Avoidance speech

Last updated

Avoidance speech is a group of sociolinguistic phenomena in which a special restricted speech style must be used in the presence of or in reference to certain relatives, or in certain situations. Avoidance speech is found in many Australian Aboriginal languages [1] and Austronesian languages [2] as well as some North American languages such as Anishinaabe-mowin, [3] Highland East Cushitic languages [4] and Southern Bantu languages. [5] Chinese naming taboo prohibits speaking and writing syllables or characters that appear in the names of esteemed people, such as emperors, parents, and ancestors.

Contents

Avoidance speech styles tend to have the same phonology and grammar as the standard language they are a part of. The lexicon, however, tends to be smaller than in normal speech since the styles are only used for limited communication.

Australia

Mother-in-law languages

Avoidance speech in Australian Aboriginal languages is closely tied to elaborate tribal kinship systems in which certain relatives are considered taboo. Avoidance relations differ from tribe to tribe in terms of strictness and to whom they apply. Typically, there is an avoidance relationship between a man and his mother-in-law, usually between a woman and her father-in-law, and sometimes between any person and their same-sex parent-in-law. For some tribes, avoidance relationships are extended to other family members, such as the mother-in-law's brother in Warlpiri or cross-cousins in Dyirbal. All relations are classificatory – more people may fall into the "mother-in-law" category than just a man's wife's mother. [6]

Avoidance speech styles used with taboo relatives are often called mother-in-law languages, although they are not actually separate languages but separate lexical sets with the same grammar and phonology. Typically, the taboo lexical set has a one-to-many correspondence with the everyday set. For example, in Dyirbal the avoidance style has one word, jijan, for all lizards, while the everyday style differentiates many varieties. In Guugu Yimidhirr the avoidance speech verb bali-l "travel" covers several everyday verbs meaning "go", "walk", "crawl", "paddle", "float, sail, drift", and "limp along". Corresponding avoidance and everyday words are generally not linguistically related. Avoidance forms tend to be longer than everyday forms. [7]

In some areas, the avoidance style is used by both members of the avoidance relationship; in others the senior member may talk to the junior in everyday style. Behavior associated with avoidance speech is a continuum and varies between tribes. For the Dyirbal people, a man and his mother-in-law may not make eye contact, face one another or directly talk to each other. Rather, they must address a third person or even a nearby object. For slightly less restricted relationships, such as between a man and his father-in-law, avoidance style is used and must be spoken in a slow, soft voice. An extreme case of avoidance behavior is found in the Umpila, in which a man and his mother-in-law may not speak at all in each other's presence. [8]

Secret languages

Children in these cultures acquire avoidance speech forms as part of their normal language development, learning with whom to use them at a fairly young age. [9] Additionally, a few languages have another style, called a "secret language" or "mystic language", that is taught to boys as part of initiation rituals, and is only used between men. [10]

Africa

A special system of avoidance vocabulary is traditionally used by married women speaking Highland East Cushitic languages in southwestern Ethiopia. In Kambaata and Sidamo, this system is called ballishsha, and includes physical and linguistic avoidance of parents-in-law. [11] Women who practice ballishsha do not pronounce any words beginning with the same syllable as the name of their husband's mother or father. [12] Instead, they may use paraphrase, synonyms or semantically similar words, antonyms, or borrowings from other languages. [13]

Ukuhlonipha is a traditional system of avoidance speech in Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa including Zulu, Xhosa and Swazi, as well as Sotho. [14] This special speech style and correlating respectful behaviors may be used in many contexts, but is most strongly associated with married women in respect to their father-in-law and other senior male relatives. Women who practice ukuhlonipha may not say the names of these men or any words with the same root as their names. [15] They avoid the taboo words phonologically (substituting sounds) or lexically (replacing words with synonyms, etc.). The ukuhlonipha system also includes avoidance of the names of certain relatives by all speakers and physical avoidance of certain relatives. [16]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Dixon 1980.
  2. ↑ Simons 1982, pp. 157–226.
  3. ↑ Brave Bird, Mary (27 January 2009). Ohitika Woman. Grove Press. ISBN   978-0802143396.
  4. ↑ Treis 2005.
  5. ↑ Herbert 1990.
  6. ↑ Dixon 1980, pp. 58–59.
  7. ↑ Dixon 1980, pp. 61–64.
  8. ↑ Dixon 1980, pp. 59–60.
  9. ↑ Dixon 1980, p. 60.
  10. ↑ Dixon 1980, pp. 65–68.
  11. ↑ Tefera 1987, pp. 44–59.
  12. ↑ Treis 2005, pp. 292–294.
  13. ↑ Treis 2005, p. 295.
  14. ↑ Herbert 1990, p. 456.
  15. ↑ Herbert 1990, pp. 457–459.
  16. ↑ Herbert 1990, pp. 460–461.

Related Research Articles

In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner.

Circumlocution is the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea. It is sometimes necessary in communication, but it can also be undesirable. It can also come in the form of roundabout speech wherein many words are used to describe something that already has a common and concise term. Most dictionaries use circumlocution to define words. Circumlocution is often used by people with aphasia and people learning a new language, where simple terms can be paraphrased to aid learning or communication. Among other usages, circumlocution can be used to construct euphemisms, innuendos, and equivocations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dyirbal language</span> Australian Aboriginal language

Dyirbal is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by the Dyirbal people. In 2016, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that there were 8 speakers of the language. It is a member of the small Dyirbalic branch of the Pama–Nyungan family. It possesses many outstanding features that have made it well known among linguists.

In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent ("subject") of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo-European languages. It has also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic languages. Ergative languages are classified into two groups: those that are morphologically ergative but syntactically behave as accusative and those that, on top of being ergative morphologically, also show ergativity in syntax. No language has been recorded in which both the morphological and syntactical ergative are present. Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter. Dyirbal is said to be the only representative of syntactic ergativity, yet it displays accusative alignment with certain pronouns.

In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a sign pointing to some element in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yanyuwa language</span> Pama–Nyungan language of northern Australia

Yanyuwa is the language of the Yanyuwa people of the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria outside Borroloola in the Northern Territory, Australia.

A mixed language, also referred to as a hybrid language, contact language, or fusion language, is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. It differs from a creole or pidgin language in that, whereas creoles/pidgins arise where speakers of many languages acquire a common language, a mixed language typically arises in a population that is fluent in both of the source languages.

Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon is a Professor of Linguistics in the College of Arts, Society, and Education and The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland. He is also Deputy Director of The Language and Culture Research Centre at JCU. Doctor of Letters, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa by JCU in 2018. Fellow of British Academy; Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, he is one of three living linguists to be specifically mentioned in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics by Peter Matthews (2014).

The Mamu are an Indigenous Australian people of the coastal rainforest region south of Cairns, in northern Queensland. They form one of 8 groups of the generically named Dyirbal tribes, the others being Yidinji, Ngajan, Dyirbal, Girramay, Warrgamay, Waruŋu and Mbabaram.

The taboo on the dead includes the taboo against touching of the dead, those surrounding them and anything associated with the dead.

Kunjen, or Uw, is a Paman language spoken on the Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, Australia, by the Uw Oykangand, Olkola, and related Aboriginal Australian peoples. It is closely related to Kuuk Thaayorre, and perhaps Kuuk Yak.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murui Huitoto language</span> Witotoan language of Peru and Colombia

Murui Huitoto is an indigenous American Huitoto language of the Witotoan family. Murui is spoken by about 1,100 Murui people along the banks of the Putumayo, Cara-Paraná and Igara-Paraná rivers in Colombia. In Peru it is spoken in the North alongside the Ampiyacu and Napo rivers by some 1,000 people. Some Murui speakers live also outside their territories, for instance the vicinity of Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia.

The Ethiopian language area is a hypothesized linguistic area that was first proposed by Charles A. Ferguson, who posited a number of phonological and morphosyntactic features that were found widely across Ethiopia and Eritrea, including the Ethio-Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic languages but not the Nilo-Saharan languages.

In linguistics, an honorific is a grammatical or morphosyntactic form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. Distinct from honorific titles, linguistic honorifics convey formality FORM, social distance, politeness POL, humility HBL, deference, or respect through the choice of an alternate form such as an affix, clitic, grammatical case, change in person or number, or an entirely different lexical item. A key feature of an honorific system is that one can convey the same message in both honorific and familiar forms—i.e., it is possible to say something like "The soup is hot" in a way that confers honor or deference on one of the participants of the conversation.

Marra, sometimes formerly spelt Mara, is an Australian Aboriginal language, traditionally spoken on an area of the Gulf of Carpentaria coast in the Northern Territory around the Roper, Towns and Limmen Bight Rivers. Marra is now an endangered language. The most recent survey was in 1991; at that time, there were only 15 speakers, all elderly. Most Marra people now speak Kriol as their main language. The remaining elderly Marra speakers live in the Aboriginal communities of Ngukurr, Numbulwar, Borroloola and Minyerri.

Word taboo, also called taboo language, language taboo or linguistic taboo is a kind of taboo that involves restricting the use of words or other parts of language due to social constraints. This may be due to a taboo on specific parts of the language itself, or due to the need to avoid a taboo topic. The taboo against naming the dead in parts of the world is an example. Taboo words are commonly avoided with euphemisms, such as the English euphemism pass away, meaning "die". It is a common source of neologisms and lexical replacement.

Warlmanpa Sign Language is a highly developed Australian Aboriginal sign language used by the Warlmanpa people of northern Australia

The Dyirbal, also called Jirrbal, are an Aboriginal Australian people living in northern Queensland, both one tribe and a group of related contiguous peoples included under that label as the Dyirbal tribes. They live on the upper Murray river of the Atherton Tableland. Their name is used as a generic term to refer specifically to one of eight groups, the others being Yidinji, Ngadyan, Mamu, Girramay, Wargamay, Waruŋu and Mbabaɽam.

The Ngajanji, also written Ngadyan, and Ngadjon-Jii are an Indigenous Australian people of the rainforest region south of Cairns, in northern Queensland. They form one of 8 groups, the others being Yidin, Mamu, Dyirbal, Girramay, Warrgamay, Waruŋu and Mbabaram, of the Dyirbal tribes.

The Girramay are an Australian Aboriginal tribe of northern Queensland.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.