Language Acquisition vs. Language Socialization

Learning to Communicate: Theories of Anthropologists and Linguists
When understanding language and communication, anthropologists and linguists study people, societies, languages and cultures in different ways. Linguists study what is referred to as language acquisition, the process by which humans acquire the capacity to learn a language and use words to communicate. These studies focus more on grammar and structure of language and how people gain the knowledge of and capacity for words and communication. Anthropologists study language socialization which is the process of acquiring language to be integrated into a community and to learn social norms of speaking. This involves the study of how individuals are taught to use language to be considered as a competent member of their society. With different approaches, these two fields of study explore the concept and ways of individuals learning language to become competent in communication with others.
One subject of study within linguistics is linguistic competence. When acquiring a language, certain rules of sentence structure must be followed in order for the individual to make sense to be able to communicate with the rest of the society. In order to be considered as a linguistically competent individual, one must be able to relay their thoughts in a clear, understandable manner that follows the rules of grammar. For instance, in the English language the sentence “I would like a hamburger” is the correct way to order a hamburger. However, “A hamburger would like I” is incorrect because of the improper sentence structure; a person that is linguistically incompetent (at least in English) could possibly produce a sentence like this. If an individual came into the United States and did not know how to properly speak English, they would be looked down upon in this society because of their

incompetence for the language. There are 5 layers of language structure: phonetics, phonology, morphology,...