Exam 4: Language

According to your textbook, preserving endangered languages is an important goal of linguistic anthropologists. Discuss the potentially ambiguous role that information technology and the digital divide may play in language preservation. Using examples from the text, assess the potential benefits that may accrue as members of less-prominent languages gain access to community technology and cross over the "digital divide." Consider how the tendency of prominent languages to crowd out speakers of lesser-spoken languages may be accelerated with increased cultural contact and exposure to global languages. How is the digital divide related to issues of language extinction?

The concept of cultural ________ includes linguistic assets or skills that can be converted into wages and benefits.

American women are far more likely than men to distinguish between colors like teal and turquoise, or magenta and purple. This is an example of:

Anthropologists refer to sounds that make a critical difference in meaning within a language as:

Compared to digital ________, people born before 1970 have more trouble navigating websites, wikis, blogs, and text messages.

Which of the following statements about language is true?

The digital age is:

Language continuum is defined as:

Noam Chomsky's research proposes that:

Dialect is defined as:

The Summer Institute of Linguistics:

Which of the following outcomes is NOT associated with efforts to preserve the Native American Lakota language, spoken by about 50,000 people in the United States?

What can linguistic anthropologists learn from studying the focal vocabulary of a social group? Why would words that show a particular sophistication and that describe unique cultural realities of a group of people be useful to investigate? Discuss one example of how the focal vocabulary of a language has changed or may change in the future, and discuss how men and women may have different vocabularies on particular topics.

What do linguistic anthropologists think about how women and men use language in different ways? What are the two models that explain why language is used in gendered ways, and what are examples that illustrate their hypotheses? Which one of these two models is more compelling to you, and why?

Historical linguistics is defined as:

Linguistic anthropologists would label new words that have emerged during the digital age, such as mouse, modem, download, and email, as part of our generation's ________ vocabulary.

The author suggests each of the following points to explain how men tend to dominate in mixed-gender conversations, EXCEPT:

Anthropology professor Michael Wesch:

While analyzing what is spoken and written is very important for linguistic anthropologists, the way that people convey messages through gestures, facial expressions, and postures is equally crucial in understanding human communication. Discuss how anthropologists can decipher the meaning of communication through examining paralanguage and what is indicated through body language. Illustrate how body language is not universal but rather depends on cultural context, and use examples to show how emotional information is communicated.

To investigate the focal vocabulary of a language in a particular community, a linguistic anthropologist might: