When a speaker in conversation attempts to conceal the identification and hence the interpretation of what he says, he may change the phonological structure of his utterances; this method of concealment I call speech disguise. This paper describes the kind of informal speech disguise commonly heard in the Philippines, illustrated by recently recorded material from Tagalog.

In his article Some relations of linguistics and ethnology, Lg. 17.291 (1941), Alfred L. Kroeber wrote: On the whole, it is evident that of the two disciplines ethnology is the one which is dependent on linguistics. But the relations are complex, and now and then it is the linguist who can profit by what the anthropologist can tender him.' One kind of material that the anthropologist can offer the linguist is lexical usage in ordinary conversation. I have gone through my field notes and have marked each instance where I recorded a term of approval or disapproval used by a Navaho speaking to one or more other Navahos. I shall report here primarily upon the circumstances surrounding words used most frequently; but I shall also note some less common phrases that seem to illuminate Navaho conceptions of values. Where possible, I have checked my recordings against those published by Sapir, Haile, and Hoijer. In some cases I reproduce here material published by these and other linguists, where this adds to or clarifies the data in my own notes.

This paper deals with an aspect of acculturation which has only recently received some attention in the literature. For the most part linguists have been concerned with historical and descriptive studies, and have generally ignored studies of languages in contact. Cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, have been content to investigate acculturation in its purely nonlinguistic manifestations. Studies of linguistic acculturation, however, can furnish valuable data and may shed considerable light on the general problem of acculturation. Whether language and nonlinguistic aspects of culture change differentially, or whether in every instance language complements and reflects nonlinguistic acculturation, is a crucial problem. In the present illustrations, linguistic acculturation seems to substantiate what has taken place in other aspects of the cultures of the groups under consideration, but this may not be the case everywhere.

Linguistics, semantics, and pragmatics. The subject of this paper is not in strictest terms a linguistic one. ‘Linguistics’, in the narrow sense in which this term is currently used, is understood to concern itself solely with the formal properties of languages. That is to say, it is limited to the analysis of the properties of the signal systems or ‘codes’ themselves as inferred from the structure of messages, while it excludes on the one hand the primary nonlinguistic stimuli which prompt messages or are encoded in them, and on the other hand also the nonlinguistic responses which the messages may evoke. One need only remind oneself of Bloomfield's description of ‘speaker's stimuli’ and ‘hearer's responses’ for an illustration of the sorts of things that get excluded from linguistics. These things which get excluded from linguistics proper, however, are to a large extent the concern and the subject matter of cultural anthropology, and they belong within the fuller study of language.

That the methods of componential analysis as they have been developed for analyzing linguistic forms are applicable in principle for analyzing other types of cultural forms is a proposition toward whose demonstration I have for some time sought to orient my ethnographic researches. The results of some exploratory work toward this end have already been published. Included among them is an analysis of Truk kinship terminology, in which it proved possible to apply some of the principles of linguistic analysis to the problem of deriving the significata of kinship terms and of determining which terms went together in what I called semantic systems. I am taking up this material again in order to present a fuller discussion of the method and of its implications for developing an empirical science of meaning.