LINGUISTIC ANTRHOPOLOGY

Linguistic anthropology is an interdisciplinary dedicated to the study of language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice. It assumes that the human language faculty is a cognitive and a social achievement that provides the intellectual tools for thinking and acting in the world. Its study must be done by detailed documentation of what speakers say as they engage in daily social activities. This documentation relies on participant observation and other methods, including audiovisual recording, annotated transcription, and interviews with participants.

As an interdisciplinary field, linguistic anthropology has often drawn from and participated in the development of other theoretical paradigms. Some of its own history is reflected in the oscillation often found among a number of terms that are not always synonyms: linguistic anthropology, anthropological linguistics, ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Its main areas of interest have changed over the years, from an almost exclusive interest in the documentation of the grammars of aboriginal languages to the analysis of the uses of talk in everyday interaction and throughout the life.

Linguistic anthropology is the comparative study of ways in which language reflects and influences social life. It explores the many ways in which language practices define patterns of communication, formulate categories of social identity and group membership, organize large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and, in conjunction with other forms of meaning-making, equip people with common cultural representations of their natural and social worlds. Linguistic anthropology shares with anthropology in general a concern to understand power, inequality, and social change, particularly as these are constructed and represented through language and discourse.