Everything about Anthropological Linguistics totally explained
Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture, and the relations between human biology, cognition and language. This strongly overlaps the field of
linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans
through the languages that they use.
Whatever one calls it, this field has had a major impact in the studies of
visual perception (especially
colour) and
bioregional democracy, both of which are concerned with distinctions that are made in languages about perceptions of the surroundings.
Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for
sociology and
self-organization of peoples. Study of the
Penan people, for instance, reveals that their language employs six different and distinct words, all of whose best English translation is "
we" — which may imply a more detailed understanding of
co-operation,
consensus and
consensus decision-making than English. Anthropological linguistics studies these distinctions, and relates them to
lifeways and to actual bodily adaptation to the senses, much as it studies distinctions made in languages regarding the colours of the rainbow: seeing the tendency to increase the diversity of terms, as evidence that there are distinctions that bodies in this environment
must make, leading to
situated knowledge and perhaps a
situated ethics, whose final evidence is the differentiated set of terms used to denote "we".
Related fields
Anthropological linguistics is concerned with
- Descriptive (or synchronic) linguistics: Describing dialects (forms of a language used by a specific speech community). This study includes phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and grammar.
- Historical (or diachronic) linguistics: Describing changes in dialects and languages over time. This study includes the study of linguistic divergence and language families, comparative linguistics, etymology, and philology.
- Ethnolinguistics: Analyzing the relationship between culture, thought, and language.
- Sociolinguistics: Analyzing the social functions of language and the social, political, and economic relationships among and between members of speech communities.
Recent work
Mark Fettes, in
Steps Towards an Ecology of Language (1996), sought "a theory of language ecology which can integrate
naturalist and critical traditions"; and in
An Ecological Approach to Language Renewal (1997), sought to approach a
transformative ecology via a more active, perhaps designed, set of tools in language. This may cross a line between science and
activism, but is within the anthropological tradition of study by the
participant-observer. Related to problems in critical
philosophy (for instance, the question
who's we, and the
subject-object problem).
See
anthropology,
linguistics.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Anthropological Linguistics'.
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