Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

Citation

Ahearn, L. M. (2021). Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter Summary

The third edition has thirteen chapters in three parts, followed by notes, references and an index. Part I, "Language: Some Basic Questions" (Chapters 1–5), sets out the field's working ideas. Part II, "Global Communities of Speakers, Hearers, Readers, and Writers" (Chapters 6–9), moves to communities and their practices. Part III, "Language, Power, and Social Differentiation" (Chapters 10–13), turns to gender, race, endangerment and power. The publisher describes the edition as fully revised, with a new chapter on how technologies such as social media and online meetings have changed language, and with attention to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on linguistic practices.

Chapter 1: The Socially Charged Life of Language

The opening chapter argues that language is a set of socially embedded practices rather than a neutral medium, and that every social interaction is mediated by language. It asks what a speaker needs to know in order to "know" a language, surveys examples of linguistic diversity and of diversity in research, and introduces the field through short profiles of scholars including Keith Basso, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Bonnie Urciuoli, Alessandro Duranti, Kathryn Woolard and James Wilce. Its core is a set of four key terms: multifunctionality, language ideologies, practice and indexicality.

Chapter 2: Gestures, Sign Languages, and Multimodality

The chapter widens the object of study beyond speech. It draws on Bakhtin's double-voiced discourse, Goffman's participation framework and production format, and the analysis of conversation, then turns to gestures and other embodied communication, sign languages, and poetry, whistled languages, song and images.

Chapter 3: The Research Process in Linguistic Anthropology

A methods chapter organised as questions: what research questions linguistic anthropologists formulate, what data they collect and with what methods (participant observation, interviews, surveys and questionnaires, naturally occurring conversations, experimental methods, matched guise tests, written texts), how they analyse data, what products result, and what ethical issues arise.

Chapters 4–5: Language Acquisition and Socialization; Language, Thought, and Culture

Chapter 4 covers language acquisition and the socialization process, including a critique of the "language gap" approach, socialization in bilingual or multilingual contexts, and socialization across the lifespan. Chapter 5 follows a hundred years of linguistic relativity and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, then reviews research on the effects of language on thought in several domains: language in general, linguistic structures, colour, space, time and language use.

Chapter 6: Global Communities of Multilingual Language Users

Defines "speech community" through size and location, shared content and type of interaction, and then presents alternatives: speech areas, speech networks and communities of practice. It continues with multilingual and transnational practices, and with diglossia, code-switching, code-mixing and heteroglossia.

Chapter 7: Literacy Practices

Distinguishes literacy events from literacy practices and the "autonomous" from the "ideological" approach to literacy. Situated cases include preschool literacy in the southeastern United States, a letter written by Pema Kumari, love-letter writing in Nepal, and instant messaging as a form between speech and writing.

Chapter 8: Online Communities and Internet Linguistic Practices

The chapter new to this edition. It treats online literacy practices (capitalization, punctuation and emojis) and online communities, relationships and social media, with sections on video meetings, avatars, and being close and distant at once.

Chapter 9: Performance, Performativity, and the Constitution of Communities

Defines performance in opposition to competence, develops the idea of performativity, treats performance as a display of verbal artistry, and closes with ethnographies of performance and performativity.

Chapters 10–11: Language and Gender; Language, Race, and Ethnicity

Chapter 10 asks what gender is and how it relates to language, whether men and women speak alike, whether gendered differences hold across ages and backgrounds, and what is myth and what is reality. Chapter 11 defines race and ethnicity, describes the rule-governed nature of African American English (habitual "be", copula deletion, double negatives, final-consonant reduction), and discusses racist language, racism in language and racial and ethnic identities.

Chapters 12–13: Language Endangerment and Revitalization; Conclusion: Language, Power, and Agency

Chapter 12 counts endangered languages, asks what dies when a language dies and why languages die, and considers whether they can be saved. Chapter 13 introduces power (hegemony, Foucault's power relations and discourse, practice theory) and agency, including its grammatical encoding and meta-agentive discourse.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3

• Multifunctionality: the idea that an utterance does several kinds of work at once rather than only conveying information.
• Language ideologies: beliefs and assumptions about language that shape how speakers and varieties are judged.
• Practice and indexicality: language use as socially situated activity, and the way linguistic forms point to social identities and settings.
• Multimodality: meaning carried by gesture, sign and other embodied channels alongside speech.

Chapters 4–9

• Language socialization: becoming a member of a community through and into its ways of using language.
• Linguistic relativity: the hypothesis, associated with Sapir and Whorf, that language influences thought.
• Community of practice: an alternative to "speech community" built on shared activity.
• Diglossia and code-switching: how languages or varieties divide functions and are alternated within talk.
• Performativity: utterances that accomplish actions in the saying.

Chapters 10–13

• Language endangerment: the loss of languages and what is lost with them.
• Hegemony and practice theory: the book's tools for thinking about power.
• Agency: the socioculturally mediated capacity to act, and how language encodes and discusses it.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• No prerequisites. The publisher states that no prior knowledge of linguistics or anthropology is required, and the opening chapter builds its vocabulary from everyday examples before introducing the key terms.
• A clear structure. The three parts move from basic questions to communities to power, and chapters are organised around questions that readers can use as study prompts, as the headings of Chapters 3, 10 and 12 show.
• Coverage of current conditions. Chapter 8 and the discussion of pandemic-era practices respond to how much talk now happens online.
• Concrete cases. Chapter 7's literacy examples and Chapter 11's detailed treatment of African American English tie general claims to specific communities and linguistic features.

Limitations

• Little formal linguistics. The contents contain no chapters on phonology, morphology or syntax, so students who need the structural side of language must add another text.
• Edition differences. The third edition adds a chapter and revises others, so chapter numbers and page references from materials written for the second edition will not match.
• Introductory depth. Thirteen chapters on a broad field mean that topics such as multimodality or endangerment are introduced rather than explored in detail, and the notes and references are the route to further reading.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the linguistic anthropology list, this is the gentlest general textbook and a natural starting point. Claire Kramsch's Language and Culture is a shorter introduction to how language expresses and symbolises cultural reality and can be read before or beside Chapters 1 and 5. James Stanlaw and Nobuko Adachi's Language, Culture, and Society is a longer textbook that also covers the structure of language, so it complements the social focus of Ahearn's text.

Alessandro Duranti's Linguistic Anthropology is the more demanding textbook on theory and method and is a natural next step after Chapters 3 and 9. Asif Agha's Language and Social Relations is a theoretical monograph on registers and social relations and follows up the discussion of indexicality and language ideologies. Ahearn's own Invitations to Love, an ethnography of love letters in Nepal, shows at book length the research behind her treatment of literacy in Chapter 7 and agency in Chapter 13.

How to Use This Book

The book suits first- and second-year undergraduates in anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociology and communication, and graduate students meeting the field for the first time. No background in linguistics is assumed.

A practical plan:

• Start with Chapter 1 and learn its four key terms, since later chapters return to them repeatedly.
• Core sequence: Chapters 3 to 5 (method, socialization, language and thought), then Chapters 6, 7 and 9 on communities, literacy and performance.
• Read Chapter 8 together with Chapter 7, since the online material extends the literacy discussion.
• Part III (Chapters 10 to 13) builds on Part I, so read it after the key terms are familiar; Chapter 13 draws the threads together and can be read last or used as a preview.
• Practice: record one everyday exchange a week, including an online one, and describe it with that week's concepts. Follow the notes to one classic study per part.