Anthropological linguistics

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. 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. Anthropological linguistics is one of many disciplines which studies the role of languages in the social lives of individuals and within communities. To do this, experts have had to understand not only the logic behind linguistic systems – such as their grammars – but also record the activities in which those systems are used. In the 1960s and 1970s, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics were often viewed as one single field of study, but they have since become more separate as more academic distance has been put between them. Though there are many similarities and a definite sharing of topics – such as gender and language – they are two related but separate entities. Anthropological linguistics came about in the United States as a subfield of anthropology, when anthropologists were beginning to study the indigenous cultures, and the indigenous languages could no longer be ignored, and quickly morphed into the subfield of linguistics that it is known as today. Anthropological linguistics has had a major impact in the studies of such areas as 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 whose best English translation is 'we'. Anthropological linguistics studies these distinctions, and relates them to types of societies 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'.