E very culture in the world presumably has language, and every culture also has music. These two departments of human culture have some important similarities and points of contact; perhaps the most obvious of these lies in the fact that language and music are the two most important ways in which man uses sound. Not only do every people employ vocal sound both in language and in music, but non-vocal sounds are also associated with both systems, often substituting for language in various types of signalling; examples include the famous West Indian drum languages and the less-known whistle speech of certain Mexican Indian tribes and of the Canary Islands (Herzog 1945, Hasler 1960). Apart from this, we can distinguish two main types of link between language and music: their mutual influence in singing, and their structural similarity. The remainder of this paper will discuss these two topics, which, although logically distinct, both constitute areas for co'dperation between linguistics and musicology. 1 The mutual influence between language and music derives from the fact that all cultures occasionally use a single physical train of sounds as the vehicle for both systems simultaneously. This is to say that all peoples sometimes use their language in song, and from this there results a universal association of words and music. Assuming that both linguistics and ethnomusicology are branches of cultural anthropology in a broad sense, then the mutual influence between language and music which arises from their frequent co-occurrence would seem to be a worthy topic for anthropological study. Several types of correlations can be observed between linguistic structure and musical structure, and these have been classified by Nettl (1956). In many instances it is impossible to say which structure has influenced the other. Such is the case in many styles of singing where the musical and the linguistic phrase-structure or syntax can be shown to coincide; examples have been presented from European music by Herzog (1949:1039-41) and from the Yurok Indians of northwestern California by Robins and McLeod (1956). There are other examples, however, where it seems clear that music has influenced language, or vice versa. Thus the influence of music on language is seen in the phonetic modifications which language undergoes when it is sung. These modifications, differing as we pass from one language or one singing style to another-that is, as we pass from one culture to another-are commonly taught by example; the principles underlying them, constituting what we might call a diction of singing, have hardly been formulated. Impressionistically, I would say that English is less distorted in singing than many languages. It is striking to note the extent to which Spanish folk songs, as compared to songs in English, distort the normal accentuation of their words. Such distortion presumably reaches a maximum in certain tone languages-those in which every syllable has an inherent pitch, and this pitch serves to mark distinctions of meaning. Some such languages, such as Chinese, fit words to music in such a way that linguistic pitch and melodic pattern more or less coincide. It is said that Twi, a West African tone language, also minimizes