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Concept
Anthropological linguistics
Summary
Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. While many linguists believe that a true field of anthropological linguistics is nonexistent, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, many others regard the two as interchangeable.
Although researchers studied the two fields together at various points in the nineteenth century, the intersection of anthropology and linguistics significantly grew in prominence during the early twentieth century. As American scholarship became increasingly interested in the diversity of Native American societies in the New World, anthropologists and linguists worked in conjunction to analyze Native American languages and to study how language related to the origins, distribution, and characteristics of these indigenous populations.
This interdisciplinary approach distinguished American anthropology from its European counterpart; while European anthropology largely focused on ethnography, American anthropology began to integrate linguistics and other disciplines. Anthropological linguistics initially focused largely on unwritten language, but now examines languages both with and without written traditions.
Early anthropological linguists primarily focused on three major areas: linguistic description, classification, and methodology.
Linguistic Description: Scholars such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and Mary Haas drafted descriptions of linguistic structure and the linguistic characteristics of different languages. They conducted research as fieldwork, using recordings of texts from native speakers and performing analysis to categorize the texts by linguistic form and genre.
Classification: Classification involved outlining the genetic relationships among languages. Linguistic classifications allowed anthropological linguists to organize large amounts of information about specific populations.
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