Language is one of the main ways humans mark belonging to different societies, and from an anthropological perspective what makes human language distinctive is not vocabulary or grammar alone but three capacities our closest primate relatives lack: producing endlessly novel sentences, referring to things that are absent or don’t exist, and loading arbitrary symbols with shared meaning. This lecture for Introduction to Anthropology opens chapter 7 of The Human Story (Brewis et al.), “Language and Our Worlds,” building the foundations of semiotics and then showing how variation within any language becomes an instrument of power. It follows Humans and Other Humans and leads into Language and Inequality. For how meaning varies across societies, see the Cross-Cultural Understanding hub; for standardization as domination, see the Power Analysis hub.
Key Concepts
- Human language is distinctive from primate communication because it produces novel sentences and refers to things that are absent, hypothetical, or nonexistent — the basis of its symbolic, rule-governed character (197–198).
- Semiotics is the study of signs and meaning: a signifier stands for a signified, and the link between them is often arbitrary — there is no necessary connection between the sound “table” and the object it names (198, 203).
- Signs come in three types — an icon resembles what it represents, an index points to it (smoke to fire), and a symbol connects to it only by shared agreement (203).
- Meaning depends on encoding and decoding within context; the same words carry different force depending on emotional and situational cues, and all knowledge is situated in a particular time and place (203–204).
- Indexicality is language that requires context to make sense; most everyday speech is indexical, while propositional statements — news reports, lectures — aim to be context-independent (202).
- Variation is intrinsic to every language, and efforts to enforce one “correct” form — including labeling one variety Mainstream White American English — express power relationships, not linguistic superiority (200, 202).
- Speech act theory holds that words do not merely convey information but perform action; a shout, a judge’s verdict, or gossip enforcing social norms all use language to produce effects in the world (205).
- Political discourse can produce social reality: the chapter’s Hungarian example shows how labeling the Roma community with pejorative and “criminal” terms turned perception into policy support (210).
📖 Book: The Human Story (Commissions earned)
From Biology to Language
We’ve finished the biological anthropology unit — primatology, human variation, the story of evolution from bipedal hominins through Homo sapiens — but biology doesn’t disappear. What let these puny, not-especially-cold-adapted humans spread into high-altitude, arctic, rainforest, and desert environments they were never built for was cumulative culture: learned behavior built up and passed on over time. Humans are flexible. They migrate, trade, and stay interconnected. And as populations spread into different places, they developed different societies, different ways of speaking, and languages that perhaps intensified their differences the further apart they got. One of the ways humans signal that they belong to distinct societies is through language.
What Makes Human Language Distinctive?
Language developed early — we don’t know exactly how early. Other primates use vocalizations and gestures to communicate in the wild, and researchers have taught certain apes to sign: Koko the gorilla, Washoe the chimpanzee, Kanzi the bonobo, usually raised among humans for that purpose (a practice largely abandoned as unethical). So apes can interpret and produce signs. But human language does something not observed in apes: it produces new sentences and new ideas, and it can talk about things that may not even exist. Tell someone to look at the purple dinosaurs floating around the room and they can picture it — there are no purple dinosaurs, but the sentence still means something. We can talk about what hasn’t happened, what has happened but that we lie about, what we wish would happen, and what never will.
This works because human language is highly symbolic: we agree on what symbols mean, and to anyone outside that agreement — whether the language is spoken or written — they mean nothing. Human languages also feature complex grammars, and yet most of that grammar is absorbed by speaking in a social context rather than taught. Most people across human history never went to school, and they still built rich oral and story traditions. Children take on language, and the ways of addressing others appropriate to their society, before they ever reach a classroom, as their brains grow and the surrounding languages become incorporated into their biology. (The textbook notes that US caregivers tend to face infants and talk to them directly, while other societies orient children outward toward the wider group — a real difference in how language is transmitted, though not a hard rule, since there is variation within every society.)
Signs, Signifiers, and Symbols
Studying language requires a metalanguage — a whole vocabulary for talking about language — which is part of why linguistic anthropology is one of the field’s more difficult subfields. Linguists distinguish the signified (the thing being talked about — a table, a desk, an idea, the purple dinosaurs) from the signifier (whatever is used to indicate it). There are three types of signifier:
- Icon — supposed to look like what it represents, the way a restroom pictogram or a picture of a table stands in for the real thing.
- Index — points to something else. Smoke indexes fire; an arrow on a garage-sale sign points to where the sale is without resembling it.
- Symbol — connected to its object only by agreement, with no necessary link. There is no reason “table” means table and another language says mesa; nothing table-like forces the word. Symbols are, in the linguists’ term, arbitrary (a handful of onomatopoetic words aside).
Encoding, Decoding, and Context
Because symbols must be read, communication runs through encoding a message and decoding it, and decoding smuggles in a lot of assumptions. A garage-sale sign works only if you know the letters, know what a garage sale is, and can handle the word “today” — an indexical term that tells you nothing about which day, so a sign left up too long becomes a puzzle. Decoding also usually needs emotional context. “The house is on fire,” said flatly, is information about a house that might be down the street or on the news; shouted, the same five words demand that you run. This is why early text messages misfired so often and why emojis and even punctuation carry emotional weight — a period at the end of a text can read as final, even angry.
Even an icon needs cultural context. A petroglyph carved into the rock in Arizona looks to many tourists like a stork carrying a baby; some Hopi people read it instead as a clan story — a crane clan and a frog clan, or a giant bird that eats badly behaved children. Which reading holds isn’t a matter of correctness but of situated knowledge: knowledge tied to a particular people, time, and place, which may not make sense outside it — the same reason “today” on the garage-sale sign requires knowing the neighborhood.
Indexicality and Propositional Language
The point that indexes rely on context generalizes into indexicality: language that needs the situation it was spoken in to make sense. Most daily speech is indexical — “meet me at our usual spot” means nothing to an outsider. Where do you hear the least indexical language? News reports and lectures, which aim to be propositional: self-contained statements of who, what, where, when, and why. “The capital of France is Paris” is supposed to hold regardless of who says it or where — which is exactly what makes propositional language feel so detached from everyday life.
Language Variation and Power
Languages don’t only vary between each other; they vary within themselves, and that internal variation is where power enters. Japanese and Korean carry different noun and verb forms depending on the respect owed to the person addressed — in Korean, even the words for eating or for rice shift when speaking to elders versus peers. English does this less starkly through registers: the way you speak in class is not the way you speak with friends. Variation within a language is universal, so when a society pushes everyone to “speak correctly,” that push is usually a power relationship — one group imposing its system on others.
The textbook’s example of colonially imposed signed languages makes this concrete: communities had developed their own signed languages, and Indigenous signs were displaced by American Sign Language. It is also why the book replaces “standard English” with Mainstream White American English — a dialect that White Americans treat as the standard and against which others are judged, not a neutral or superior form. The pronunciation of “ask” is a small case: the variant “aks,” now stigmatized and associated with Black varieties of English, was used in England centuries ago and persists among some rural White Americans, and some evidence suggests it was once the more common form before elites settled on “ask.” Which variety gets called standard reflects who became dominant, not which is linguistically better.
Speech Acts and Social Action
Language is not just words; it is a way of doing something in the world. Speech act theory holds that words are meant to produce feeling or action, not only to transmit information. Said flatly, “the house is on fire” passes on information; shouted, it is an attempt to make you act. The same symbols do very different work, so it is worth asking what someone is trying to accomplish with them.
One thing words do is constrain behavior. Gossip looks trivial but enforces social norms: in small towns and small colleges, word travels fast, and the flow of information keeps people “in their place.” Passing on information and disciplining conduct turn out to be the same act.
Political Labeling and Discourse
The chapter closes on language as social action with an example from Hungary (210). A political party challenged the ruling party on immigration by referring to the Romani, or Roma — a discriminated-against minority — with the known pejorative “gypsy,” then coining “gypsy criminals” and “gypsy crime.” As the textbook puts it, the party’s discourse about criminals “served effectively to turn them into criminals in the perceptions of many Hungarians,” and so bolstered support for its policies. The lecture draws the contemporary parallel that political leaders elsewhere have modeled similar moves, labeling people as criminals or “illegals” to shape how a community sees them. The takeaway is to stay mindful: when someone tells you something — even a news report — ask what they want you to feel and do, and who you are being asked to sacrifice or harm in the process.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes human language different from animal communication?
Other primates communicate with vocalizations and gestures, and some apes have been taught to sign, but human language uniquely produces novel sentences and refers to things that are absent, hypothetical, or nonexistent. That symbolic, rule-governed capacity — not just having “words” — is what sets it apart (197–198).
What is semiotics in anthropology?
Semiotics is the study of signs and how they carry meaning. It distinguishes the signified (the thing referred to) from the signifier (what refers to it), and stresses that the connection is usually arbitrary — meaning depends on shared agreement, not on any natural link between word and world (198, 203).
What is the difference between an icon, an index, and a symbol?
An icon resembles what it represents (a restroom pictogram), an index points to something else (smoke indicating fire, an arrow to a garage sale), and a symbol is tied to its object only by convention, with no necessary connection (203).
What is a speech act?
Speech act theory holds that words perform actions rather than only conveying information. A shouted warning, a judge pronouncing a verdict, or gossip enforcing a norm all use language to change something in the world (205).
How does language reflect power?
Every language varies internally, so declaring one variety “standard” — for example Mainstream White American English — is an exercise of power, not a linguistic fact. Political discourse can go further and produce social reality, as when labeling a group with criminalizing terms shifts public perception and policy (200, 210).
Course Navigation
Previous: Humans and Other Humans — Neandertals, Denisovans, and archaic admixture.
Next: Language and Inequality — how language shapes thought and reinforces discrimination: linguistic relativity, raciolinguistics, and linguistic profiling.
- Cross-Cultural Understanding Hub — How meaning varies across cultures.
- Power Analysis Hub — Structures of power and resistance.
- How Writing Shaped Our Idea of Language — The theoretical critique: why “language” is an abstraction derived from writing.