This volume brings together papers based on presentations originally given by the various contributors at the 2019 workshop ‘The Integration of Language and Society’.
There are some construals of the phrase ‘the integration of language and society’ which are completely uncontroversial. One is the idea that social factors are the driving force for much of the systematic variability found in language use, which in turn largely accounts for the spread of variants in language change. Another is that societal changes—newly established contact with speakers of another language, the creation of new technologies, the abandonment of old ones, the advent of previously undreamt of and thus hitherto unnamed concepts, and suchlike—can lead to the rise of new lexical items and the obsolescence of others. Over time, the accretion of such changes can leave unmistakable societal imprints on a language’s lexicon. Linguists do not, it seems to me, differ on whether there is ‘integration of language and society’ when it comes to such matters. They differ only in their level of professional interest in these topics as opposed to others.
The volume under review seems to set out to argue for some rather more contentious types of integration, however. This is visible in the inside front cover, where we read that ‘The volume explores the interaction of language and society as reflected in the grammar of a language. Each language bears an imprint of the society that speaks it […] The findings advance our understanding of how non-linguistic traits have their correlates in language, and how these [correlates in language—NM] change when society changes’ (emphasis mine). While this quotation seems to emphasise social and cultural influence on grammar, elsewhere, it is made clear that the editors regard the flow of influence to be bi-directional. As the editors put it: ‘Language and society are closely integrated and mutually supportive (rather than one being dependent on the other) […]’ (2).
In the rest of this review, I will first present a chapter-by-chapter overview, before returning to the key question of the integration of language and society, and the levels at which such integration holds.
The first chapter of the collection is an introduction by the editors. In it, Aikhenvald, Dixon and Jarkey lay out the conceptual framework that unites the volume. They list five linguistic domains which ‘show strong correlations and integration with non-linguistic societal traits’ (7). These are: (i) reference classification (specifically, gender systems and classifier systems), (ii) types of possession structure, (iii) forms of address, (iv) source of information, transmission of information and interaction patterns, and (v) special speech styles. They also identify six societal traits with respect to which these linguistic parameters seem to co-vary: (a) relations within a community, social hierarchies and kinship categorisation, (b) social constraints (taboo and avoidance), (c) principles of interaction and attitudes to information and their sources, (d) beliefs, religion, spirits and dreams, (e) means of subsistence and physical environment, and (f) language awareness, language engineering, and sensitivity to societal changes. After summarising examples of integration with respect to these linguistic and social properties, the chapter concludes with an overview of the contributions.
Chapter 2, ‘The grammatical expression of social relations in Japanese’, is written by Nerida Jarkey. In it, Jarkey examines the grammar of honorification in Japanese, showing how a system which originally only indexed hierarchical relations evolved, over a period of just over a millennium, into one in which in-group versus out-group relations are a crucial axis. This contrasts with the situation in Korean, in which hierarchical social relations remain paramount. Jarkey suggests that changes in Japanese society over the same period are linked to this linguistic difference.
In Chapter 3, ‘Honorification in Dzongkha’, author Stephen Watters discusses a Tibeto-Burman language which is the national language of Bhutan. Dzongkha’s honorific system manifests itself in both nouns and verbs. In nouns, certain body part words and words for everyday items have suppletive honorific equivalents. A semi-open subset of those honorific roots can be compounded with other noun roots to yield the honorific version of other nouns. In the verb system, there is a small set of monomorphemic verbs which have special suppletive honorific forms, in some cases neutralising the distinction between two or more separate common verbs (for instance, tang ‘send’ and bjin ‘give’ correspond to one and the same honorific form, nang). In addition to this, there are compound verbs consisting of a noun root and a verb root which can be made honorific by replacing the noun portion with its honorific counterpart. Watters illustrates these systems in use by showing how honorific constructions are deployed in a scene from a Bhutanese movie and in a natural conversation between four men over a game of Carrom.
This gives rise to an interesting point of comparison with Chapter 4, ‘Identifying who is who in Brokpa’, in which Pema Wangdi discusses a language closely related to Dzongkha, spoken by around 3,500 people in Eastern Bhutan, and by around 1855 more in parts of Northeast India. Wangdi discusses the honorific system of Brokpa, which is similar to that of Dzongkha and which Wangdi says illustrates integration with respect to social parameters (a) (relations within a community) and (b) (social constraints). Wangdi also discusses a comparative construction which she says shows evidence of integration with respect to social parameter (a), as well as the topographic deictic system of the language, a point of integration with respect to social parameter (e) (means of subsistence and physical environment).
Chapter 5, ‘The semantics of the Dyirbal avoidance style: Adjectives’, is written by R.M.W. Dixon. In the culture of Dyirbal speakers, there was a taboo against direct interaction among certain relatives, specifically one’s parents-in-law and children-in-law. When talking in the presence of such a relative, a speaker would switch to a special speech style called Jalnguy. Jalnguy morphosyntax and phonology did not differ significantly from the corresponding everyday variety of Dyirbal; however, almost 100% of the content words were different. Not all everyday words had an exact correspondent in Jalnguy, though: more usually, a single Jalnguy word would correspond to several everyday ones, so that Jalnguy neutralised a number of lexical distinctions. Dixon argues that there are patterns in which distinctions are neutralised and which are maintained in Jalnguy, and that these patterns are revelatory of certain cultural and societal features, some of which would probably be at play in any society, and some of which seem to be Dyirbal specific.
Chapter 6 is ‘The ways of speaking and the means of knowing: The Tariana of northwest Amazonia’, in which Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald examines possible integration points in the gender system, the multiple classifier system and the evidential system in Tariana, an endangered Arawak language. She shows that gender marking can be manipulated to convey the status of men and women, thus constituting an instance of integration with respect to social parameter (a) (relations within a community). The multiple classifier system, in contrast, reflects social parameter (e) (environment and means of subsistence). Finally, Aikhenvald argues that the evidential system reflects a number of social parameters simultaneously (namely, (a), (c), (d) and (f)).
Staying in the same geographical region, Katarzyna I. Wojtylak addresses ‘Links between language and society among the Murui of northwest Amazonia’ in Chapter 7. As well as discussing a number of possible integration points, Wojtylak highlights instances of disintegration—cases in which social and/or linguistic change leads to a growing apart of social and linguistic properties. The phenomena examined are classifiers, possessive marking, spatial adverbs and special avoidance speech styles.
Luca Ciucci’s contribution, ‘How grammar and culture interact in Zamucoan’, appears as Chapter 8. The focus is on Old Zamuco, Ayoreo and Chamacoco. Ciucci’s most striking finding is that, in Ayoreo, there is an essentially perfect correlation between the grammatical gender of a noun and the gender of its personification in Ayoreo myth. Ciucci’s suggestion is that the language has influenced the development of the society’s mythology. Also discussed are a teknonymic suffix in Ayoreo, the possessive classifier system and comparative constructions.
Chapter 9 is ‘The integration of languages and society: A view from multilingual Southern New Guinea’, by Dineke Schokkin. Schokkin examines the practices of multilingualism in the region of the Pahoturi River, before proceeding to a discussion of possessive marking in Idi. A key distinction in the system is between ‘distant’ and ‘close’ possession constructions. She goes on to show how speakers exploit this distant/close distinction to convey the extent to which they identify with languages they do and don’t speak.
Chapter 10, ‘The Iraqw society reflected in their language’, is written by Maarten Mous. Iraqw, a Cushitic language spoken in Northern Tanzania, has a considerable anthropological literature devoted to its speakers. Mous cites this literature as showing that: (i) the society highly prizes togetherness at the level of the local community, over and above kinship and other sorts of social bonds; and (ii) that the society operates on a non-chronological conception of time. He argues that these societal traits have their linguistic correlates in the lexicon, in a certain impersonal subject marker, and in the demonstrative system.
Chapter 11 is Anne Storch’s ‘Waiting: On language and Hospitality’. Ranging over a variety of communities in Majorca, with a focus on German tourists and West African migrant workers, Storch provides an anthropological meditation on language use and language ideologies in what she calls ‘transitional settings’ (342)—contexts in which speakers are forced to bide their time by some interruption to their progress.
The volume is well edited, with only a handful of typos and a single instance of a glyph-rendering problem (265, fn 16). The papers are well written and mostly very clear, although Storch’s chapter contains quotations in French and German for which translations should have been provided (347; 355). The volume is also commendable for its excellent descriptive coverage of a number of understudied languages, although there is one unfortunate slip: a misanalysis of a masculine Catalan participle form as feminine in Storch’s chapter (352).
I did not come away convinced that the integration of language and society plays out at the level of grammar. Many of the more compelling examples of integration in the volume are avowedly at the level of the lexicon and/or language use, where everyone would expect them. It also struck me that a number of the examples presented as grammatical in nature would be better analysed as lexical and/or pragmatic. For instance, the fact that the equivalent of my garden is rejected by Murui speakers, while our garden is accepted, plausibly does have to do with the fact that gardens are not individually owned in the local culture (226); but if so, this could be because my garden is a kind of presupposition failure. There is no need to assume a syntactic prohibition against the form in question. Further to this, there is the general difficulty of demonstrating causal links between the relevant phenomena and excluding the possibility that apparent points of integration are coincidental. The editors and authors do acknowledge such difficulties in a few specific places (most clearly in footnote 4 on (6)), but the issue holds of every interesting claim in the book and is never satisfactorily put to rest.
What would it take to put this worry to bed? One could try to catalogue cases in which linguistic change happens despite the absence of a relevant societal change (e.g. loss of an honorific system in the absence of a new effulgence of egalitarian spirit in the culture), and cases of societal change without the sort of linguistic change we might expect it to precipitate. If we find that such cases are much rarer than cases where linguistic change and societal change happen in harmony, this would make one more confident that apparent cases of integration are real. Unfortunately, this volume does not attempt anything of this sort, but it will be a must-read for anyone interested in these issues.
