I know some guys hear are historians and u/AlfredicEnglishRules is an anthropologist. I was listening to a podcast and someone brought up some groups in America use slang predominately because their biology makes English difficult for them. I'm wondering how biology affects language? Is it just an IQ thing, or are there subtle differences in vocal chords? Or is it bullshit?
I can understand cultural differences shaping languages. And I've heard evolutionary differences, like early men having to increase their vocabularies to include dogs in their hunting.
Ehh... I heavily question the premise, but I'm no historian or biologist or anything so don't expect much academic rigor behind my opinion.
America seems to be an easy place where such observations can be made.
A native Japanese will often have trouble pronouncing the english "L" sound (hence the "Engrish" meme), but an American-born Japanese will rarely have the same kind of issue. People from all kinds of cultures who are born in America can see this effect in action.
A similar phenomenon occurs with accents. Within 1 generation of being born in a different country, most cultures can assimilate and have similar accents to normal people within the country.
I think culture and cultural history has a lot more to do with language than anything else. I think slang is just born out of certain thoughts wanting to be expressed in unique ways. Its made up until the meaning sets, its just another facet of language.
I believe that, if you're referring to American blacks when you say that, its either them wanting to feel "black" and put their own (unfortunate) twist on the language, or otherwise are holdover terms and phrases ingrained in deep southern culture. If you're talking Hispanics its a similar kind of phenomenon, though with more connection to their original languages and hanging out with people of their own culture, creating their own twist on the language to suit them.
Those are the main two groups I've seen which use heavier amounts of slang than others, but I don't really see either groups having actual trouble with the English language (minus the lack of knowledge about vocabulary/definitions, certain grammar rules, or spelling, but that's more a struggle with education than actual comprehension). Reaching a relatively average level of comprehension of English if you're born in America is far from difficult.
The guy was referring to black people. Thanks for the info
Hasn't Thomas Sowell pointed out that black Americans adopted the culture of the poorest whites in the South after emancipation, including elements of their way of speaking. So called black vernacular is essentially the speech pattern of the poor English, Scots and Irish who lived in the South in the Antebellum and Reconstruction era.
The biggest differences between race is in the brain. Language is how you compare and express things, so of course your brain determines what kind of language you use. The other factors would be much more minor in comparison.
Everyone starts with the same basic biology, so there won't be any difference there.
From an anatomical POV losing teeth or damage to the lips/tongue will affect things because, for the English language at least, those are the things you use when making the sounds for consonants. They're all some variation of air pressure being moulded around the teeth and tongue, so language can be affected in that sense but only in terms of deviating from the norm in terms of how the structure of the mouth should be.
This includes idiots who split their tongues, probably affects a lot of people with lip/tongue/facial piercings around the same areas, those who have lost teeth for whatever reasons, and anyone unfortunate enough to be born with several conditions where the mouth/teeth/tongue don't form fully.
Intelligence definitely shapes language. And intelligence shapes individual biology and biological outcomes. So, yes, it's entirely possible that there are subsets of the human population that simply cannot use modern languages effectively, because their brains just cannot handle the word/object, concept/individual or reality/possibility differences. (For instance, a lots of blacks will call everything of a type by a brand name withing that type "Glock brand glock" and cannot distinguish hypothetical and reality-based questions "but I did eat breakfast yesterday!")
Culture also effects language, to a degree that modern Westerners probably cannot comprehend. It's also entirely possible that individuals within un-advanced/regressed cultures have never gained/have lost certain language abilities.
people with small prefrontal cortex, namely blacks, struggle to understand abstract concepts like time and causality even if you bring them up in fully developed society. https://www.amren.com/news/2017/10/morality-racial-differences/
how would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning.
Ah this is my area, I'm a linguist.
Your question is very general, and whichever way I take it, the state of the field and research is such that we're not going to get many real answers any time soon, it's all pozzed.
Vocal chord differences? Nah that's going to be bollocks unless we're talking other species of human, or birds. IQ? Yeah it's going to impact you. But I actually think it's mostly a series of gauntlets, we need to consider neglect and residual elements of their pidgin-creole english, and then a culture which pulls down those who act 'white' in the cases that you're talking about.
There are certain 'critical periods', a baby has to meet certain milestones if they're to be able to continue to develop language normally, once you get past these ages if you haven't learnt certain language skills, you're fucked. Quite fucked at 3, and institutionalisation levels of fucked if you've still not developed them at 5 or 6 or so.
The wealthier and white parents talk with their kids, they read to them, they stimulate that learning. Look into the '30 million word gap' which they've desperately tried to discredit and poo-poo, as though it still doesn't show a massive difference with either race or wealth, or a combination (even if it can't parse exactly which or if that number is exaggerated, the difference is still there).
With less stimulation, you're going to get less kids meeting those particular milestones. The low IQ poor and/or black kids who were going to struggle to meet those milestones even if they had a lot of stimulation are now going to not hit them, and essentially have an induced language-learning disability their whole lives.
So there's an interplay, anyone of low IQ who might have been fine in a healthier culture is now in serious trouble.
Now they've made it past that gauntlet let's say, they are now being taught a different dialect in the home and in their school, and then all their peers socially discourage learning or speaking right. It's a fucked situation.
Well general is good for me. I'm not going to understand more technical and narrowed answers.
As far as I'm aware, Language is a technology that our biology has adapted to exploit.
Along with religion.
Biology includes the brain. If a being has trouble imagining the future or a hypothetical they will not have use for words and conjugations that express such. Thus their language will not develop such words or constructions.
Finally we get to admit that some people aren't as intelligent as everyone says they are. Let's try an easy sentence with some difficult words, "we looted Worcester then went down the Thames to loot Leicester square for a lads night out."
You can read that fairly well, but there are those who can't say it. England, do you know anyone like that?
Ok, all kidding aside there are papers about intelligence and pronunciation. It gets into a subject that anthropologists don't enjoy talking about. Well are the biggest racists because our entire job is to explain the other to normal people. As someone else point out, the Japanese don't pronounce L and R as different. That's because they don't have those letters and use a rolled L in their language. We can say the same for the Welsh ll sound. It's not in English, but we can find it in Polish, Navajo and even Mongolian.
But, trying to explain that to the common man has problems so the simple statement like it's not a common word, or they shortened it to save time doesn't work. Soz the explanation is given that the other can't pronounce it. There is a whole section of anthropology proving this, and it's older than most of the other forms of it. Even papers written today have stuff like that in it.
Navajos are stupid and need to be kept in their primitive state. The anthropologist says that with a bunch of softer words and makes it sound like they're helping. We need to protect the indigenous cultures from modernistic ideologies! It's incredibly racist, but they claim to be the good guy. Black people need to preserve their culture and you are racist for telling them to clean up. That's being used as a control method for the black culture. If black people get smart, then they won't vote Democrat or buy stupid products aimed specifically at them.
Someone else mentioned how brand names are used as the generic term. This is why Nintendo had a campaign to make sure people knew that their consoles were specific. We don't actually have a generic term for nappies or diapers. Baby strollers and prams are also brand names.
In parts of the US if they ask if you want coke, they mean soda. As opposed to Texas, especially Waco where they ask, "do you want Dr pepper or do you wish to sin against God and man?"
That's why I enjoy studying culture, the details are fascinating. History does the same for me. Combining the two means seeing a very different world from others. So yes, there are papers like that, but it's a sign of who is talking to who than actual evidence.
Very interesting. I’d say you can be trained to speak properly but you can be limited by IQ. Growing up my mother demanded that you speak the queen’s English in her house so even today slang sounds foreign to me.
The length of your sentences is determined by how much air you have in your lungs.
It's bullshit.
Speech capacity doesn't form additively but subtractively. The brain figures out which muscle group connections it needs, and neglects the ones that aren't useful. Babies can make sounds their parents can't; most notably the latin double-R, erre, which many northern europeans lose in childhood.
A native Japanese speaker finds it exceptionally difficult to pronounce b and v differently, but if you raise their child in a native english environment, they'll have no problem with it at all.
Point is, where language is concerned, it's pretty much all nurture. Or more precisely, muscle training.
Yes and,
It's not just muscle, it's perception too. The babies stop attending too, and being able to make distinctions between, foreign sounds that are similar. Eventually it just sounds like all the barbarians are just saying 'barbarbar' or some shit.
The only biological evidence I have seen is that some languages are inherently easier for the brain to process than others. But this only pops up when you look at things like dyslexia: some languages like Italian produce no significant amount of the population with it, while in other languages such as English or Russian this affects something like 5% of the population.
Biology might be able to have some interaction with parts of the brain commonly involved in language processing. Which invariably could have secondary effects on how individuals, and maybe even a culture communicates and develops language.
Beyond that though you might be reaching a bit. And I don't think you're necessarily accounting for how distinctly different language rules can be, which can affect how strict or how flexible grammar, syntax, etc etc.