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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language​

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

The power of language: we translate our thoughts into words, but words also affect the way we think

Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bangor University

Disclosure statement

Guillaume Thierry has received funding from the European Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Research Council, and the Arts Council of Wales.

Bangor University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Have you ever worried in your student years or later in life that time may be starting to run out to achieve your goals? If so, would it be easier conveying this feeling to others if there was a word meaning just that? In German, there is. That feeling of panic associated with one’s opportunities appearing to run out is called Torschlusspanik .

German has a rich collection of such terms, made up of often two, three or more words connected to form a superword or compound word. Compound words are particularly powerful because they are (much) more than the sum of their parts. Torschlusspanik, for instance, is literally made of “gate”-“closing”-“panic”.

If you get to the train station a little late and see your train’s doors still open, you may have experienced a concrete form of Torschlusspanik, prompted by the characteristic beeps as the train doors are about to close. But this compound word of German is associated with more than the literal meaning. It evokes something more abstract, referring to the feeling that life is progressively shutting the door of opportunities as time goes by.

English too has many compound words. Some combine rather concrete words like “seahorse”, “butterfly”, or “turtleneck”. Others are more abstract, such as “backwards” or “whatsoever”. And of course in English too, compounds are superwords, as in German or French, since their meaning is often distinct from the meaning of its parts. A seahorse is not a horse, a butterfly is not a fly, turtles don’t wear turtlenecks, etc.

One remarkable feature of compound words is that they don’t translate well at all from one language to another, at least when it comes to translating their constituent parts literally. Who would have thought that a “carry-sheets” is a wallet – porte-feuille –, or that a “support-throat” is a bra – soutien-gorge – in French?

This begs the question of what happens when words don’t readily translate from one language to another. For instance, what happens when a native speaker of German tries to convey in English that they just had a spurt of Torschlusspanik? Naturally, they will resort to paraphrasing, that is, they will make up a narrative with examples to make their interlocutor understand what they are trying to say.

But then, this begs another, bigger question: Do people who have words that simply do not translate in another language have access to different concepts? Take the case of hiraeth for instance, a beautiful word of Welsh famous for being essentially untranslatable. Hiraeth is meant to convey the feeling associated with the bittersweet memory of missing something or someone, while being grateful of their existence.

Hiraeth is not nostalgia, it is not anguish, or frustration, or melancholy, or regret. And no, it is not homesickness, as Google translate may lead you to believe, since hiraeth also conveys the feeling one experiences when they ask someone to marry them and they are turned down, hardly a case of homesickness.

Different words, different minds?

The existence of a word in Welsh to convey this particular feeling poses a fundamental question on language–thought relationships. Asked in ancient Greece by philosophers such as Herodotus (450 BC), this question has resurfaced in the middle of the last century, under the impetus of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf , and has become known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Linguistic relativity is the idea that language, which most people agree originates in and expresses human thought, can feedback to thinking, influencing thought in return. So, could different words or different grammatical constructs “shape” thinking differently in speakers of different languages? Being quite intuitive, this idea has enjoyed quite of bit of success in popular culture, lately appearing in a rather provocative form in the science fiction movie Arrival.

Although the idea is intuitive for some, exaggerated claims have been made about the extent of vocabulary diversity in some languages. Exaggerations have enticed illustrious linguists to write satirical essays such as “ the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax ”, where Geoff Pullum denounces the fantasy about the number of words used by Eskimos to refer to snow. However, whatever the actual number of words for snow in Eskimo, Pullum’s pamphlet fails to address an important question: what do we actually know about Eskimos’ perception of snow?

No matter how vitriolic critics of the linguistic relativity hypothesis may be, experimental research seeking scientific evidence for the existence of differences between speakers of different languages has started accumulating at a steady pace. For instance, Panos Athanasopoulos at Lancaster University, has made striking observations that having particular words to distinguish colour categories goes hand-in-hand with appreciating colour contrasts . So, he points out, native speakers of Greek, who have distinct basic colour terms for light and dark blue ( ghalazio and ble respectively) tend to consider corresponding shades of blue as more dissimilar than native speaker of English, who use the same basic term “blue” to describe them.

But scholars including Steven Pinker at Harvard are unimpressed, arguing that such effects are trivial and uninteresting, because individuals engaged in experiments are likely to use language in their head when making judgements about colours – so their behaviour is superficially influenced by language, while everyone sees the world in the same way.

To progress in this debate , I believe we need to get closer to the human brain, by measuring perception more directly, preferably within the small fraction of time preceding mental access to language. This is now possible, thanks to neuroscientific methods and – incredibly – early results lean in favour of Sapir and Whorf’s intuition.

So, yes, like it or not, it may well be that having different words means having differently structured minds. But then, given that every mind on earth is unique and distinct, this is not really a game changer.

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The Power of Language: How Language Shapes People, Culture, and Politics

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What unites us as human beings despite our diverse cultures and beliefs?  

In its various forms, language is a universal thread that runs through all societies, transcending cultural boundaries. It shapes our ways of thinking, how we interact with each other, our behaviours, and our collective consciousness. Understanding this universal influence of language is critical to analyze the complexities of human behaviour and culture. Language is the most powerful tool humanity has ever developed; it allows individuals to give meaning to feelings and emotions, convey knowledge, communicate, and share thoughts and opinions. This complex tool has permitted humanity to give meaning to their lives and to what’s around individuals regardless of their cultural setting or beliefs; language is the glue that keeps together millions of fragments that form the complex mosaic of human interaction. Nevertheless, we are limited to what we can verbalise through language; we cannot give meaning to something without the use of language. Thus, our perception of the world is intricately tied to this tool of communication that humanity has devised. 

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” – Wittgenstein

This statement by the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein encapsulates the notion that human understanding of the world is limited by language. When we lack the verbal language to describe something, we lack the capacity to give it meaning. The interesting thing is that language is not universal. In contrast, many languages stem from different roots; language varies across world regions, being one of the reasons why the understanding of things might be slightly different from one place to another. For example, there are things that can be described through a word in one language, nevertheless other languages could lack vocabulary to describe it through a word. Language goes beyond words; it’s not always verbalized, and it can be manifested in various forms. An illustration is the case of a newborn and a mother where feelings and attachment are conveyed without verbal language; here, language is manifested by smell, touch, emotions, and feelings long before the baby can express a word.

So, does language hinder mutual understanding among individuals in different regions of the world? If we consider the theory developed by Wittgenstein, we might conclude that it does limit our understanding of the world. But how? Suppose language does define an individual’s knowledge and perception of the world. Can we validate the assumption that language also influences the structural outcomes of world systems, such as economic, political, social, and cultural structures?

Language defining perceptions 

Language is not merely a tool for communication; it’s a lens that shapes our worldview. It molds the way we convey knowledge and our understanding. We cannot assume that the world’s understanding functions in one standard applicable to all human beings. On the contrary, language trains individuals to perceive the world in specific ways, influencing how we think and interact with each other. Consider the example of color; in English, there is only one word to categorise the color blue, while in Russian, the word “glouboy” refers to light shades of blue and “siny” to the darker shades (Boroditsky, 2010) . This creates a different categorical understanding between both languages, impacting the perception of individuals. This is just one example, but it’s constantly present when comparing different languages.

​Gender could be another example of how we understand things through language; in German, the sun is feminine, and the moon is masculine, while in Spanish, they are the opposite. In this case, the definition we give to both based on gender will define the attributes individuals will use to describe the characteristics of both the sun and the moon; Spanish speakers will likely use feminine attributes to represent the moon, and German speakers’ male attributes. This example shows how language influences individuals in determining stereotypical characteristics depending on gender. Moreover, English speakers typically identify the doer of an action, whereas Spanish speakers may argue that the action happened by itself. For instance, In English, you would say, “The man broke his hand”; in Spanish, you would say, “his hand broke itself”.  Linguistic structural difference affects how both English and Spanish speakers think about a specific situation, perceive the intention of an action, and ultimately judge the cause of the action. Suggesting that language structures influence our reasoning process and perception, playing a crucial role in how individuals interact with each other.

The Australian tribe Kuuk Thaayorre is a clear example of how linguistic structures influence individuals’ perceptions of not only ways of thinking and human behaviour but also perceptions of time and geographical orientation. In the Western world, language allows us to describe where objects are situated; English speakers comprehend the location of objects in an egoistic, self-centered way, where objects are located based on the assumption that location revolves around the direction we are located. Nonetheless, for the Kuuk Thaayorre location is constructed without taking our position or direction as a point of reference but rather the actual geographical position of the object. For example, instead of saying the water bottle is located on the right side of the table, they would have an accurate understanding of where the object is located based on the cardinal system, “facing southwest”. Their structural way of constructing sentences gives them a precise understanding of geographical positions, making them more capable of determining the directions we are facing, whereas, in Western languages, we wouldn’t be able to close our eyes and determine the direction we are facing (Boroditsky, 2010) . For them,  time is also locked based on the landscape. In Western culture, time passes by from left to right based on the direction the individual is facing, whereas for the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape, therefore “when they are facing north, they organize time from right to left. When they sit facing east, time comes towards the body. What’s the pattern? Time for them is not locked around their body but around the landscape” (Boroditsky, 2010) .

Professor Boroditsky’s previous examples, presented in a 2010 TED talk, help us understand how language influences how humans perceive events, situations, objects, time, and even geographical positions, shaping our reasoning and understanding; however, could language influence the world of politics? It may not directly affect societies’ political preferences, but it could be a factor since public opinion is developed and conveyed through language. 

Language & Thought: Linguistic Relativity 

The Spahir-Wolf Theory, also known as the theory of linguistic relativity, refers to the proposal that language is highly influential in how people perceive reality, analysing how linguistic patterns affect the thoughts of individuals. The argument developed by E. Saphir implies that speakers of different languages may perceive reality differently, where language is one of the key factors that influence individuals’ reasoning and cognitive processes. If this is the case, to what extent does language influence individuals? The validity of this hypothesis persists in the realm of speculation since there is not enough empirical data to prove the extent to which language influences human behaviour and perception of reality. On the other hand, the linguistic theory of determinism developed by  Wolf suggests that language and its structures determine human knowledge, thought, and other cognitive processes such as categorisation, reasoning, and perceiving behaviours; it suggests that the individual’s reasoning is constrained and limited by language. Therefore, individuals are stuck with the perspectives and cognitive processes that language enforces. Based on the latter, this theory entails more empirical evidence than linguistic relativity, as in this case, language might influence individuals’ thinking but not only merely their perception of reality; this hypothesis is primarily based on language structure influencing the perception of individuals of gender, time, direction, characterisation, and logic. 

Voicing Politics 

If we compare linguistics with other systems worldwide, there are apparent differences between varying systems. In the realm of politics, different world regions entail different political fictions and perspectives, which are mainly constructed by the cultural identity of individuals; if language influences the cultural identity of various groups of people, does it have repercussions on society’s political identity and preferences? The answer is yes. Language serves as a way of conveying thoughts and opinions, and it is strategically used to sway public opinion, thus shaping political appeals and structures. Language also plays a crucial role in how individuals understand legal frameworks and concepts of political structures; thus, constitutions and legislations are constructed in different linguistic structures depending on the language spoken. This is also a challenge in countries where there is a wide spectrum of languages spoken, as legislation has to be harmonised with the linguistic structures of the different groups of people within a country. Imagine India, a country ranking second in the world with the most languages spoken, with a total of 780 different languages. The country’s legal framework’s official languages are Hindi and English, nevertheless, there are many other languages spoken in the region and not everyone speaks the two official languages, this limits the understanding of individuals to the language they speak acting as a barrier to interpretation. The harmonization of a legal framework to another local language would imply slight changes in meaning and understanding.

Last Thoughts: A Discourse on Culture

If linguistic determinism holds true, can we conclude that language impacts people’s thinking, culture, political outcomes, and public opinion? 

Language is one of the main factors influencing culture, and shaping the collective consciousness of individuals. In the realm of politics and public opinion, language serves to express public discourse, shaping individuals’ thought patterns, cultural preferences, and political systems. Ultimately, people use language to share knowledge, exchange opinions, debate, and deliberate, thereby demonstrating its powerful influence on culture and politics. Linguistic structure and other linguistic features shape individuals’ reasoning processes, affecting how information is communicated via language. Language reveals the power of the human mind, where cognitive processes vary across cultures. We have been able to create multiple systems of communication that shape our understanding of how the world functions, which is why assuming that our way of understanding is based on a universal standard is egocentric; our thoughts are narrow and limited by our linguistic capacity.

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The power of language: How words shape people, culture

Speaking, writing and reading is integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language - what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine - can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

"Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human," said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. "Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity."

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as "girls are as good as boys at math," can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

"All this research can help us discover what it means to be human," Jurafsky said.

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

"We live in a very polarized time," Jurafsky said. "Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together."

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SUMMARY: LANGUAGE AND POWER

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• > Language, power and identity

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Language, power and identity.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

• Supplementary materials

How are identities constructed in discourse? How are national and European identities tied to language and communication? And what role does power have – power in discourse, over discourse and of discourse? This paper seeks to identify and analyse processes of identity construction within Europe and at its boundaries, particularly the diversity of sources and forms of expression in several genres and contexts. It draws on media debates on Austrian versus Standard High German, on focus group discussions with migrants in eight European countries and on public and political debates on citizenship in the European Union which screen newly installed language tests. The analysis of different genres and publics all illustrate the complexity of national and transnational identity constructions in a globalised world. What is experienced as European or as outside of Europe is the result of multiple activities, some of them consciously planned in the sense of political, economic or cultural intervention, others more hidden, indirect, in the background. Such developments are contradictory rather than harmonious, proceeding in ‘loops’ and partial regressions (rather than in a linear, uni-directional or teleological way). Thus, an interdisciplinary approach suggests itself which accounts for diverse context-dependent discursive and social practices.

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• Volume 45, Issue 2
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• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444811000048

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Article contents

Language and culture.

• Ee Lin Lee Ee Lin Lee Department of Communication Studies, Western Washington University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.26
• Published online: 07 July 2016

Language is an arbitrary and conventional symbolic resource situated within a cultural system. While it marks speakers’ different assumptions and worldviews, it also creates much tension in communication. Therefore, scholars have long sought to understand the role of language in human communication. Communication researchers, as well as those from other disciplines (e.g., linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology), draw on each other’s works to study language and culture. The interdisciplinary nature of the works results in the use of various research methods and theoretical frameworks. Therefore, the main goal of this essay is to sketch the history and evolution of the study of language and culture in the communication discipline in the United States.

Due to space constraints only select works, particularly those that are considered landmarks in the field, are highlighted here. The fundamentals of language and the development of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in leading to the formation of the language and social interaction (LSI) discipline are briefly described. The main areas of LSI study—namely language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication—are summarized. Particular attention is paid to several influential theories and analytical frameworks: the speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis. Criticisms and debates about the trends and directions of the scholarship are also examined.

• conversation analysis
• discourse analysis
• ethnography of speaking

The Fundamentals of Language

A major task of language researchers is to understand the complexities entailed in the structures of talk in order to unfold and understand sociality, including human nature, cultural values, power structure, social inequality, and so on. Researchers in language, culture, and communication study language situated in cultural nuances in order to understand language use in enhancing intergroup and intercultural dialogue. Although language enables learning and bonding, it also confuses interlocutors with contradictory yet deep and rich multi-layered meanings, such as (mis)interpretation of intentions, violation of normative conduct, and repair of conversations that have gone awry.

In a way, language not only construes our perception, but also constructs our social reality by manifesting actual social consequences. For example, the word race represents something that does not exist in physical reality, but it has real implications and consequences (e.g., discrimination, social disparity, unequal access to healthcare, etc.). Here, language allows the creation of actual and persistent perceptions (e.g., bad, inferior, non-deserving, and so on) that determine aspects of people’s lives. In fact, the role of language in influencing interlocutors’ perception and communication remains one of the most popular opening lines in empirical studies focusing on language and culture.

How Language Shapes Perception

Known as linguistic relativity, the notion that language influences our thinking about social issues derives from Edward Sapir’s works in anthropology and linguistics in the 1920s (Mandelbaum, 1963 ). Sapir studied the lexical dissections and categorization and grammatical features from the corpora obtained during his fieldwork over several decades. While studying the languages of different North American Indian tribes, including those living in Washington and Oregon in the U.S. and Vancouver in Canada, Sapir found, for example, that the Hopi language did not have lexical equivalents for the English words time, past , or the future . Therefore, he suggested that the Hopi worldview about temporal communication was different from the English worldview. In his lectures Sapir promoted the understanding of language as a system embedded in culture. Thereafter, based on Sapir’s findings, researchers studying language inferred that if there was no word for, say, you in a certain language, then speakers of that language treat you as nonexistent.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s, later suggested that language could, to some extent, determine the nature of our thinking. Known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic determinism, the notion that language is a shaper of ideas or thought inspired further empirical testing (Whorf, 1952 ). This led some researchers to conclude that speakers of different languages (e.g., Polish, Chinese, Japanese, English, etc.) see their realities differently. The investigation of the effects of languages on human behaviors, as influenced by Sapir’s and Whorf’s works, continues to be a popular topic in various academic disciplines.

During its postwar rebuilding efforts overseas in the 1930s, the U.S. government recruited linguists and anthropologists to train its personnel at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). While linguists researching the micro-level elements of languages successfully taught FSI officers how to speak different languages, anthropologists studying the macro-level components of culture (e.g., economy, government, religious, family practices, etc.) taught the officers how to communicate effectively with people from different cultures (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990 ). The research and training collaboration between linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists at FSI showed that the learning of a foreign culture was not merely about acquiring language skills or translating from one language to another, but a holistic understanding of language in a wider context.

While the teaching of foreign languages to FSI officers was efficient, teaching anthropological understanding of foreign cultures was more challenging. Moreover, during the 1940s the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and the notion that language frames people’s worldview were contested in empirical findings. About the same time, Edward Twitchell Hall, who is credited with founding the field of intercultural communication, strongly promoted his belief that effective communication between two people from different cultural backgrounds (i.e., intercultural communication) should combine verbal (i.e., speech) and nonverbal (i.e., non-linguistic) communication embedded in a cultural context (Hall, 1966 ).

Citing efficiency, researchers at the time developed language translation programs that enabled the quick learning of intercultural communication. In this approach of linguistic universalism, researchers assumed structural equivalence across languages—that word-by-word translation can foster cultural understanding (Chomsky, 1972 ). This shift of direction in academic research challenged Sapir’s proposition of the understanding of culture and communication based on common conceptual systems—the notion that meanings and values of concepts cannot be truly understood without understanding the cultural system.

Regardless of the competing viewpoints, research on how speakers of different languages operate under different language and communication systems continues to date. Researchers have also widened the scope of the language and culture program to include the study of language use and functions (i.e., communicative purposes) in and across different cultural systems. Although the translation of the linguistic corpora into the English language is commonly featured in proprietary research publications, analyzing discourse data in the native languages is preferred. Language is therefore treated as intact with the cultural system. This line of study, despite differences in methodological and theoretical frameworks, forms the basis for a specific discipline within the communication field called language and social interaction (LSI).

The LSI discipline focuses on the study of human discourse and human interaction in situatedness. Scholars pursuing this line of research seek to understand the development of speech and language processes in various settings, from small group to interpersonal, including face-to-face and those mediated by technology (see International Communication Association [ICA] and National Communication Association websites, respectively). The scholarship employs qualitative and quantitative methods and includes verbal (i.e., speech) and nonverbal communication (i.e., nonlinguistic cues) (see the ICA website ). The various methodological and theoretical frameworks used include social psychology, ethnography of speaking, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and narrative analysis. Although well-established and housed in the communication field, works in LSI are interdisciplinary.

While LSI studies also include nonverbal communication as a language system, scholarship on speech—whether naturally occurring, elicited, mediated, or written—outnumber those focusing on nonverbal communication. The paucity of nonverbal scholarship in the LSI discipline underscores the challenges of recording nonverbal communication for data analysis (Fitch & Sanders, 2005 ). Although studies pertaining to how social life is lived in situated conversation and language is used in various interactional settings dominate LSI research discourse, the study of nonverbal communication as language deserves its own coverage as a (sub)discipline. Consequently, this essay focuses on the scholarship on speech in LSI. The following sections review a selection of the LSI subdisciplines organized by research methods, or more commonly conceptualized as analytical frameworks and procedures: language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication. The review highlights a few major theories or theoretical frameworks in each subdiscipline, namely the speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis.

Language Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of language usage or talk in interaction. Researchers who study language pragmatics investigate the meanings of utterances in relation to speech situations in the specific contexts of use. Two theoretical frameworks that are commonly cited in language pragmatics are the speech act theory and Grice’s maxims of conversational implicatures, from which the influential politeness theory derives. These theoretical frameworks emerged from the examination of language independently from context, including situational factors that influence the cultural assumptions of the speaker and hearer.

Speech Act Theory

In an attempt to understand utterances in interaction, Austin ( 1962 ) explained speech acts as communicative acts in which speakers perform actions via utterances in specific contexts. Called performatives , these are illocutionary acts in which the speaker asserts a demand through utterances. Illocutionary acts contain force— that is, they allow the speaker to perform an act without necessary naming the act (e.g., apology, question, offer, refuse, thank, etc.). Austin illustrated three types of force: (a) locution , the words in the utterances; (b) illocution , the intention of the speaker; and (c) perlocution , the consequential effects of the utterance upon the thoughts, feelings, or actions on the hearer.

The speaker’s illocutionary act is said to be happy when the hearer understands the locution and illocutionary forces. In order for the speaker’s illocutionary act to be happy, the utterance has to fulfill felicity conditions. Felicitous illocutionary acts are those that meet social and cultural criteria and bring about effects on the hearer that the speaker intended (Searle, 1969 ). Thus, illocutionary acts are conventionalized messages, because their performance is an engagement in rule-governed behavior (also see Goffman, 1967 ).

Searle extended Austin’s concept of speech acts and elaborated on the speech act theory by identifying the conditions necessary for the realization of speech acts. For example, to promise, the speaker needs sincerity and intentionality; to declare the marital union of two partners, a priest or a judge has to be present. Hence the successful performance of a speech act depends on whether the constituent conditions of a particular speech act are fulfilled, or a particular speech act is realized in a contextually appropriate manner (i.e., in relation to sociocultural factors).

Searle developed a typology to categorize speech acts: (a) representatives , where the speaker says how something is, like asserting; (b) directives , the speaker tries to get the hearer to perform some future action, such as requesting and warning; (c) commissives , the speaker commits to some future course of action, such as pledging and promising; (d) expressives , the speaker articulates his or her psychological state of mind about some prior action, such as apologizing and thanking; and (e) declaratives , performatives that require non-linguist institutions, such as christening or sentencing. These conditions must be fulfilled for the speaker to effect the specific act.

The speech act theory can be used to describe utterance sequences—for example, to predict antecedents and consequents in a conversation. Thus, when a violation of the typology occurred, speech act theory successfully predicted repairs and other signs of troubles in the conversational moves. However, Searle’s taxonomy was criticized for several reasons. First, while Searle treated illocutionary acts as consisting of complete sentences in grammatical form, such acts can be very short utterances that do not follow the complete object-verb-subject structure (e.g., “Forge on!”). On the other hand, the speaker may need to utter several sentences to bring about effects on the hearer (e.g., advising). Second, Searle assumed that the felicity conditions for successful performances are universal, but later studies found that the conditions are indeed specific to the culture.

Furthermore, Searle subscribed to a linear, speaker-to-hearer view of transaction that dismissed the interactional aspect of language. The hearer’s role was minimized; specifically, the hearer’s influence on the speaker’s construction of utterances was ignored. Searle also neglected perlocutionary acts, which focus on the intention of the speaker. Instead, he focused solely on the linguistic goal of deliberate expression of an intentional state while overlooking extralinguistic cues. In short, the speech act theory could not account for intentionality and variability in discourse.

Grice’s Maxims of Implicatures

By moving beyond the linear (i.e., speaker-to-hearer) view of transaction, Grice proposed the cooperative principle ( 1989 ). He observed that interlocutors engage in collaborative efforts in social interaction in order to attain a common goal. In Grice’s view, collaborative efforts do not mean agreement; they mean that the speaker and the hearer work together in the conversation. According to the principle, participants follow four conversational maxims: quantity (be informative), quality (be truthful), relation (be relevant), and manner (be clear, be brief). Since these four maxims vary by culture, the interlocutors need to have culturally nuanced knowledge to fulfill these maxims.

According to Grice, meaning is produced in a direct way when participants adhere to the maxims. When the speaker’s intentions are conveyed clearly, the hearer should not have to interpret the speaker’s intentions. This occurs with conventional implicatures where standard word meanings are used in the interaction. However, in actual social interaction, most meanings are implied through conversational implicatures in which one or more of the conversational maxims are violated. Due to normative constraints, a speaker who says p implicates q , and the hearer would then need to infer the implied meanings; for example, what is being said and what is beyond words in a recommendation letter.

In short, Grice’s maxims of conversational implicatures are used to explain why people engage in different interpretations rather than rely on the literal meanings of utterances. The maxims attend to implied meanings that constitute a huge part of conversation and also the role of the hearer. Nonetheless, the cooperative principle was criticized for privileging the conversational conventions of middle-class English speakers. Additionally, Grice did not scrutinize strategic non-cooperation, which remains a primary source of inference in conversation (Hadi, 2013 ).

Politeness Theory

Influenced by Grice’s maxims, Brown and Levinson ( 1987 ) proposed the politeness theory to explain the interlocutor’s observation of conversational implicatures in order to maintain the expressive order of interaction. Brown and Levinson observed politeness strategies that consistently occurred in their field data across several languages: Tzetzal and Tamil languages in Asia, and the British and American forms of English. Despite the distinctive cultures and languages, they observed outstanding parallelism in interlocutors’ use of polite language to accomplish conversational goals. Politeness is the activity performed to enhance, maintain, or protect face or the self-image of the interlocutors.

To illustrate language universality in politeness, Brown and Levinson proposed a socialized interlocutor—nicknamed a model person (MP)—as a face-bearing human with rationality and intentionality when communicating. To avoid breaching social equilibrium, the MP, whom Brown and Levinson identified as the speaker, conforms to social norms to be polite. In performing a speech act, the MP cultivates a desirable image (i.e., positive social worth), pays attention to the hearer’s responses, and ensures that nobody loses face in social interactions (e.g., feels embarrassed, humiliated, awkward, etc.).

Since face is emotionally invested (e.g., actors get upset) and sanctioned by social norms, actors are said to engage in rule-governed behavior to pay homage to their face. Due to the emotional investment, face threats are likely to occur when actors perform facework. Brown and Levinson described two basic face wants: positive face , the desire for one’s actions to be accepted by others, such as approval from others; and negative face , the desire for one’s actions to be unimpeded by others. A threat to positive face decreases approval from the hearer (e.g., acknowledging one’s vulnerability), whereas a threat to negative face restricts one’s freedom to act (e.g., requesting a favor).

According to the politeness theory, the speaker can choose whether or not to perform face-threatening acts (FTAs). When performing FTAs, the speaker will go on or off record. In going off record, the speaker uses hints or utterances that have more than one attributable intentions, so that he or she does not appear to have performed a speech act. For example, the speaker who utters “Oops, I don’t have any cash on me” to the hearer after they have dined together in a restaurant is using an off-record strategy to suggest that the hearer foot the bill. In contrast, going on record means that the speaker performs the FTA (i.e., baldly without saving face) with or without redress. With redress, the speaker indicates that he or she does not intend to violate social equilibrium by performing the FTA (see further discussion below). Without redress, the speaker directly expresses his or her desire; for instance, the speaker commands the hearer to pay for lunch by saying, “You should pay this time.”

The speaker can use either positive or negative politeness strategies when performing FTAs with redress. Positive politeness strategies are used to attend to the hearer’s positive face. For example, in the restaurant scenario, the speaker can choose to compliment the hearer in order to establish solidarity by saying, “You have always been so generous …” On the other hand, negative politeness strategies are used to avoid imposing on the hearer’s negative face. For example, by seeking permission, “Would you consider paying for lunch? I will return the favor in the future,” the speaker acknowledges that the hearer is not obligated to perform the action of footing the bill.

According to the politeness theory, the speaker wants to use the least amount of effort to maximize ends by considering the weight of performing the FTA. Brown and Levinson postulated a formula: Wx = P (S, H) + D (S, H) + R, where W stands for the weight of the FTA; P the relative power of hearer (H) over speaker (S), which is asymmetrical (e.g., if H is an authority); D the social distance between H and S, which is symmetrical (if H speaks another dialect); and R the ranking of imposition of the FTA in a particular culture. They suggested that P and D were universal with some emic correlates. Thus, in calculating Wx, S will consider the payoffs of each strategy. For example, in using positive politeness strategies, S may appear to be friendly, whereas in using an off-record strategy, S may appear manipulative by imposing on H, who gets S’s hints and then performs a future act. In using an on-record strategy, S may choose to be efficient, such as in an emergency (e.g., Ambush!).

After three decades, politeness theory remains one of the most tested theories. However, amongst its criticisms, the theory is said to account for intentional politeness, but not intentional impoliteness. The significant attention paid to the speaker’s utterances, albeit with a consideration for the hearer’s face, reveals the assumption of conversations as monologic. In some respects the theory followed the trajectory of Searle’s and Grice’s works in that the performance of utterances is conceptualized as a rational cognitive activity of the speakers. In particular, speakers are assumed to generate meanings and action, whereas hearers are treated as receivers who interpret the speech performance. Therefore, the politeness theory is unable to fully explain interactional organization in talk exchanges.

Conversation Analysis

During the 1960s, empirical science centered on the prediction of the effects of abstract ideas on communication and social life. Common predictors tested include personality types, cognition, biological sex, income level, and political stance. Social scientists who studied language commonly adhered to the quantitative paradigm; they conducted experiments, used elicited conversations, and analyzed responses containing rehearsals of recollected conversations. The study of mundane rituals, however, was not of academic concern.

Erving Goffman, a sociologist, later made a radical theoretical move that differed significantly from the mainstream empirical studies. Goffman stated that orderliness was empirically observable from everyday conversation. He argued that since socialization shapes the social actor’s competencies, conversation maintains moral codes and institutional order. In other words, sequential ordering of actions in social interaction reflects the macro social institution (e.g., politics, business, legal systems, etc.).

Goffman’s works were viewed as a paradigm shift in the social sciences. He called attention to the orderliness that is observable in ordinary conversation—an area of investigation that other scientists neglected. Furthermore, unlike the early works in language study, Goffman’s theoretical framework no longer focused solely on the performance of speakers in conversations. Instead, meaning making—that is, the examination of the participants’ understanding of one another’s conduct—took precedence. Goffman did not test his ideas, nor did he develop any set of empirical methods that allowed the testing of his ideas.

In search of an empirical analysis of conversation, Harold Garfinkel, another sociologist, expanded on Goffman’s ideas. Garfinkel ( 1967 ) proposed that ethno-methods (i.e., the study of people’s practices or methods) inform the production of culturally meaningful symbols and actions. He noted that social actors use multiple tacit methods (e.g., presuppositions, assumptions, and methods of inference) to make shared sense of their interaction. Thus, conversation is a place where participants engage in mundane reason analysis, and conversational sequential structure—the organization of social interaction—reveals membership categorization.

The subdiscipline of conversation analysis (CA) was further expanded when Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, who were later joined by Gail Jefferson, studied suicide calls made to the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide, Los Angeles (Sacks, 1984 ). They investigated how sequential structure is managed in institutional talk. Conversation analysts study conversation sequence organization, turn design, turn taking, lexical choices, the repair of difficulties in speech, and the overall conversational structure. They analyze linguistic mechanisms (e.g., grammar and syntax, lexis, intonation, prosody, etc.) in naturally occurring conversations.

Institutional talk, as examined in later CA studies, focused on those that have fewer formal constraints as institutional practices (e.g., phone calls, doctor–patient interaction, and classroom instructions), but not those that have rigid structures within formalized rituals (e.g., a religious wedding ceremony, a sermon, etc.). Institutional CA studies accelerated in the past few decades, allowing the identification of macro-level societal shifts through the management of social interaction in talk (Gee & Handford, 2012 ).

In general, CA theory postulates that talk is conducted in context. Participants’ talk and actions evoke context, and context is invoked and constructed by participants. Sequencing position in conversations reflects the participants’ understanding of the immediate preceding talk. As such, sequential structure reveals socially shared and structured procedures (Garfinkel, 1967 ). Thus, CA is the study of action, meaning, context management, and intersubjectivity.

CA is qualitative in methodology, even though later scholarship involved statistical analysis. The method is criticized for several weaknesses, among them: (a) the analysis and presentation of select segments of conversation lack rationale; (b) most CA studies are restricted to studying conversations in North America and Europe; (c) since multiple identities are at play in conversations, those that are consequential for social interaction remain ambiguous and debatable in analyses; and (d) the boundaries between pleasantries (e.g., small talk) and institutional talk are at times fuzzy in institutional CA (Have, 1990 ). Nevertheless, with a range of sub-areas quite well developed, CA is said to form its own discipline.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis (DA) is a broad term for different analytical approaches used to examine text and talk. Discourse is considered language use in general, and language is viewed as a form of action. The distinctions between the different approaches used in DA are based on the influences of the early works or traditions in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis and critical linguistics, Bakhtinian research, Foucauldian research, and even interactional sociolinguistics (Gee & Handford, 2012 ). However, the very different approaches and practices in DA have sparked disagreements among researchers about their applications and distinctions.

Data used in DA range from written to spoken, such as recorded spontaneous conversation, news articles, historical documents, transcripts from counseling sessions, clinical talk, interviews, blogs, and the like. Socio-historical contexts are often included in DA. As a tool for analyzing text and talk, DA has significantly influenced the study of language and culture. Two of the most popular DA approaches used in communication studies are Discursive Psychology (DP) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

Discursive Psychology

DP evolved in the early 1990s from Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter’s works, in which they expressed dissatisfaction with the ways psychologists treated discourse. In psychology, utterances are treated as a reflection of the speaker’s mental state. Hence, talk is considered reflective (Edwards & Potter, 2005 ). However, in DP talk is considered constructive; language use is thus viewed as a social action or function. This means that people use language to make sense of what they do in a socially meaningful world. Therefore, language is treated as a tool to get things done.

In DP, researchers study the details of what people say (e.g., descriptions, terms, lexicons, or grammar). Researchers are concerned with how these features have particular effects or bear functions, such as shifting blame, denying responsibility, and providing counterarguments. DP researchers seek to understand the interests, attitudes, and motives of the speakers, particularly, why people use language the way they do and how they manage and construct identities.

Language use in news media coverage provides a good example for DP analysis. For example, the August 2015 news coverage about corruption in Malaysian government offices supplies rich vocabularies for analyzing the speakers’ motives. Under the leadership of Bersih (an organization whose name literally translates to clean in the Malay language), an estimated half a million street demonstrators peacefully gathered in Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, for a public demonstration that lasted two days. The demonstrators demanded transparency in the country’s governance, including fair elections. They urged the Prime Minister, Najib Razak, to resign following a critical exposé published in The Wall Street Journal . The Prime Minister was reported to have transferred the equivalent of US$11 billion from a government development firm into his personal bank account (Wright & Clark, 2015 ). Prior to the Prime Minister’s counterattack, the press labeled the demonstrators rally goers . However, the Prime Minister and his acolytes in government in turn used descriptors such as criminals, crazy, unpatriotic , and shallow-minded culprits to label the demonstrators traitors to their country.

The description above shows the way the speakers used language to construct their reality and their relationship to that reality. In this case, DP researchers would analyze and illustrate how the Prime Minister and his government officials co-construct shared meanings in interaction, such as particular realities, beliefs, identities, or subjectivities. For instance, the government can be seen as attempting to exercise control over the public demonstrators (through discourse) in order to defend governmental power. Thus, by labeling the demonstrators culprits , the government asserted its identity as the authority— the elite power that runs the country and decides what goes.

DP researchers assume that each speaker has multiple identities, and the identities can only be performed successfully with the consent of the listeners (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998 ). The researchers also assert that the productive examination of discourse must be considered within the context of language use, such as the institutional setting and local sequential organization of talk. For example, a proper analysis of the Malaysian public demonstration above must include an understanding of the context of the public demonstrators’ dissatisfaction with governmental corruption and citizen’s demand for transparency in governance—a longstanding issue since the country’s independence from Britain. Thus, indexicality—the understanding that the meaning of a word is dependent on the context of use—is essential in DP analysis (Potter, 1996 ).

Perhaps one of the strongest criticisms of DP is the researchers’ reluctance to interpret macro-social concerns. DP researchers insist that the analysis of text and talk should depend on the context exactly as construed by the language used. This means that extratextual information should not be inserted in the analysis. Therefore, DP cannot be utilized to interrogate broader social concerns, such as politics, ideology, and power (Parker, 2015 ). As such, context is limited to and constituted by the interactional setting and functions of utterances.

DP is also criticized for casting speakers as conscious and agentic—that is, as autonomous subjects who manipulate language to do things. Speakers’ intentionality in attribution is thus considered fixed in their minds. Such an assumption in fact closely resembles that of traditional psychology—the very idea that DP researchers attempted to shift away from (Parker, 2015 ). Moreover, the analyst’s interpretation is crucial in unfolding an understanding of the discourse. The analyst’s knowledge and statuses thus influence his or her interpretation of the language used by speaker and can be a weakness if the analyst may conform to some sort of ideology that impacts data interpretation.

Critical Discourse Analysis

Of all the approaches used to study DA, CDA is one that takes a macrosocietal and political standpoint (Van Dijk, 1993 ). Critical discourse analysts examine how societal power relations are enforced, legitimated, maintained, and dominated through the use of language. The sociohistorical context of the text is emphasized. The examination of social problems requires the analyst to be well versed in multiple disciplines. Commonly, the analysts are motivated by particular political agendas or ideologies, and they seek to challenge certain ideologies (Fairclough, 2005 ). Therefore, based on, say, the motivation to fight social inequality and oppression, an analyst may seek out selected texts or talks for study. It is in CDA studies that the abuse, dominance, and unequal distribution of social goods are called into question.

Social theorists whose works are commonly cited in CDA include Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Karl Marx, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. Typical vocabulary in CDA studies includes power, dominance, hegemony, class, gender, race, discrimination, institution, reproduction , and ideology . Topics examined include gender inequality, media discourse, political discourse, racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and antiSemitism. Critical discourse analysts seek to answer questions such as: How do elite groups control public discourse? How does such discourse control the less powerful group (in terms of mind and action)? What are the social consequences of such discourse control? (Van Dijk, 1993 ). The dominant social groups in politics, media, academics, and corporations are scrutinized in terms of the way they produce and maintain the dominant ideology.

Critical discourse analysts explore three contextual levels of discourse: the macro, meso, and micro (Van Dijk, 1993 ). At the macro level, analysts focus on the understanding of relationship between the text and broader social concerns and ideologies. At the meso level, analysts examine the contexts of production and reception of the text, and the ideologies portrayed. The analysts ask questions such as: Where did the text originate? Who is (are) the author(s) and the intended audience of the text? What perspectives are being promoted? At the micro level, analysts scrutinize the forms and contents of the text through linguistic features and devices in order to reveal the speaker’s perspective or ideology. Linguistic features and components studied include direct and indirect quotations, terms used to refer to individuals or groups, sentence structure and grammar (e.g., active and passive voice), and premodifiers (e.g., non-Muslim citizens or Muslim-Chinese citizens).

While analysts frequently favor institutional texts (e.g., a journalistic report) in their analyses, everyday conversation is also included. In fact, everyday conversation is considered social group discourse that can be used to reveal societal norms and shared beliefs. According to van Dijk’s studies of racism in everyday conversation, he found that the speakers’ utterances of “I am not racist, but …” and “We are not a racist society, but …” are in fact a reproduction of institutional talk. He called this specific type of talk a double strategy of positive self-representation and negative other-denigration.

While the multidisciplinary nature of CDA seems beneficial, it is also one of its biggest criticisms. In particular, critical discourse analysts are often accused of not productively using a combination of multiple approaches. Indeed, the more linguistically-oriented studies of text and talk overlooked theories in sociology and political sciences that focus on social and power inequality issues. On the other hand, those that focus on sociology and political sciences did not rigorously engage in DA. Moreover, the relationship between discourse and action coupled with cognition remains inconclusive (Van Dijk, 1998 ).

The Ethnography of Communication

The ethnography of communication originated from ethnology in the 1800s and found a home in in anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, pioneered the ethnographic methods. He intensively recorded the methods he used in his fieldwork when studying the Trobrian Islanders of Papua New Guinea in 1914 , including intrinsic details about the people, their language, and their daily life (Murdock, 1943 ). Franz Boas, a German anthropologist who lived among the Inuit in the late 1800s, further propounded on the necessity for language training among ethnographers who wished to decode the emic (i.e., native) perspective (Muller-Wille, Gieseking, & Barr, 2011 ).

Ethnographers study social norms, meanings, and patterns of life by examining symbolic activities ranging from speech to social artifacts. By writing on culture, recording people, and natural history, ethnographers describe, analyze, and compare people from different communities. The painstaking work involved in ethnography provides rich data that are highly nuanced. Ethnographic works are said to be the portraits of social life. Oftentimes, interviews are used concurrently, along with other methods (e.g., textual analysis) to obtain community members’ interpretation and explanation of the communicative activities. Data analyses are conducted along with (i.e., not after) data recording in the field.

While an ethnographer may generate questions for investigation before entering the field, he or she must remain flexible and receptive to other important questions that may emerge on site. The focus of investigation might shift because theoretical sensitivity—the review of literature prior to fieldwork—may not sufficiently orient the ethnographer to actual interactions. This is because the behaviors and activities that the ethnographer purports to study may have changed due to cultural shift. The use of such an inductive method allows the study of language and culture without theoretical constraints.

Ethnographers may compare the behaviors cross-culturally when a sufficient number of studies of the cultures of interest become available. Since the voices of community members are given precedence, ethnographic reports rely heavily on and present people’s utterances, as well as fine details of observations. In fact, early ethnographic works in anthropology tend to exhaustively cover many life aspects about a community, though the search for nuances and painstaking details, coupled with the ethnographer’s prolonged engagement in the community, pose constraints of time and resources. However, in the 1960s, ethnography took a new turn with the greater emphasis on the study of language use.

The Ethnography of Speaking

The prominence of ethnographic studies focusing on speech in language and culture began in the 1960s with Dell Hymes’s study of language use. Hymes, who was trained in anthropology and linguistics, sought to understand speech patterns, functions, and speaking in situatedness. He departed from microlinguistics (which focuses on semantics, turn-taking, prosody, and conversational structure) to pursue a more holistic account of interaction in context. Hymes emphasized the examination of nonverbal cues, tone of conversation, evaluation of the interlocutors’ conduct, the setting of the interaction, and so forth.

Speaking is considered fundamental in understanding social reality. Hymes’s ethnography of speaking (later called ethnography of communication) is a method for analyzing communication in different cultural settings. Hymes’s ( 1972 ) SPEAKING mnemonic or schema, developed as an etic framework for the etic understanding of social interaction, provides an inductive tool for examining social and cultural elements through the means and ways of speaking. Each letter in the SPEAKING mnemonic represents a different element of a speech act: S represents the setting or scene; P , the participants and participant identities; E , the ends; A , the act sequence and act topic; K , the key or tone; I , the instrumentalities; N , the norms of interaction and interpretation; and G , the genre.

The SPEAKING mnemonic is one of the most widely used theoretical and analytic frameworks in ethnographic studies. Although Hymes developed it to study spontaneous conversation, recent communication studies has broadened the scope of the data to include textual analysis and computer-mediated communication. Such pluralities are, in fact, inherent in people’s ways of speaking and despite some criticisms (e.g., Hymes proposed using his methods to study muted groups, but researchers who wish to listen to minority voices must also learn to listen to the dominant ones), the ethnography of speaking’s theoretical framework has withstood the test of time. It was the inspiration for Gerry Philipsen’s ( 1992 ) speech codes theory—another important heuristic theory in the ethnographic study of language and culture.

Speech Codes Theory

In addition to Hymes’ ethnography of speaking, Philipsen drew from Bernstein’s coding principle ( 1971 ) to postulate his speech codes theory. Bernstein argued that different social groups manifest different communicative practices and linguistic features. These differences are influenced by and, in turn, reinforce the groups’ coding principles—the rules that govern what to say and how to say it in the right context.

According to Philipsen, people’s ways of speaking are woven with speech codes—the system of symbols, meanings, premises, and rules about communication conduct that are historically situated and socially constructed. Therefore, examining a community’s discourse can tease out people’s understanding of the self, society, and strategic action. Philipsen posited five propositions for studying the relationship between communication and culture:

People in different speech communities exhibit different ways of speaking, with different rules for communicative conduct informed by their socially constructed symbols and meanings.

Each code gives practical knowledge about the ways of being in a speech community.

People attach different cultural meanings to speech practices.

Metacommunication (i.e., talk about talk) reveals important worldviews, norms, and values of the people.

The common speech code reveals the morality of communication conduct. For example, community members’ discourse about should not s reveal the should s that they value.

Using the five propositions, Philipsen argued that the speech codes theory can reveal the ways of speaking and reinforce a group’s speech codes. Indeed, the theory has informed the vibrant scholarship on ways of speaking and meaning-making across different global cultural communities. For example, Lee and Hall’s ( 2012 ) study of Chinese Malaysian discourse of dissatisfaction and complaint-making, with and without a formal goal of resolution—called, respectively, thou soo and aih auan— unearthed previously unexplored cultural values of the speech community. Lee ( 2014 ) developed the study further to understand the assumptions of personhood among Chinese Malaysians.

Cultural Discourse Analysis

The speech codes theory also served as the foundation for the development of Donal Carbaugh’s cultural discourse analysis theory. Carbaugh, a former student of Philipsen’s, proposed the cultural discourse theory (CDT) as a way to understand culturally shaped communication practices. According to CDT, cultural discourses are constituted by cultural communication and codes. Culture is an integral part but also a product of communication practices that are highly nuanced and deeply meaningful and intelligible to cultural participants (Carbaugh, 1996 ). Cultural participants draw on diverse communication practices and thus create diversity within and across cultural communities.

Cultural discourse analysts study key cultural terms that are deeply meaningful to the participants; for example, oplakvane , which is a distinctive way of speaking to assert Bulgarian personhood (Carbaugh, Lie, Locmele, & Sotirova, 2012 ). Such cultural terms are an ongoing metacultural commentary that reveals implicit cultural knowledge, the taken-for-granted knowledge, such as beliefs, values, and assumptions about the self.

Three types of questions typically guide cultural discourse analysis (CuDA) are: (a) functional accomplishment (What is getting done when people communicate in this specific way?); (b) structure (How is this communicative practice conducted? What key cultural terms are used to give meaning to the participants? What deep meanings do the terms create?); and (c) sequencing or form (What is the act sequence of this communicative practice, in terms of interactional accomplishments, structural features, and sequential organization?).

The analyst approaches a CuDA project with a particular stance or mode of inquiry. Carbaugh identified five modes of inquiry that enable analysts to tease out important cultural ingredients in a topic of investigation: the theoretical, descriptive, interpretive, comparative, and critical. For example, the theoretical mode enables analysts to understand the basic communication phenomena in the speech codes of a community and therefore to refine what and how to listen for culture in their discourse before venturing into the field. The five modes chart a rough linear design; the analyst must accomplish the preceding mode before embarking on the subsequent mode. The first three modes (i.e., theoretical, descriptive, and interpretive) are mandatory in any CuDA project; however, the last two (i.e., comparative and critical) may or may not be accomplished in a single study (e.g., in an exploratory study).

Cultural discourse analysts typically use Hymes’s SPEAKING framework and Philipsen’s speech codes theory as guidelines for their subsequent analyses in the descriptive and interpretive stages. The analysis of implicit cultural meanings in CuDA can be structured using five semantic radiants or hubs: being , acting , relating , feeling , and dwelling . Using CuDA, analysts can tease out people’s understanding of who they are (being); what they are doing together (acting); how they are linked to one another (relating); their feelings about people, actions, and things (feeling); and their relationship to the world around them (dwelling). The cultural discourse analyst’s task, then, is to advance cultural propositions (i.e., statements containing the taken-for-granted knowledge) and premises (i.e., values or beliefs). These are statements that shed light on the importance of a particular communicative practice among members of a speech community (e.g., beliefs about what exists, what is proper, or what is valued).

While the theories in the ethnography of communication have gained a lot of prominence in the LSI discipline, they have also enriched it. For example, Hymes’s SPEAKING framework, Philipsen’s speech codes theory, and Carbaugh’s CDT have all added depth and rigor to LSI data analysis. Evidently, to navigate through the language and social interactions of a community to which the researcher is not an insider, he or she needs to gain communicative competence (Hymes, 1962 ). Specifically, the researcher needs to know how to communicate like the insiders in order to articulate and explain the behaviors and communicative phenomena to other outsiders. The researcher also needs to gain competence particularly in the multidisciplinary methods of LSI.

However, neither reliance on English as lingua franca for LSI research nor the practice of hiring translators are sufficient for undertaking this line of inquiry successfully. Therefore, many LSI studies recruit international scholars to participate in their research projects. While this is a common practice, especially in CuDA, the researchers’ cultural interpretations and the subsequent translation of the data into the English for publications need to be done with utmost care in order to maintain the integrity of cultural nuances. Moreover, while the scholarship has strived to give voice to muted, non-dominant groups internationally, the dearth of cross-comparative studies—a goal and a tradition of ethnography—is a great concern. In that sense the study of intercultural interaction using the ethnography of communication has not yet come of age in this increasingly globalized and complex world.

This essay outlines the history and evolution of the study of language and culture by the main areas of study in the LSI discipline. The four main areas summarized are language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication. Influential methodological and theoretical frameworks reviewed cover the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis. Finally, the essay examines major criticisms of the theories and applications, as well as possible future directions of scholarship, when and where appropriate in the discussion.

Further Reading

• Edwards, D. , & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology . London: SAGE.
• Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (4th ed.). New York: Routledge.
• Erving Goffman Archives in the Intercyberlibrary of the University of Nevada .
• Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Micro studies of the public order . New York: Basic Books.
• Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture . New York: Doubleday.
• Hymes, D. (1962). The ethnography of speaking. In T. Gladwin & W. C. Sturtevant (Eds.), Anthropology and human behavior (pp. 13–35). Washington, DC: Anthropology Society of Washington.
• Martin, J. N. , Nakayama, T. K. , & Carbaugh, D. (2012). The history and development of the study of intercultural communication and applied linguistics. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (pp. 17–36). Oxon, England: Routledge.
• Philipsen, G. (1975). Speaking “like a man” in Teamsterville: Culture patterns of role enactment in an urban neighborhood. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 61 , 13–22.
• Wodak, R. , & Chilton, P. (2005). A new agenda in (critical) discourse analysis: Theory, methodology and interdisciplinarity . Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Wooffitt, R. (2005). Conversation analysis and discourse analysis: A comparative and critical introduction . London: SAGE.
• Antaki, C. , & Widdicombe, S. (1998). Identity as an achievement and as a tool. In C. Antaki & S. Widdicombe (Eds.), Identities in talk . London: SAGE.
• Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, codes and control: Vol. 1. Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Brown, P. , & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Carbaugh, D. A. (1996). Situating selves: The communication of social identities in American scenes . Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Carbaugh, D. , Lie, S. , Locmele, L. , & Sotirova, N. (2012). Ethnographic studies of intergroup communication. In H. Giles & C. Gallois (Eds.), The handbook of intergroup communication (pp. 44–57). New York: Routledge.
• Chomsky, N. (1972). Language and mind . New York: Harcourt Brace.
• Edwards, D. , & Potter, J. (2005). Discursive psychology, mental states and descriptions. In H. T. Molder & J. Potter (Eds.), Conversation and cognition (pp. 241–259). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Fairclough, N. (2005). Peripheral vision: Discourse analysis in organization studies: The case for critical realism. Organization Studies , 26 , 915–939.
• Fitch, K. L. , & Sanders, R. E. (Eds.). (2005). Handbook of language and social interaction . Mahwah, NJ: LEA.
• Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Gee, J. P. , & Handford, M. (2012). The Routledge handbook of discourse analysis . New York: Taylor & Francis.
• Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays in face-to-face interaction . Chicago: Aldine.
• Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Hadi, A. (2013). A critical appraisal of Grice’s cooperative principle. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics , 3 , 69–72.
• Have, P. t. (1990). Doing conversation analysis: A practical guide . London: SAGE.
• Hall, E. T. (1966). The hidden dimension . New York: Anchor Books.
• Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication (pp. 35–71). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
• Lee, E. L. (2014). Assumptions of personhood in the discourse about Chinese identity in Malaysia. In M. B. Hinner (Ed.), Chinese culture in a cross-cultural comparison (pp. 77–110). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
• Lee, E. L. , & Hall, B. “J” (2012). Cultural ideals in Chinese Malaysians’ discourse of dissatisfaction. In M. B. Hinner (Ed.), The interface of business and culture (pp. 365–390). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
• Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (1990). Notes in the history of intercultural communication: The Foreign Service Institute and the mandate for intercultural training. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 76 , 262–281.
• Mandelbaum, D. G. (Ed.). (1963). Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality . Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
• Muller-Wille, L. , Gieseking, B. , (Eds.) & Barr, W. (Trans.). (2011). Inuit and Whalers on Baffin Island through German eyes: Wilhelm Weike’s Arctic journal and letters (1883–1884) . Montréal, Canada: Baraka Books.
• Murdock, G. P. (1943). Bronislaw Malinowski. American Anthropologist , 45 , 441–451.
• Parker, I. (2015). Critical discursive psychology (2d ed.). Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Philipsen, G. (1992). Speaking culturally: Explorations in social communication . Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Philipsen, G. (1997). Toward a theory of speech codes. In G. Philipsen & T. Albrecht (Eds.), Developing communication theories (pp. 119–156). Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Potter, J. (1996). Representing reality: Discourse, rhetoric, and social constructions . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Sacks, H. (1984). Notes on methodology. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action (pp. 21–27). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language . London: Cambridge University Press.
• Ten Have, P. (1999). Doing conversation analysis: A practical guide . London: SAGE.
• Van Dijk, T. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Society , 4 , 249–285.
• Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach . London: SAGE.
• Whorf, B. L. (1952). Collected papers on metalinguistics . Washington, DC: Foreign Service Institute.
• Wright, T. , & Clark, S. (2015, July 2). Investigators believe money flowed to Malaysian leader Najib’s accounts amid 1MDB probe . Wall Street Journal .

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