Linguistic Anthropology

Kim Michelle Perales PonzioCristina Martínez Chávez

José Alejandro Aguilar Rodríguez

Linguistic Anthropology

The study of communication in

cultural contexts and the linguistic analysis of particular (usually non-Indo-European)

languages.

It also studies the relation between human biology, cognition and

language.

It usually refers to work on languages

that have no written records.

In the United States a close relationship between anthropology and linguistics developed as a result of research by anthropologists into the American Indian cultures and languages. 

Through anthropological linguistic, languages are described and interpreted in a certain sociocultural context, the time and the geographic space.

This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and self- organization of peoples.

Historical development

Alessandro Duranti has noted three paradigms that have emerged over the history of the subdiscipline.

The first known as “anthropological

linguistics”.

The second, known as "linguistic

anthropology”.

The third paradigm,

studies questions

related to other subfields of

anthropology with the tools of

linguistic inquiry

Focuses on the documentation of languages.

It engages in theoretical studies of

language use.  

Problems between interlinguistic and intercultural translation

When a translator or a researcher face a language for the first time, he would find

problems with the translation or definition of a word or term.

Intralinguistic translation Interlinguistic translation

It is used a synonymous.

In the second one, the linguistic won't find an

equivalent, so as an interpreter, he would

process the message in the other language.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

• Instead of merely assuming that language influences the thought and behavior of its speakers he looked at Native American languages and attempted to account for the ways in which differences in grammatical systems and language use affected the way their speakers perceived the world. Whorf was also concerned with how a scientific account of the world differed to such an extent from a religious account, which led him to study the languages of old religious scripture and to write several anti-evolutionist pamphlets.

Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances

where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with

one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE

"Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the

well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied

languages).

One of Whorf's examples of this was the supposedly many words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, which has later

been shown to be a misrepresentation, but also for example how the Hopi language describes water

with two different words for drinking water in a container versus a natural

body of water.

These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always possible.

Edward Sapir

Sapir's special focus among American languages was in the Athabaskan languages, a family which especially fascinated him. In a private letter, he wrote: "Dene is probably the son-of-a-bitchiest language in America to actually know...most fascinating of all languages ever invented.“.Sapir also studied the languages and cultures of Wishram Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Paiute, Takelma, and Yana. His research on Southern Paiute, in collaboration with consultant Tony Tillohash, led to a 1933 article which would become influential in the characterization of the phoneme.

Although noted for his work on American linguistics, Sapir wrote prolifically in linguistics in general. His

book Language provides everything from a grammar-typological classification of languages (with

examples ranging from Chinese to Nootka) to speculation on the phenomenon of language drift,

and the arbitrariness of associations between language, race, and culture.

Sapir was also a pioneer in Yiddish studies in the United States.Sapir was active in the international auxiliary language movement. In his paper "The Function of an International Auxiliary Language", he argued for the benefits of a regular grammar and advocated a critical focus on the fundamentals of language, unbiased by the idiosyncrasies of national languages, in the choice of an international auxiliary language.

Sapir and Worf studies

Sapir was the teacher of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied with him at Yale and substitute-taught for him during his illness. Whorf produced important work on Hopi and developed in his own way some of Sapir's ideas about the relation of language and thought, resulting in the so called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or, in Whorf's terms, the principle of linguistic relativity.

Sapir's intellectual breadth and eclecticism, and his genius for observing and describing in simple and elegant fashion what at first seem to be impossibly confusing linguistic patterns have always attracted graduate students, even long after his death and in periods in which American linguistics has been dominated by schools minimizing his interests.

He has inspired many a linguist to try to think more widely and to delve more deeply into their subjects, whatever their theoretical orientation. It is likely that his position in American Linguistics as one of the founding and most intellectually prominent members of the modern field will long remain undiminished.

• Anthropological linguistics deals with describing many languages and issues such as the influence of language on the behavior of the community that uses it. The well known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a result of such investigations. According to this theory the language that people use has strong influence on the perception of the world.

Therefore, anthropolinguists deal with problems such as how it happens that peoples sharing a culture might speak different languages and peoples who have different cultures sometimes share a language.