Language

Language has often been considered as a conceptual entity, divorced from the mechanisms of its material embodiment as socially circulating sound. The chapter argues instead that there are significant areas of overlap between what are often taken as separate domains. These include the sonic features of everyday speech acts, the ways language pervades all forms of human endeavor, and the shared indexical and iconic associations of all forms of sounded expression. Lost in excisions of sound from language are considerations of voice and performance, speech play and verbal art, the affective and poetic dimensions of language, and the coordination of language and other sonorous expressive forms in ritual and ceremony. Fertile areas for future scholarship at the intersection of sound studies, linguistics, and anthropology reaffirm the important role that sound studies plays in foregrounding the material embodiment of language as socially circulating sound.