It is the study of the relations between language and culture and the
relations between human biology, cognition and language. It is a branch of
anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered
languages, and has grown over the past 100 years to encompass almost any aspect
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.
Finding a systematic way of putting down previously
unwritten languages in a way that would reflect all linguistic peculiarities
and phonetic phenomena, and explaining how people that share a culture might
speak different languages and people who have different cultures sometimes
share a language; are the task of anthropologic linguists.
As
anthropologic linguistics works on the assumption that communities’ cultures are
reflected by language change it investigates synchronic and
diachronic language change – that is it analyses various dialects and if it is
possible the historical development. Moreover, the emergence and evolution of
pidgins and creoles is also within the scope of interest of anthropologic
linguistics. What is more, language acquisition in children is also studied by
anthropolinguists, however, not the stages of language development are
examined, but how the acquisition of linguistic abilities is perceived by the
community.
The primary concern of anthropologic linguistics was with the unwritten
languages in America and their recording in order to preserve them in case the
number of speakers started to decrease drastically.
The principle of linguistic
relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which
its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view.
Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf
hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as having two
versions:
1.
The
strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories
limit and determine cognitive categories
2.
The weak
version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain
kinds of non-linguistic behavior.
The idea was
first clearly expressed by 19th century thinkers, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt,
who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. The early 20th
century school of American Anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir
also embraced the idea. Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as
the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he
perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and
behavior
During the past forty years there have been many attempts to recast the
fundamental insights of Sapir and Whorf, originally expressed in a number of
evocative and sometimes metaphorical passages similar to those just cited, in
terms sufficiently prosaic that the doctrine may be subjected to empirical
test. We do not attempt to review that literature but rather endorse Roger
Brown’s conviction that Eric Lenneberg in 1953 really said all that was
necessary (Brown 1976:128). In Brown’s summary, “Whorf appeared to put forward
two hypotheses: I Structural differences between language systems will, in
general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an
unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the two languages. The structure of
anyone’s native language strongly influences or fully determines the world-view
he will acquire as he learns the language.”
From the
late 1980s a new school of linguistic relativity scholars have examined the
effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad
support for weak versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts. Some
effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semantic domains,
although they are generally weak. Currently, a balanced view of linguistic
relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences
certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other
processes are better seen as subject to universal factors. Research is focused
on exploring the ways and extent to which language influences thought. The
principle of linguistic relativity and the relation between language and thought
has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to
psychology and anthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of
fiction and the invention of constructed languages.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
More
than any other linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he
himself called "the principle of linguistic relativity". Instead of
merely assuming that language influences the thought and behavior of its
speakers (after Humboldt and Sapir) 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 has
been criticized by various scholars in linguistics and psychology, who often
point to his 'amateur' status, thereby insinuating that he was unqualified and
could thereby be dismissed. However, his not having a degree in linguistics
cannot be taken to mean that he was linguistically incompetent.
Bibliography:
Brown K.Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics – 2nd
Edition. Oxford: Elsevier. 2005.
"anthropological linguistics." Encyclopædia
Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica
Inc., 2012. Web. 21 Mar. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/27502/anthropological-linguistics>.
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