Anthropological linguistics
From Encyclopædia
anthropological linguistics
Anthropological
linguistics is the study of natural human
languages--whether written or unwritten, contemporary or historical--as an intrinsic part of the general study of human culture and society. A traditional branch of
anthropology, it also includes three subareas:
psycholinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and SOCIOLINGUISTICS. Unlike the formal and deductive approaches to the study of
language in general inaugurated by Noam CHOMSKY, anthropological study of
languages primarily describes the observable behaviors of
speech communities from an inductive approach. Anthropological linguists also investigate
primate systems of
communication, sign
languages of the deaf,
language acquisition by children,
pidgin and
creole languages, the creation of national
languages, bilingualism and dialects, oral
literature of preliterate peoples, and ethnographic texts of all kinds.Early StudiesColonial expansion in the 19th century resulted in an
interest in describing all that was found in lands new to white Europeans, whether in Russian-occupied
Asia, Spanish Colonial
America, or American-occupied North
America. The
interest in mapping and understanding the unfamiliar territories included an attempt to describe the peoples encountered there, particularly their cultures and
languages.Until 100 years ago anthropological
linguistics in the
United States and
Russia was, strictly speaking, a branch of
ethnography and
anthropology. The foundations for modern anthropological
linguistics were, however, being established. The attempt to discover general truths about people--their psychologies, native views of the
world, and
languages--became the concern of scholars in a variety of fields, including
anthropology and
linguistics. They hoped to account for the diversity of human beings in all their cultural types. They hoped also to amplify the understanding of humanity by concentrating scientific
attention on that supremely human ability--articulate
speech.Later DevelopmentsAnthropologists had studied
language competence and
speech behavior with emphasis on these abilities as part of the
science of humankind. Anthropological linguists focused on the way in which the various forms of human
language behavior dramatically reflect both human diversity and commonality in order to explore the range of potentialities and variations within the species.
attention continued to be concentrated upon the
languages of peoples maximally different from the Europeans. Emphasis was on the mental qualities and psychological variation reflected in the unwritten
languages of the peoples in newly settled lands--a significant study because most of the
languages of the
world were unwritten.Distinguished Russian linguists such as Roman JAKOBSON and Nikolai Trubetskoy began by studying the
ethnography and
literature of non-Russians living within the tsarist Russian empire. In the
United States, the Geological Survey, at first part of the government's attempt to map the newly acquired territories of the
Louisiana Purchase and the West, collected word lists of the
languages of the indigenous population.After the Civil War in the
United States, a significant contribution was made by John Wesley POWELL at the Bureau of American Ethnology. He developed a classification of the
languages of all North
America north of
Mexico, showing that, of the hundreds of
languages and dialects, only 55
language families, each descendant from a common parent
language, existed north of
Mexico. This classification was essentially correct, although later studies have shown additional genetic relationships. Most scholars now believe that ten large
language families existed there, as well as a
number of individual
languages of unknown ancestry.The Twentieth CenturyLike Powell,
Americans such as Franz BOAS (the father of American
anthropology) and his student Edward SAPIR undertook the study of customs,
folklore,
speech behavior, and
language categories. They examined the grammatical structures and historical relationships of the native
languages of the
United States, including traditional oral
literatures that were transmitted by native speakers from
memory. One significant result of the studies of American Indian
languages was the hypothesis developed by
Benjamin Lee WHORF in association with Sapir. This theory states that
language structures affect the speakers'
perceptions and that
grammar and ideas are therefore interrelated.In the 20th century, anthropological linguists began to employ the results of earlier studies in an attempt to discover shared, universal, invariant characteristics of human thought and
language by studying the unwritten
languages of decreasing populations before their
languages became extinct. The objective was to record, and thus preserve, the
languages of these hundreds of societies, lest their unusual testimony to the range of human variation and commonality be lost.Since the turn of the century, the methods of anthropological linguists have been further developed and expanded. The range of the studies has been extended to include
languages in other areas of the
world, and the techniques and theories used have greatly profited from the advances in general
linguistics. Outstanding anthropological linguists such as Leonard BLOOMFIELD and Sapir combined their knowledge of general
linguistics--a
science based on centuries of study of written
languages--with the anthropological view that unwritten
languages are equally significant. This combination of expertise, derived from philological studies of written
languages plus the view of
language as a part of culture, forms the intellectual basis for the anthropological view in linguistic studies. This view of
language as part of culture and separable from the rest of culture, in the way it can be studied, is uniquely anthropological.General linguistic studies of recent decades have been concentrated mostly on the supposedly genetically inherited human ability for
language and on the mental rules shared by members of a
speech community, called "competence." Studies in linguistic
anthropology have, on the other
hand, been concentrated rather on the "performances,"
speech acts that manifest that supposedly innate competence. The result has been the broadening of anthropological studies to serve as a check on theory by confronting theories with diverse behavioral data. Anthropological linguists have also, as a result, come to
stress language functions in contr?st to the exclusive study of structure. Structuralist-derived models (see
STRUCTURALISM), however, are now used in the interpretation of ethnographic materials and literary texts and in other SEMIOTIC investigations.Harvey PitkinBibliography: Bloomfield, L.,
language (1963; repr. 1984); Bolinger, D., and Sears, D. A., Aspects of
language (1981); Burling, R., Man's Many Voices (1970); Carroll, J. B.,
language and Thought (1964); Fishman, J. A., Sociolinguistics (1970); Hoijer, H., ed.,
language in Culture (1954); Hymes, D., ed.,
language in Culture and Society (1964); Sapir, E., Selected Writings, ed. by D. G. Mandelbaum (1949; repr. 1985).
