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.
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