Anthropological Linguistics

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.

Anthropological linguistics is concerned with:

Descriptive (synchronic) linguistics:

Describing dialects (forms of a language used by a specific speech community).

·         Historical (diachronic) linguistics:

Describing changes in dialects and languages over time.

·         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.

Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology. Anthropology was conceived as comprising four subfields: archaeology, physical (now `biological') anthropology, linguistics (now `linguistic anthropology'), and ethnology (now `sociocultural anthropology'). Boas contributed to all four of his named branches of anthropology.

His personal research contributions gave him an important place in the history of anthropology.  Even Boas has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology.” Although Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, he left it to colleagues and students such as Edward Sapir to research the relationship between culture and language.

Edward Sapir was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. His name is borrowed in what is now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.

Classification of Languages

During his lifetime Sapir was highly regarded for his work on language—his groundbreaking studies of Native American languages broke the myriad of languages down into six categories—and for his insistence that discussion of a wider culture was necessarily connected to discussion of the individual within that culture.

Sapir's classifies all the languages in North America into only 6 families:

Eskimo–Aleut

Algonkin–Wakashan

Nadene

Penutian

Hokan–Siouan

Aztec–Tanoan.

Sapir's classification is still commonly used in general languages-of-the-world type surveys.

Sapir suggested that man perceives the world principally through language. He wrote many articles on the relationship of language to culture. A thorough description of a linguistic structure and its function in speech might, he wrote in 1931, provide insight into man’s perceptive and cognitive faculties and help explain the diverse behavior among peoples of different cultural backgrounds.

He also did considerable research in comparative and historical linguistics. A poet, an essayist, and a composer, as well as a brilliant scholar, Sapir wrote in a crisp and lucid fashion that earned him considerable literary repute.

Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

Linguistic relativity is a general term used to refer to various hypotheses or positions about the relationship between language and culture.

For Sapir, linguistic relativity was a way of articulating what he saw as the struggle between the individual and society. In order to communicate their unique experiences, individuals need to rely on a public code over which they have little control.

Sapir and Whorf's ideas about the unconscious aspects of linguistic codes continued to play an important part in the history of linguistic anthropology, and reappeared in the 1980s in the context of a number of research projects, including the study of language ideology.

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Anthropological Linguistics