans have symbolic language; other animals have simply calls and call systems. Speech communities are traditionally the specific groups of people associated with a given language. Variants of languages can be dialects, creolizations, or pidgin forms. Pidgin is a language that develops with no native speakers in a single generation among members of communities where distinct native languages exist.
