Anthropological linguistics |
Anthropological linguistics is the study of language through human genetics and human development . This strongly overlaps the field of
linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies of 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 environment.
Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and
self-organization of peoples. Study of the Penan people, for instance, reveals that they have six
different and distinct words for "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
David Nettle, in Linguistic Diversity
(1998), notes "the amazing fact that the map of language density in the world is the same as the map of species diversity: i.e.
where there are more species per unit of area, there will be more languages too." Thus to increase linguistic adaptation and
respect for diversity may also be to conserve habitat and increase biodiversity.
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
External links
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