Anthropological linguistics  

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Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language. This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use. Early anthropological linguists primarily focused on three major areas: linguistic description, classification, and methodology.

• Linguistic Description: Scholars such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and Mary Haas drafted descriptions of linguistic structure and the linguistic characteristics of different languages. They conducted research as fieldwork, using recordings of texts from native speakers and performing analysis to categorize the texts by linguistic form and genre.
• Classification: Classification involved outlining the genetic relationships among languages. Linguistic classifications allowed anthropological linguists to organize large amounts of information about specific populations. By classifying language, scholars could systematize and order data from their ethnographic work.
• Methodology: By analytically breaking down language, anthropological linguistics could use the constituent parts to derive social and cultural information. It also made pattern-identification possible, with Boas and Sapir using these procedures to show that linguistic patterning was unrealized among speakers of a given language.

See also

• Linguistic relativity
• Linguistic anthropology
• Gender role in language
• Sociolinguistics
• Sociology of language
• World Oral Literature Project
• Semiotic anthropology