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Photo by Suzy Hazelwood.

English dialects make themselves heard in genes

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If you need to hit a nail, what tool do you ask for? If you say “hammer,” do you pronounce the “r”? Do you drop the “h”?

Different people pronounce the same English words in different ways. People learn which words to use and how to pronounce them as they’re learning to talk with family, friends and others in their community, so geographic patterns in these pronunciations can persist over time.

In England, pairs of words that mean similar things, like “sight” and “vision” or “yes” and “aye,” can reveal a rich history of language that is intertwined with the history of the place itself. Such words have their origins in migrations and conquests that took place during the Middle Ages. New words would sometimes coexist and sometimes displace one another.

Cultural evolution researchers like us know that it’s not just mountain ranges or oceans that can be barriers to interaction. Different people can share their technology, cuisines and ideas, but some tend to interact more often with those who share cultural similarities, a behavior called homophily.

This can be seen most clearly when cultural traditions lead people to marry people from the same community. Populations that tend to marry within their group because of social or economic forces, including religious traditions and social stratification, have smaller gene pools, leading them to be more genetically similar to one another.

In addition to groups with distinctive marital practices, researchers have found relationships between genes and culture when studying groups that are from different ethnicities or different regions of the world. These similarities between genes and culture don’t imply that certain genetic variants are exclusive to these groups, or that genetics causes certain cultures to arise. Rather, the same people might be more likely to share genetics and language because of a common history, especially because of significant geographic or social barriers between groups.

Can smaller things, like the different dialects between neighboring villages, shape the genetic landscape of populations? In our new study, we combined genetic and linguistic data sampled in England to study the effects of culture on genetics at smaller geographic scales than generally studied.

We examined this relationship between cultural and genetic variation across England. In places where people move often, the small correlations between language and genes can be lost because of how rapidly they change. Since Great Britain is an island, few people entered its rural population between the times of the Norman conquest in 1066 and the end of the 19th century, making it ideal for our analysis.

Photo by Brett Jordan, courtesy of Pexels.

Combining two sets of data

Ideally, we could use a unified data set capturing information about the genetics and dialects of people living in a region. Unfortunately, no such data exists. Instead, we used data from two separate studies of people from approximately the same time and place. For our research, we focused on where the data sets overlapped in England.

For linguistic data, we relied on the Survey of English Dialects. Between 1950 and 1961, interviewers visited over 300 mostly rural places and asked people hundreds of questions about their daily lives. Their answers recorded the phrases, terms and sounds of local dialects of English. Each of these words can carry clues about where, or with whom, a person grew up.

The genetic data we used came from the People of the British Isles project, an academic investigation of how much Britain’s historical events of conquest, war and migration are reflected in British genetics. The project sequenced DNA from more than 2,000 people in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Researchers genotyped people whose grandparents who were born within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of each other, were largely rural, and were born in the late 19th century.

The People of the British Isles project found that most genotypes were not local to any one part of Great Britain but were evenly distributed. However, the historical movements of people to Great Britain left genetic marks: Compared with people in the rest of Great Britain, the genetics of those from the south of England were slightly more similar to those in France – a result of the Norman conquest a millennium ago – and the genetics of people in the former Danelaw were slightly more similar to modern Danes – because of the settling of the region by Vikings and, later, Danes. These events resulted in groups of people with somewhat similar genetics, a phenomenon referred to as genetic clustering.

We used features from the Survey of English Dialects to measure where neighboring towns spoke the most differently, which occurs at the borders between dialects. When people from neighboring towns speak the same dialect, we expect features of their language, such as whether the “r” is pronounced at the ends of words, to be similar. Conversely, if nearby towns speak different dialects, their language features will be more different.

Many of these dialect boundaries have long histories, such as that separating the English of the North from that of the South of England. Over time, dialects can persist in similar locations if geographic or cultural barriers influence how often and with whom people interact.

The echo of sounds long gone

We found greater genetic differences at the borders between dialects. Our results suggest that language, or some other aspect of culture, has limited how people interacted to some degree over the past thousand years. By limiting how often people started families with those from neighboring groups, cultural differences have maintained genetic evidence of the Norman conquest and other events from the Middle Ages.

This is the first time that information about linguistic dialects has been compared with modern genetic data within a population, particularly at such a granular level. Notably, people speaking different dialects have no obvious reason to avoid marrying one another, as would be expected from groups with specific marriage customs. Nevertheless, we find that even small-scale language differences, or other aspects of culture associated with these differences, can leave an impression on genes via people’s mating behaviors.

Even though people outside of Britain may think of a general “British accent,” the subtle differences among dialects seem to have parallels with the genetics of the region. This is in spite of the fact that the languages brought by people coming to England have since mixed and merged to produce the modern English language and today’s dialects.

The data used in our study represents the genetic landscape and dialects of the late 19th century; both have changed significantly since then. After the introduction of radio and television, dialects became more influenced by the cities around them. As a result, features of many English dialects in England, such as the pronunciation of “r” at the ends of syllables, have become much less common.

At the same time, immigrants from the former British Empire and elsewhere have brought a new influx of language. The cities in Great Britain have developed a set of new dialects rooted in the interactions among people from all ethnicities. As cultural barriers among groups fall away, small human interactions form the bridges that allow people to deemphasize differences and learn from one another.

This article has been updated to clarify which parts of the United Kingdom were included in the different data sets and the authors’ study

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Yakov Pichkar, Ph.D. Candidate in Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University and Nicole Creanza, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation, under a Creative Commons License.

Feature Image by Suzy Hazelwood courtesy of Pexels.

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What Is Anthropological Poetry?

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“For me, poetry is the music of being human.”
—Carol Ann Duffy

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SCRIBBLING IN YOUR field journal, you can feel the sentence snap in two like a branch stepped on—the meaning broken by the grammatical demands of prose. You suddenly find your pen working down the page in a rhythmic fashion, the writing at once spacious, languid, and succinct.

Without explanation, you allow a different mode of consciousness as you craft something new: metaphors emerge, images are enlivened, hidden emotions and tensions surface, deeper layers of meaning and human interaction are revealed.

You find yourself inside an anthropological poem. What now? How can you shape this work into a poem the broader public will want to read?

SAPIENS’ poet-anthropologists and others over the past century have been showing us how. To highlight a few tips and reflections, we share our thoughts on anthropological poetry. As the poetry editor at the magazine, I (Christine) review poetry submissions against the backdrop of historical and contemporary conversations about what “anthro-poetry” is and what it can be. The poems selected for SAPIENS must in some way illuminate anthropology for a broad readership, but they may also push edges in both fields by traveling freshly strung gossamer threads between poetic craft and research-based content and insights.

As the inaugural poet-in-residence at the magazine in 2021, I (Justin) had time, space, and encouragement to develop my thoughts on Black ethnographic poetics. I was able to explore what poetry can do, its power, and the myriad ways it helps us live more fully, more joyously.

POET-ANTHROPOLOGISTS ENGAGE THE WORLD

Anthropologists “study all aspects of human existence, past and present,” writes Danilyn Rutherford, the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which funds SAPIENS. From archaeologists to linguistic anthropologists, to biological anthropologists, paleoanthropologists, and sociocultural anthropologists, researchers “document the meanings humans make of the different worlds they inhabit.”

So, it’s not a surprising hop from studying human existence to writing poetry. One could even argue that all poetry is anthropological—for it records our abundant and diverse meaning-making efforts in oral or written form.

Take a poet like William Butler Yeats, who was not a trained anthropologist but who nonetheless witnessed and ethnographically documented the realities of war, pain, and grief that early 20th-century Ireland experienced in its fight for independence from Britain. He, among many others of the Irish Literary Revival, galvanized people by crafting a strong and powerful sense of Irish nationalism through a poetic witness of his cultural environment.

A poet-anthropologist adds to this grounded witnessing of the world another layer: a perspective shaped by the theoretical and/or critical lenses of sociocultural anthropology, the deep time analyses of biological anthropology, the insights and subtleties of linguistic anthropology, or the diversity and complexity of archaeology. In addition, one subgenre engages ethnographic research based on fieldwork in a way that might qualify it as a genre of social science communication. 

In anthropological poetry, “we see a trained observer in the world, feeling the world, engaging the world, not apart from but of—often trying to relate across human differences.” As poet-anthropologists Nomi Stone and Leah Zani explain about their series Battlefields, Fieldpoems, these poems “were written out of our relationships with the world, shaped by our different academic histories and methods training, as well as our different investments in poetic craft.” For them, poetry is “a mode of deep seeing and sensory aliveness.”

Like scholarly writings, anthropological poetry shapes what readers see and feel. Witnessing can be, as poet Ross Gay says, “a generative act.” Like him, you might ask yourself: “How does how we witness make the world?”

Notice this witnessing at work in “Fieldwork” by poet-anthropologist Michael D. Jackson:

“Even now they file at first light
through the elephant grass, along
the red path to their farms, leaving
me behind. I used to follow them
and ask if I could hoe or weed,
stack unburned branches beyond
the outer fence. They would
laugh outright …”

The scene of people walking through the grass to their farms becomes vivid and alive—a type of worldmaking. But moreover, Jackson places himself in the poem, referencing his long-term fieldwork with a specific community. The poem might even help us “see beyond what we can see,” as poet and playwright Claudia Rankine has emphasized in regard to the possibilities of art.

Anthropologists answer that question of how their witnessing makes the world by being attentive to such issues as: how language can retrench or disrupt power inequalities, how narratives might embody or dislodge colonialist ideologies, or how a poem may show culture change. Take, for instance, a poem that peels back an ethnographic moment; another that drops readers into a visceral perspective on war and terror; a moving autoethnographic exploration of lynching, anti-Black racism, and a search for family; or a historically sweeping poem on how animated the world around us is.

Yet poetry is not anthropology, and anthropology is not poetry. But the two can be bone and muscle for one another—structuring and contributing to dynamic, humanistic expressions that are birthed from a skilled, sensorial engagement with the world and the long arc of human history.

FURTHER POSSIBILITIES OF ANTHRO-POETRY

As Leah Zani, a former poetry editor at Anthropology and Humanism, has written, the history of anthropological poetry is one “of possibility, without settled conventions in craft, method, or audience.”

So, given this complex history, how does craft matter? An effective poem can change a reader’s or listener’s consciousness. Metaphor, rhythm, imagery, rhyme, line breaks, and other poetic elements can be used in any combination to craft a poem for greatest impact. Every word needs to perform. Study outstanding poems at the Poetry Foundation and elsewhere, and you will gain a feel for how to write your own.

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You’ll also want to listen intently to the poem as you revise. Does the “sound” of the poem match the sense of it? You affect consciousness through the musicality of your piece: The fleshiness of music—spoken word—vibrates tiny bones in the middle ear, which leads to changes in the brain. Notice how word choice (“over the moor,” not “across the plateau”) and alliteration (“sounds of sleeves”), for example, shape sound.

Taken together, anthropology and poetry can expand the possibilities of what we as humans believe “truth” to be. Anthropology’s deep knowledge-seeking can help train poets in new ways of seeing and capturing—and giving life and voice to otherwise unvoiced realities. Poetry’s use of metaphor, in turn, can expand anthropology’s insights into the truths of human experience.

In my (Justin’s) year as SAPIENS’ inaugural poet-in residence, I had time to deepen my understandings of witness, grief, and joy, and to dive into poetic methods of Black worlding. In my work, I try to find metaphors that most closely match the emotional reality of my experiences of what freedom can look like, such as when I write in “The Cookout (and All Other Manners of Heavenly Black Things)”:

“There go my bro Freddie/ and my mans Ahmaud/ they just’a Jesse Owens runnin’/ just’a Usain Bolt runnin’/ racin’ round and round in wide arcs’ah hallelujah/ got a whole field just for them/ just for them/ runnin’ just as fast/ as fast and as round as they can/ ’cause they know/ they just know that here/ at the Cookout/ they ain’t never gon’ lose they breath/ naw/ not again/ not never again.”

These lines reference my cultural experience of the Southern Black Church and Black Pentecostalism, using “wide arcs’ah hallelujah” as a touchstone to refer to the way members of the church often euphorically race around a sanctuary when they have been “touched” or “visited” by what we call the “holy spirit.” This metaphor, juxtaposed with the speculative “freedom dream” of life and joy I employ for fallen victims of anti-Black and/or anti–Black Queer violence (Freddie Gray and Ahmaud Arbery in this case), helps craft a searing truth of what it means to be Black and/or Black Queer in the U.S., attempting to imagine spaces of respite and celebration under the threat of violence and death. Metaphors such as this can reveal and/or conceal, depending on how they are used.

This truth in metaphor often gets obscured by what people assume is “fact” versus “fiction.” A narrow notion of “fact” is thought to be in direct opposition to metaphor, to story, to embellishment. The reality is that truth is made up of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Consider a set of grandparents who have been married for 50 years sharing the story of the day they first met. The “facts” might be simple: They met at a coffee shop. She dropped her cup. He paid for her to have another. They then sat down and talked for hours.

But the story these grandparents tell might employ devices like embellishment and metaphor, because those are more indicative of the emotive truth they experienced upon laying eyes on each other for the first time.

What if the truth of their story becomes about how his heart fluttered when she looked deep into his eyes like she could see his soul? What if it were about how the musicality of his voice sounded like blended flutes to her ears when he spoke to her that first time? 

Through poetic language, a deep emotive truth, or emotional logic, comes through the recollection of how they felt in that moment. This metaphorized or embellished recollection, for them, might be truer, more factual, and more real than a rote, halted recitation of their physical actions.

POETRY’S QUALITY OF LIGHT

A poetic light can illuminate all things human. In Audre Lorde’s famous essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” she writes: “[Poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change.”

For people who are marginalized, poetry is, indeed, not a luxury, but a language. I (Justin) know it as a searing light through which we might brighten the path toward futures we were told we would never have. For me, it has often been a lighthouse in the darkness, shepherding my ship to port. But it has also been the torpedo fire, the rocket blaze, the missile flame I have learned to launch in protection.

For me (Christine), poetry has been a way to embody in language what otherwise remains ineffable, to envision more just and healthier ways of being and relating in the world, and to carve out spaces where sensory input, dreams, intuition, and emotions have equal play with other aspects of being human. As Rankine says, “Futurity comes if you can feel.” To me, poetry can be part of a decolonizing effort for how it helps us express what it’s like being in bodies in social spaces, in physical places, and in evolutionary time.

We often think of light as gentle, as soft. We think of the unveiling of social ills as gradual, following a linear path that says: “It will happen soon” or “we cannot stay like this forever … can we?” But consider those in Plato’s cave: aware enough of the light to become accustomed to shadows. Think of what it means to step into the sun then: to be forced into that light—that truth. It would hurt and burn, would it not?

Could you stand it? Or would you run back to the comfort of your shadows?

If poetry is light, if poetry is truth, why then would you ever think it was easy? Gentle? Soft? How could you ever believe it a luxury?

Poetry has power. But can a poem force a knee from a neck or stop a bullet? Can words heal a toxic lake or human body? Can they end empire-building? Can they save parents from fear of losing their children?

We do not know. At least, not yet.

Our poems are not shields. They are not force fields. They are not defensive. But they are weapons. Poems can be blades, bludgeons, bullets unto themselves. They also can be vessels we take to challenge our fears, to move us toward a place of vision. Moreover, as Lorde writes, “Poetry is not only dream or vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”

So we say, again: Poems are weapons.

They are weapons because in the face of darkness, hate, and denial, truth is a weapon, love is a weapon, even joy is a weapon. And in the worlds of hope, soulfulness, and witness that poetry creates, they shine searingly and brilliantly. Submit yours here.

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Justin D. Wright is a sociocultural anthropologist, performance studies scholar, theater artist, and performance poet.

Christine Weeber is the copy editor, sub-editor, and poetry editor at SAPIENS. She has an M.A. in cultural anthropology and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from Colorado State University.

This article originally appeared in SAPIENS, “a digital magazine about everything human, told through the stories of anthropologists”.

Image from the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City / Flickr