Living Language. Laura M. Ahearn

because they are completely context-dependent in that they inherently refer to particular moments in time or places in space (“here,” “then,” “now,” “there”) or social actors (“you,” “I,” “that person,” “such individuals”). In order to understand to whom “you” refers, for example, one must know the specific context of the conversation or text in question. And these sorts of references can shift; the person referred to as “you” can easily become “I” (or vice versa), and in reported speech a statement such as, “I’m already here,” can be reported using different words and verb tenses – for example, “You said that you were already there.”¹⁴

      In addition to indexicals that refer to specific times, places, individuals, objects, or concepts, there are also more general ways in which language can be indexical. In other words, as Jakobson has already informed us, language can “point to” something social or contextual without functioning in a referential way. Aspects of language use such as regional or ethnic “accents” or “dialects,” for instance, “point to” the speaker’s origins and are therefore examples of nonreferential or “pure” indexicality (Silverstein 1976:29). Ways of speaking that come to be associated over time with particular social groups can be called “registers” – examples include “motherese,” “geek talk,” and “teacher’s voice” – and therefore when a way of speaking becomes associated with a specific group, the process is known as enregisterment (Agha 2004, 2007). This process is constantly occurring, and we are all participating in it.

      Some indexicals have both referential and nonreferential functions. The Nepali pronouns and verb forms used in the Pounded Rice Ritual described at the outset of this chapter, for example, index not just the particular addressee (the bride) but also her social position as it plummets from the relatively high status of daughter to the lowly status of daughter-in-law. Silverstein maintains that such indexes can call into being the very social relations that they are indexing (1976:34). In this sense, they are performative, as we shall discuss in greater depth in a later chapter. Similarly, the various words the San Francisco high school students used for “stoned” also index their youth status and most likely membership in various social groups. Indexicality is also an important concept for understanding the disappearance of the language of Taiap in Papua New Guinea, as it indexed certain social identities the villagers had come to devalue. Much more will be said about these sorts of situations, as well as many others, throughout the rest of the book. For our purposes here, it is important to realize the centrality of the concept of indexicality. Duranti writes,

To say that words are indexically related to some “object” or aspect of the world out there means to recognize that words carry with them a power that goes beyond the description and identification of people, objects, properties, and events. It means to work at identifying how language becomes a tool through which our social and cultural world is constantly described, evaluated, and reproduced.

      (1997:19)

      The concept of indexicality is powerful but also extremely nuanced and culturally and linguistically specific (Hanks 1999:125). Acknowledging the socioculturally embedded nature of language is therefore the first step toward being able to shed further light on how indexicality works. Here are just a few examples of the subtle ways in which language can index social relations, identities, or values, “pointing to” such important aspects of the sociocultural world and even creating, reinforcing, or challenging those very relations, identities, or values:

       A college student mimics the voice of a character from a comedy show, thereby indirectly referencing not only that character and that show but also indicating that she is the sort of cool, hip, in-group sort of person who watches such a show.

       Labeling someone as an “enemy combatant,” a “freedom fighter,” a “terrorist,” or an “insurgent” can index the speaker’s political views about the conflict in question and can also sometimes establish, strengthen, or transform legal, military, or political understandings, thereby having real effects in the social world.

       Code-switching or translanguaging (Flores 2019) between two or more languages, dialects, or social registers can index different processes involved in a person’s ethnic, racial, gender, and/or socioeconomic identity formation and can have different social or even moral connotations, depending on the situation.

      As Silverstein notes: “Some of us have long since concluded that such phenomena are indexical all the way down” (2006:276).

      The Inseparability of Language, Culture, and Social Relations

The rest of this book will provide concrete examples of how these four concepts – multifunctionality, language ideologies, practice, and indexicality – are being applied in the field of linguistic anthropology. In the process, the following chapters will also attempt to reach two specific kinds of readers of this book: those who believe that language should be studied in a technical way, isolated from any actual instance of its use, and those who believe that social relations and cultural values should be studied without a close analysis of linguistic practices. To these readers, and indeed to all other readers as well, I hope to demonstrate in the following pages that language, culture, and social relations are so thoroughly intertwined that they must be studied in connection with one another. The field of linguistic anthropology provides some of the necessary tools for arriving at a deeper understanding of such linguistic, cultural, and social phenomena.

      2

      Gestures, Sign Languages, and Multimodality

      Having introduced readers to linguistic anthropologists’ approach to language as a form of social action, we discuss in this chapter how language is much more than just talk or words. As Jakobson’s concept of multifunctionality emphasizes, linguistic interactions are always operating on multiple levels and through multiple channels. Scholars call this multimodality, and those who study multimodal discourse seek to understand more deeply how participants in an interaction can co-construct meanings through multiple modes (which can also be called modalities or channels) in addition to face-to-face speech, such as nonverbal gestures, gazes, facial expressions, body movements, written texts, computers, material objects, or other semiotic forms.

Consider the following example. In a classic comedy skit that appeared on “The Tonight Show” in 2013, entitled, “#Hashtag,” Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake proceed to have a face-to-face conversation that mimics an online exchange.¹ Throughout the interaction they liberally intersperse the word “hashtag,” accompanying it with a hand gesture – two fingers of each hand overlapping each other to look like the number sign on a keyboard – whenever an online user might insert a hashtag in a post on social media. Their rapid-fire references to American popular culture are very generation- and culture-specific, so many of the jokes might be unintelligible to some audiences, but for our purposes the interesting point is that the comedy routine derives much of its humor from the central idea of the skit: the displacement of a linguistic feature (the hashtag) from one mode of communication (social media), where it is ordinarily used, to another (face-to-face conversation). Different modes of communication often involve different socially and culturally specific conventions of language use, and individuals who transgress those conventions may generate laughter, anger, or confusion.² The humor in this skit derives, at least partially, from this sort of transgression.

      The “#Hashtag” skit is also a useful example in several other respects because it demonstrates how meanings can be co-constructed by participants not just through speech but through various other semiotic modes, or channels. Hearkening back to Jakobson’s model representing the multifunctionality of language (see Figure 1.4 from Chapter 1), we might recall that one of the prime constituents of a speech event is the “channel,” or mode, through which the interaction takes place. If we broaden our analysis beyond interactions that involve face-to-face conversation, it soon becomes clear that semiosis – or meaning making – can occur through many modes, including, for example, the following (among others):

       Speech

       Gestures