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Language and Gestures

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Submitted By dreamdrastically
Words 604
Pages 3
Cheryl Rowan
Prof. Kalos
Intro to Cultural Anthropology
5 August 2012
Language and Gestures Although it is often very overlooked, language is an extremely important part of culture. It is how we communicate by putting meaning to words. Just as culture is different everywhere, language is as well. In Federica Sgorbissa’s article, “Gestures That Speak”, she discusses the way humans have a natural instinct to pronounce words differently when obtaining different meanings or emotion, as well as our natural instinct to use gestures as a form of language. It is said that we use gestures to highlight language structure to make our message easier to understand. In a study in Italy, they had people listen to two comments that could easily be taken different ways, giving the sentence two different meanings, and then where shown others with a video. Without the visual stimuli of gestures shown while being spoken, more got the only audio ones wrong. This along with many other studies have shown the importance of gestures in language. Communication is an important aspect of culture. Culture is learned, through experience, environment, and people, but it is learned through communication, which is why language is so important. According to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, “linguistic differences encode culture”, language can influence your perspective. Language enables us to share our beliefs and values and learn from each other, as well as learning about other cultures. Even simply how things are said can influence the perception of the message being sent. For example as social media and technology continues to grow today, many conversations are held through technology. But when doing that it is easy to misinterpret the intentional meaning of the message, without the emphasis on certain words and how they are pronounced can change the intended emotion of that sentence.

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