April 6, 2006
Ways of speaking is topic of talks, meeting
People conversing on the streets in Tokyo differ from those on the streets of Seattle in ways other than the language they’re using. Each culture (and subculture), Communication Professor Gerry Philipsen says, has its own “ways of speaking,” that is, rules about what is and isn’t appropriate in communication.
The UW has been a leader in studying ways of speaking — both within this country and around the world — and this spring a lecture series and a small conference will be devoted to spreading some of the knowledge gained.
Tamar Katriel, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, kicked off the lecture series this week with a Walker-Ames talk, On Cultural Ways of Speaking. Katriel earned her doctorate at the UW in 1983, and since then has devoted considerable time to studying a particular brand of Israeli speech known as “dugri.”
“It’s a very aggressive, rough way of speaking that to Israeli ears can sound very natural and very appropriate, but to American ears can sound too rough and offensive,” Philipsen says.
Philipsen, who was Katriel’s graduate adviser, nominated her for the Walker-Ames professorship. When she was accepted, with the co-sponsorship of Near Eastern Languages & Civilization, Anthropology, English, Education, Linguistics and Communication, money from the Earl and Edna Stice Fund for Social Science was used to bring in four additional lecturers in ways of speaking. They are:
- Nancy Baym, University of Kansas, Speaking of the Internet, April 17.
- Donal Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts, “Speaking” in Silence and Ways of Speaking, April 24.
- Kirt Wilson, University of Minnesota, Mimesis, Race, and Civilization: Speaking a Black Intellectual Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century, May 1.
- Valerie Manusov, UW, Nonverbal Communication: Revelations of a Cultural Code, May 8.
All lectures will be at 3:30 p.m. in 226 Communication. They are free and open to the public.
Philipsen is offering a special session of his graduate course, Ways of Speaking, this quarter — a session that will be built around the visiting lecturers. He has also planned a small conference on campus April 9–11, bringing together 10 scholars who teach ways of speaking courses so that they can have a sustained discussion about their teaching aims and practices in the cultural codes tradition. A variety of outside experts and respondents — including a scholar in teaching and learning — will also be there to further the discussion.
“These are people — many of them UW graduates — who teach an undergraduate, liberal arts course about cultural communication,” Philipsen says.
Katriel will give the conference keynote speech. Sessions of the conference are open to the UW community, but space is limited. Philipsen asks that anyone who is interested in attending all or part of it contact him at gphil@u.washington.edu
“Those of us who study ways of speaking have tried to collectively learn about all these different cultures and their ways of communicating,” Philipsen says of the field, “then step back and say, ‘What does this teach us about the way humans communicate?’ What we’re able to show is that they communicate in ways that are deeply cultural. We are concerned with how to understand ourselves and others in terms of the ways that we communicate.”
