Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

Even distance between speakers tells us something about the way we communicate.

Linguistic anthropology is one of four sub-fields in anthropology. It is an interdisciplinary field that combines the study of languages and the study of societies. This has led to discoveries about how languages operate within a given society, whether that society is a small regional one or the global society.

Features Studied

Linguistic anthropology studies how dialects, accents and actions affect a person's interactions with fellow members of society--for example, how dialects separated the social classes in Victorian England. To do this, anthropologists study features like languages written, spoken, signed and gestured. They also look at factors such as clothing, jewelry, greeting and parting actions, physical distance between speakers and eye contact.

Historical Linguistics

There are two main branches of linguistic anthropology. The first branch is historical linguistics. Historical linguistics specifically studies the genealogy or evolution of individual languages. Tracking a language's development requires an understanding of the changes in a language, whether morphological or phonetic. Studying these changes enables the anthropologist to track the migration of a people through the development and changes in their language.

Ethnolinguistics

The second branch of study, ethnolinguistics, is based on two similar yet distinct schools of thought. The New World Encyclopedia states that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis supported the idea that "language, by providing habitual grooves of expression, predisposes people to see the world in a certain way and this guides their thinking and behavior." The second school of thought supports that a person's language and culture predisposes them to seeing things from a particular viewpoint, but that language is an ever-changing element that takes in bits of new influences constantly. Therefore, those changes affect the perspectives of individuals and societies, causing their thinking to constantly evolve.

Documentation

Detailed documentation about social interactions is crucial to linguistic anthropology. There are four main ways documentation is acquired--annotated transcriptions, audio/visual recordings, participant interviews and participant observation (a method of observation where the researcher lives among and interacts with the society being studied). Documented interactions provide endless information of unquestionable origin to support the anthropologist's work.

Origin

Linguistic anthropology developed out of cultural anthropology. Three major contributors to this branch of anthropology are Franz Boas (1858-1942) for his studies in linguistics, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) for his work in ethnography and ethnology, and Edward Sapir (1884-1939) for his contributions to the Sapir-Whorf theory.

References

• Mystfx: What is Linguistic Anthropology?
• Oregon State: Definitions of Anthropological Terms
• UCLA: Linguistic Anthropology
• New World Encyclopedia: Anthropology