Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages, and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.

Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes communication, forms social identity and group membership, organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and develops a common cultural representation of natural and social worlds.

As Alessandro Duranti has noted, three paradigms have emerged over the history of the subdiscipline: the first, now known as "anthropological linguistics," focuses on the documentation of languages; the second, known as "linguistic anthropology," engages in theoretical studies of language use; the third, developed over the past two or three decades, studies questions related to other subfields of anthropology with the tools of linguistic inquiry. Though they developed sequentially, all three paradigms are still practised today.

The first paradigm was originally called linguistics, but as it and its surrounding fields of study matured, it came to be called anthropological linguistics. The field was devoted to themes unique to the subdiscipline: linguistic documentation of languages that were then seen as doomed to extinction (they were the languages of native North America on which the first members of the subdiscipline focused). The themes included:

Humboldt's philosophy holds an important place in recent work produced in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe.

Dell Hymes was largely responsible for launching the second paradigm, which fixed the name linguistic anthropology in the 1960s, though he also coined the term ethnography of speaking (or ethnography of communication) to describe the agenda he envisioned for the field. It would involve taking advantage of new developments in technology, including new forms of mechanical recording.

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