Paper short abstract:

An Inugguit informant of mine said 'spoken language is a prison', oqauheq parnaerussiviuho: a Wittgensteinian description meaning verbalising limits thought. This paper explores an alternative ontology of language through the lens of the phenomenology of speech and Hymesian 'ways of speaking'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes as its starting point a language culture where the pragmatics of silence, jokes and gestures have to be carefully interpreted to be understood. In doing so, it explores a number of issues relevant to the phenomenology of speech and Hymesian 'ways of speaking'. These issues are discussed from the perspective of fieldwork amongst the Inugguit of north-west Greenland, a remote community of Arctic pseudo hunter-gatherers who subscribe to an intersubjective, non-Cartesian approach to language. Language is not objectified by the Inugguit; gesture and silence which are central to Merleau-Pontian phenomenology are important features of their language culture and there is still a degree of animist enmeshment between language and nature in the Inugguit psyche. 'Speaking' and 'belonging' have a particular salience as indices of intimacy where connectedness is constantly reinforced through a distinct commonality of expression and certain social practices, such as very frequent visiting of one another, story-telling, recycling of names and a shared monistic philosophy. The Inugguit define themselves through a repertoire of communicative and behavioural strategies which are used to ensure that one is accepted in a supportive kin group - the social imperative for each member. Silence, story-telling, male-male banter and semantic precision facilitated by the morphology of Polar Eskimo all feed into communicative strategies. What is more, with a high degree of morpho-semantic plasticity, the language is alive with an ontological dimension and open to new shades of meaning through the addition of potentially several hundred independent affixes, and thousands of affix combinations.