[Lingtyp] Traditional view of language and grammar in indigenous societies

Thu Jul 3 10:37:37 UTC 2025

Dear Randy and all,

Thank you for sharing this!

In field methods classes, I have cited examples of the “attention to meaning” type from Alison Henry’s (2005) paper on working with speakers of … non-standard spoken (Belfast) English, in an attempt to counter-act the exoticizing of “non-literate cultures”.

The following gives you a flavour (p. 1604):

‘Does this sentence sound right or not: There’s lots of new people moving in round here’

‘No’

‘What would you say?’

‘There’s not many new people moving in round here. People like this area, they tend to hang on to their houses.’

Henry, Alison. 2005. Non-standard dialects and linguistic data. Lingua 115(11). 1599–1617.

Best, Eva

Prof Eva Schultze-Berndt (she/her) | Linguistics and English Language
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures | The University of Manchester, UK

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of randylapolla via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Wednesday, 2 July 2025 at 17:24
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Traditional view of language and grammar in indigenous societies
Dear All,
Late last year and early this year there was a short discussion following the post by Bernat Bardagil copied below. I was not able to respond at the time, but I hope there are still people interested in this question.

Chris Donley talked of his experience doing fieldwork on Khatso, and concluded that "I think the key factor here is that Khatso has no writing system and is not taught in school. Therefore, speakers are not familiar with the concept of analyzing it as a thing in the world separate from its daily use.”

This is my experience also. When I first started working on the morphologically complex Qiang language (Sino-Tibetan; northern Sichuan, China) I worked with an old man who had not left the mountains for 30 years, and was completely illiterate. Like Chris said, he could not conceive of what he was saying as an object of inquiry that you could treat in an abstract way. It was all about meaning for him. We couldn’t just make up sentences for him to say, as for him it all had to be real. When I asked him how to say 'Khuəzi went out to her field', he said, “You can’t say that.” I was shocked and so asked why, and he said, “Because Khuəzi doesn’t have a field.”. He was trained as a Qiang historian, one responsible for passing on the historical stories of the Qiang, and he took me on as his student. He would speak at length and I would ask him to help me write it down, but what he gave me was just keywords, not the full form. I asked him about “the rest of it”, i.e. the morphology, and he said “That is just sound”. When I finally got the stories down I tried to investigate the grammar by manipulating some of the forms in the story, e.g. in a story where a cow goes down a hill, I asked how to say ’the cow didn’t go down the hill’, and again he said “You can’t say that”, so I asked why, and he said, “Because that is not how the story goes.”
In those days I was still doing lexical elicitation with a wordlist, but this didn’t work out well with him, as the wordlist was based on Chinese lexical categories, and he was unfamiliar with them and so when I asked for ‘cloud’, he said “What kind of cloud?” and then described half a dozen clouds with different basic names, and no general term (though many young people learn only one word for cloud, as they are thinking in Chinese categories). The same happened with ‘pheasant’: I couldn’t ask for a general term for ‘pheasant’, I needed to describe a particular type out of many.

This contrasts greatly with the speakers of the Rawang language of Kachin State, Myanmar. The speakers are almost all devout Christians, most can also speak Burmese, English, Chinghpaw, and often Lisu, and many have studied the bible in Greek, so are very aware of grammar. They have the Rawang Literature Committee, which is like the Académie Française, attempting to regulate and improve the writing system and the language generally. They are very aware of the tones and the morphology. One aspect was that when they told me a word, they would inflect it in a word-class specific way, so they had a clear conception of word classes.

I’ll attach some slides from a guest talk I gave on oral vs. literate cultures in a colleague’s course on Orality, based largely on Jack Goody & Ian Watt 1963, "The Consequences of Literacy". Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3: 304-345. Hope they can be of use, and get you to read Goody & Watt 1963, which I highly recommend.

Randy J. LaPolla
Whorf 1956: 78: '... linguistics is fundamental to the theory of thinking and in the last analysis to ALL HUMAN SCIENCES.' (emphasis in orig.)  p. 79: 'The very essence of linguistics is the quest for meaning, and, as the science refines its procedure, it inevitably becomes, as a matter of this quest, more psychological and cultural, while retaining that almost mathematical precision of statement which it gets from the highly systematic nature of the linguistic realm of fact."

On 27 Dec 2024, at 11:09 PM, Bernat Bardagil Mas via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

Dear all,

As anyone working closely with indigenous languages and cultures of the Americas, we have seen multiple instances of the awareness that indigenous peoples have of everything that surrounds them, with detailed accounts and explanations ranging from social aspects to natural or supernatural phenomena.

We have come to wonder whether, and how frequently, this type of reflection is attested also for language — not so much the origin of language, but its structure and nature. Have any of you encountered anything similar to this notion among indigenous communities, regarding the structure of their own language? Or, are you aware of any mentions of something that could correspond to traces of this type of indigenous linguistic or grammatical knowledge?

Thank you,

Bernat Bardagil i Mas & Sara Larios i Ongay

- -
Bernat Bardagil
Postdoctoral researcher
Department of Linguistics, Ghent University
research.flw.ugent.be/en/bernat.bardagil<https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/bernat.bardagil>

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