Linguistic,the Subfield of Anthropology

Anthropology, Linguistic,the subfield of anthropology that attends to the place of language in all its forms in the life of human communities, past and present. Many specialists today prefer the designation linguistic anthropology, but both terms are used.

History

The leading questions of linguistic anthropology can be traced at least to the period of the Enlightenment. Johann Gottfried von Herder, in his prizewinning "Essay on the Origin of Language" (1772), explored how language came to exist, the relationship between language and thought, and the relationship between language diversity and ethnic diversity. Enlightenment scholars collected linguistic materials from all over the world, as with the compilation made for Catherine the Great by Simon Pallas. The 1791 edition of this work contained information on 272 languages. Our understanding that the diversity of human languages results from the radiation of relatively few ancient languages into many descendant forms dates also to this era, to Sir William Jones's 1786 pronouncement that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were so similar that they must have "sprung from some common source" (the language known today as Proto-Indo-European).

In the early years of the 20th century, research on Native American languages shaped the discipline. The U.S. anthropologist Franz Boas argued that investigations into the structure of language could reveal the "fundamental ethnic ideas": basic understandings about the world that shape the development of human cultures and distinguish one from another. Edward Sapir, a prolific grammarian, wrote his dissertation on the Takelma language of Oregon under Boas's direction. The breadth of Sapir's interests, including the principles of linguistic structure, the history of languages and their speakers, the social organization of linguistic variation, and the relationship between language and thought, is taken by many linguistic anthropologists today as a charter for their field.

Reflecting on the magical spells used in gardening by the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia, the Polish-born anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski realized that their language was not merely a sign of thought but a "mode of action." In his first publication on this point, in 1921, Malinowski argued that this was characteristic of "primitive" languages, but in Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), he moved to the position held by Boas and Sapir, that there are no primitive languages. Instead, language exhibits these functions in all human communities. European linguists of the Prague School focused in the 1920s and 1930s on the functional relationships between language and society, including language standardization and the development of literary language. One leader of the Prague circle, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, fled Europe for the United States in 1941, and his functionalist perspective became a major influence on American linguistic anthropology.

Methodology

Boas insisted on firsthand contact with speakers of languages, rather than the compilation of materials collected by travelers and missionaries. Both Boas and Sapir worked directly with speakers of Native American languages, often in remote communities. They devised writing systems for these languages and trained native-speaker consultants to use them, making these local experts partners in data collection. Such collaborations foreshadowed our current understanding of field research, as a dialogue between investigators from two traditions, not a one-way extraction of data by a knowing scholar from a "naive" informant. Boas, believing that the principles of a culture were fully revealed only in the local language, placed heavy emphasis on the collection of textual materials, ranging from myth cycles to recipes. While Boas, Sapir, and their students recorded language data writing on wax cylinders and wire, advances in recording technology now permit linguistic materials to be inexpensively recorded on audio or videotape, played back in the field for discussion with speakers, and archived as permanent evidence of findings. Ease of recording facilitates the use of survey methods that draw on large samples of speakers rather than on only a few key consultants. It also permits full exploitation of the ethnographic method of participant observation. Early scholars of necessity depended heavily on interviews, structured by principles emanating from the home culture of the anthropologist, not from the culture of the consultant. Portable recorders permit investigators to record language use during events that are part of the ordinary life of the community, such as rituals, legal proceedings, and interactions between caretakers and children. The ability to manipulate such recordings makes possible very fine-grained discourse analysis, now widely used by linguistic and cultural anthropologists to explore subtle details of interactional dynamics, emotional disposition, and the organization of cultural knowledge.

Fieldwork today is strongly influenced by the "ethnography of speaking," a program initiated in the 1960s by Dell H. Hymes and John Gumperz. This framework approaches the forms and uses of language as a part of culture, just like food production or religious practice, and equally susceptible to ethnographic study. An ethnographer of speaking should identify the full range of linguistic patterns and occasions and their use by the group under study, from everyday conversation to theatrical performances, philosophical discourse, and all forms of written language. Research should ideally address all languages spoken in a multilingual community, and deal with the full range of competencies among speakers.