Home > Anthropological linguistics

Whatever one calls it, this field has had a major impact in the studies of visual perception (especially colour) and bioregional democracy, both of which are concerned with distinctions that are made in languages about perceptions of the environment.

Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and self-organization of peoples. Study of the Penan people, for instance, reveals that they have six different and distinct words for " we" — which may imply a more detailed understanding of co-operation, consensus and consensus decision-making than English. Anthropological linguistics studies these distinctions, and relates them to lifeways and to actual bodily adaptation to the senses, much as it studies distinctions made in languages regarding the colours of the rainbow: seeing the tendency to increase the diversity of terms, as evidence that there are distinctions that bodies in this environment must make, leading to situated knowledge and perhaps a situated ethics, whose final evidence is the differentiated set of terms used to denote "we".

1 Related fields

Anthropological linguistics is concerned with

• Descriptive (or synchronic) linguistics Describing dialects (forms of a language used by a specific speech community). this study includes phonology, morphology, syntaxThe first meaning of the term syntax originating from the Greek words (sun, meaning ‘together’) and (taxis, meaning sequence/order), can be described as the study of the rules, or "patterned relations" that govern the way the words in a sentence come toge, semanticsIn general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos or "significant meaning," derived from sema sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. Semantics is often opposed to syntax, in which case the former pertains to what something means while t, and grammarThis article is about grammar from a linguistic perspective. For English grammar rules see English writing style According to the structuralist point of view, grammar is the study of the rules governing the use of a language. That set of rules is also cal.
• Historical (or diachronic) linguisticsHistorical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics is primarily the study of languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax. Historical linguistics aims to classify Describing changes in dialects and languages over time. This study includes the study of linguistic divergence and language familiesLanguages Most languages are known to belong to language families ("families" hereforth). An accurately identified family is a phylogenetic unit, i. all its members derive from a common ancestor. The ancestor is very seldom known to us directly, since mos, comparative linguisticsThe comparative method (in linguistics) is a method used to detecting genetic relationships between languages and to establish a consistent relationship hypothesis by reconstructing: the common ancestor of the languages in question, a plausible sequence o, etymologyEtymology is the study of the origins of words. Some words have been derived from other languages, possibly in a changed form (the source words are called etymons . Through old texts and comparisons with other languages, etymologists try to reconstruct th, and philologyPhilology is the study of ancient texts and languages. The term originally meant a love ( Greek philo of learning and literature (Greek logia . Philology was one of the 19th century's first scientific approaches to human language but gave way to the moder.
• Ethnolinguistics Analyzing the relationship between culture, thought, and language.
• Sociolinguistics Analyzing the social functions of language and the social, political, and economic relationships among and between members of speech communities.