Linguistic anthropology

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Linguistic anthropology is the

language structure and use.[1]

Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes communication, forms social identity and group membership, organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and

Historical development

Linguistic anthropology emerged from the development of three distinct paradigms that have set the standard for approaching linguistic anthropology. The first, now known as "anthropological linguistics," focuses on the documentation of languages. The second, known as "linguistic anthropology," engages in theoretical studies of language use. The third, developed over the past two or three decades, studies issues from other subfields of anthropology with linguistic considerations. Though they developed sequentially, all three paradigms are still practiced today.[3]

First paradigm: anthropological linguistics

The first paradigm, anthropological linguistics, is devoted to themes unique to the sub-discipline. This area includes documentation of languages that have been seen as at-risk for extinction, with a particular focus on indigenous languages of native North American tribes. It is also the paradigm most focused on linguistics.[3] Linguistic themes include the following:

Second paradigm: linguistic anthropology

The second paradigm can be marked by reversing the words. Going from anthropological linguistics to linguistic anthropology, signals a more anthropological focus on the study. This term was preferred by

John Gumperz, for the idea of ethnography of communication. The term linguistic anthropology reflected Hymes' vision of a future where language would be studied in the context of the situation and relative to the community speaking it.[3]
This new era would involve many new technological developments, such as mechanical recording.

This paradigm developed in critical dialogue with the fields of folklore on the one hand and linguistics on the other. Hymes criticized folklorists' fixation on oral texts rather than the verbal artistry of performance.[4] At the same time, he criticized the cognitivist shift in linguistics heralded by the pioneering work of Noam Chomsky, arguing for an ethnographic focus on language in use.

Hymes had many revolutionary contributions to linguistic anthropology, the first of which was a new unit of analysis. Unlike the first paradigm, which focused on linguistic tools like measuring of phonemes and morphemes, the second paradigm's unit of analysis was the "speech event". A speech event is defined as one with speech presented for a significant duration throughout its occurrence (ex., a lecture or debate). This is different from a speech situation, where speech could possibly occur (ex., dinner). Hymes also pioneered a linguistic anthropological approach to ethnopoetics. Hymes had hoped that this paradigm would link linguistic anthropology more to anthropology. However, Hymes' ambition backfired as the second paradigm marked a distancing of the sub-discipline from the rest of anthropology.[5][6]

Third paradigm: anthropological issues studied via linguistic methods and data

The third paradigm, which began in the late 1980s, redirected the primary focus on anthropology by providing a linguistic approach to anthropological issues. Rather than prioritizing the technical components of language, third paradigm anthropologists focus on studying culture through the use of linguistic tools. Themes include:

Furthermore, similar to how the second paradigm used new technology in its studies, the third paradigm heavily includes use of video documentation to support research.[3]

Areas of interest

Contemporary linguistic anthropology continues research in all three paradigms described above:

  1. Documentation of languages
  2. Study of language through context
  3. The study of identity through linguistic means

The third paradigm, the study of anthropological issues through linguistic means, is an affluent area of study for current linguistic anthropologists.

Identity and intersubjectivity

A great deal of work in linguistic anthropology investigates questions of sociocultural

Taiap language is associated with one identity: not only local but "Backward" and also an identity based on the display of hed (personal autonomy). To speak Tok Pisin is to index a modern, Catholic identity, based not on hed but on save, an identity linked with the will and the skill to cooperate. In later work, Kulick demonstrates that certain loud speech performances in Brazil called um escândalo, Brazilian travesti (roughly, 'transvestite') sex workers shame clients. The travesti community, the argument goes, ends up at least making a powerful attempt to transcend the shame the larger Brazilian public might try to foist off on them, again by loud public discourse and other modes of performance.[9]

In addition, scholars such as Émile Benveniste,[10] Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall[11] Benjamin Lee,[12] Paul Kockelman,[13] and Stanton Wortham[14] (among many others) have contributed to understandings of identity as "intersubjectivity" by examining the ways it is discursively constructed.

Socialization

In a series of studies, linguistic anthropologists

universal
, that the direction of adaptation (whether the child is made to adapt to the ongoing situation of speech around it or vice versa) was a variable that correlated, for example, with the direction it was held vis-à-vis a caregiver's body. In many societies caregivers hold a child facing outward so as to orient it to a network of kin whom it must learn to recognize early in life.

Ochs and Schieffelin demonstrated that members of all societies socialize children both to and through the use of language. Ochs and Schieffelin uncovered how, through naturally occurring stories told during dinners in white middle class households in Southern California, both mothers and fathers participated in replicating male dominance (the "father knows best" syndrome) by the distribution of participant roles such as protagonist (often a child but sometimes mother and almost never the father) and "problematizer" (often the father, who raised uncomfortable questions or challenged the competence of the protagonist). When mothers collaborated with children to get their stories told, they unwittingly set themselves up to be subject to this process.

Schieffelin's more recent research has uncovered the socializing role of

epistemic markers[16]—and new ways of speaking about time.[18] And they have struggled with and largely resisted those parts of the Bible that speak of being able to know the inner states of others (e.g. the gospel of Mark, chapter 2, verses 6–8).[19]

Ideologies

In a third example of the current (third) paradigm, since

thee" and "thou" from everyday English usage.[22] Woolard, in her overview of "code switching", or the systematic practice of alternating linguistic varieties within a conversation or even a single utterance, finds the underlying question anthropologists ask of the practice—Why do they do that?—reflects a dominant linguistic ideology. It is the ideology that people should "really" be monoglot and efficiently targeted toward referential clarity rather than diverting themselves with the messiness of multiple varieties in play at a single time.[23]

Much research on linguistic ideologies probes subtler influences on language, such as the pull exerted on Tewa, a Kiowa-Tanoan language spoken in certain New Mexican pueblos and on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, by "kiva speech", discussed in the next section.[24]

Other linguists have carried out research in the areas of

English as a global language'. For instance, Indian linguist Braj Kachru investigated local varieties of English in South Asia, the ways in which English functions as a lingua franca among multicultural groups in India.[25] British linguist David Crystal has contributed to investigations of language death attention to the effects of cultural assimilation resulting in the spread of one dominant language in situations of colonialism.[26]

Heritage language ideologies

More recently, a new line of ideology work is beginning to enter the field of linguistics in relation to heritage languages. Specifically, applied linguist Martin Guardado has posited that heritage language ideologies are "somewhat fluid sets of understandings, justifications, beliefs, and judgments that linguistic minorities hold about their languages."[27] Guardado goes on to argue that ideologies of heritage languages also contain the expectations and desires of linguistic minority families "regarding the relevance of these languages in their children’s lives as well as when, where, how, and to what ends these languages should be used." Although this is arguably a fledgling line of language ideology research, this work is poised to contribute to the understanding of how ideologies of language operate in a variety of settings.

Social space

In a final example of this third paradigm, a group of linguistic anthropologists have done very creative work on the idea of social space. Duranti published a groundbreaking article on

Paul Kroskrity's argument that speech forms originating in the Tewa kiva
(or underground ceremonial space) forms the dominant model for all Tewa speech can be seen as a direct parallel.

Silverstein tries to find the maximum theoretical significance and applicability in this idea of exemplary centers. He feels, in fact, that the exemplary center idea is one of linguistic anthropology's three most important findings. He generalizes the notion thus, arguing "there are wider-scale institutional 'orders of interactionality,' historically contingent yet structured. Within such large-scale, macrosocial orders, in-effect

magic of textual and nontextual metricalizations, synchronized."[30][31]

Race, class, and gender

Addressing the broad central concerns of the subfield and drawing from its core theories, many scholars focus on the intersections of language and the particularly salient social constructs of race (and ethnicity), class, and gender (and sexuality). These works generally consider the roles of social structures (e.g., ideologies and institutions) related to race, class, and gender (e.g., marriage, labor, pop culture, education) in terms of their constructions and in terms of individuals' lived experiences. A short list of linguistic anthropological texts that address these topics follows:

Race and ethnicity

  • Alim, H. Samy, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball. 2016. Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race. Oxford University Press.
  • .
  • Bucholtz, Mary. 2010. White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity. Cambridge University Press.
  • Davis, Jenny L. 2018. Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance. University of Arizona Press.
  • Dick, H. 2011. "Making Immigrants Illegal in Small-Town USA." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 21(S1):E35-E55.
  • Hill, Jane H. 1998. "Language, Race, and White Public Space." American Anthropologist 100 (3): 680–89. .
  • Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • García-Sánchez, Inmaculada M. 2014. Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics of Belonging. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Ibrahim, Awad. 2014. The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming. 1 edition. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
  • Rosa, Jonathan. 2019. Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press.
  • Smalls, Krystal. 2018. "Fighting Words: Antiblackness and Discursive Violence in an American High School." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 23(3):356-383.
  • Spears, Arthur Kean. 1999. Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture. Wayne State University Press.
  • Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2013. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Waveland Press.
  • Wirtz, Kristina. 2011. "Cuban Performances of Blackness as the Timeless Past Still Among Us." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 21(S1):E11-E34.

Class

  • Fox, Aaron A. 2004. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Duke University Press.
  • Shankar, Shalini. 2008. Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley. Duke University Press.
  • Nakassis, Constantine V. 2016. Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India. University of Chicago Press.

Gender and sexuality

Ethnopoetics

Ethnopoetics is a method of recording text versions of oral poetry or narrative performances (i.e. verbal lore) that uses poetic lines, verses, and stanzas (instead of prose paragraphs) to capture the formal, poetic performance elements which would otherwise be lost in the written texts. The goal of any ethnopoetic text is to show how the techniques of unique oral performers enhance the aesthetic value of their performances within their specific cultural contexts. Major contributors to ethnopoetic theory include Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Tedlock, and Dell Hymes. Ethnopoetics is considered a subfield of ethnology, anthropology, folkloristics, stylistics, linguistics, and literature and translation studies.

Endangered languages: language documentation and revitalization

Endangered languages are languages that are not being passed down to children as their mother tongue or that have declining numbers of speakers for a variety of reasons. Therefore, after a couple generations these languages may no longer be spoken.[32] Anthropologists have been involved with endangered language communities through their involvement in language documentation and revitalization projects.

In a language documentation project, researchers work to develop records of the language - these records could be field notes and audio or video recordings. To follow best practices of documentation, these records should be clearly annotated and kept safe within an archive of some kind. Franz Boas was one of the first anthropologists involved in language documentation within North America and he supported the development of three key materials: 1) grammars, 2) texts, and 3) dictionaries. This is now known as the Boasian Trilogy.[33]

Language revitalization is the practice of bringing a language back into common use. The revitalization efforts can take the form of teaching the language to new speakers or encouraging the continued use within the community.[34] One example of a language revitalization project is the Lenape language course taught at Swathmore College, Pennsylvania. The course aims to educate indigenous and non-indigenous students about the Lenape language and culture.[35]

Language reclamation, as a subset of revitalization, implies that a language has been taken away from a community and addresses their concern in taking back the agency to revitalize their language on their own terms. Language reclamation addresses the power dynamics associated with language loss. Encouraging those who already know the language to use it, increasing the domains of usage, and increasing the overall prestige of the language are all components of reclamation. One example of this is the Miami language being brought back from 'extinct' status through extensive archives.[36]

While the field of linguistics has also been focused on the study of the linguistic structures of endangered languages, anthropologists also contribute to this field through their emphasize on ethnographic understandings of the socio-historical context of language endangerment, but also of language revitalization and reclamation projects.[37]

See also

References

  1. ^ Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), 2004: Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  2. ^ Society for Linguistic Anthropology. n.d. About the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (accessed 7 July 2010).
  3. ^ a b c d Duranti, Alessandro. 2003. Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms. Current Anthropology 44(3):323–348.
  4. JSTOR 539732
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  6. ^ Hymes, Dell. 1981 [1975] Breakthrough into Performance. In In Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. D. Hymes, ed. Pp. 79–141. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  7. ^ Kulick, Don. 1992. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinea Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  8. ^ Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. In Meaning in Anthropology. K. Basso and H.A. Selby, eds. Pp. 11–56. Albuquerque: School of American Research, University of New Mexico Press.
  9. ^ Kulick, Don, and Charles H. Klein. 2003. Scandalous Acts: The Politics of Shame among Brazilian Travesti Prostitutes. In Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power. B. Hobson, ed. Pp. 215–238. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  10. ^ Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in general linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press.
  11. ^ Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. 2005. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.
  12. ^ Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press.
  13. ^ Kockelman, Paul. 2004. Stance and Subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14(2), 127–150.
  14. ^ Wortham, Stanton. 2006. Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press.
  15. ^ Ochs, Elinor. 1988. Culture and language development: Language acquisition and language socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi Schieffelin. 1984. Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications. In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. R. Shweder and R.A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 276–320. New York: Cambridge University.
    • Ochs, Elinor, and Carolyn Taylor. 2001. The “Father Knows Best” Dynamic in Dinnertime Narratives. In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader. A. Duranti, ed. Pp. 431–449. Oxford. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
    • Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990. The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  16. ^ a b Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1995. Creating evidence: Making sense of written words in Bosavi. Pragmatics 5(2):225–244.
  17. ^ Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2000. Introducing Kaluli Literacy: A Chronology of Influences. In Regimes of Language. P. Kroskrity, ed. Pp. 293–327. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
  18. ^ a b Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2002. Marking time: The dichotomizing discourse of multiple temporalities. Current Anthropology 43(Supplement):S5-17.
  19. ^ a b Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2006. PLENARY ADDRESS: Found in translating: Reflexive language across time and texts in Bosavi, PNG. Twelve Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006.
  20. ^ Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology. In The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels. R. Cline, W. Hanks, and C. Hofbauer, eds. Pp. 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
  21. .
  22. ^ Silverstein, Michael. 1985. Language and the Culture of Gender: At the Intersection of Structure, Usage, and Ideology. In Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives. E. Mertz and R. Parmentier, eds. Pp. 219–259. Orlando: Academic Press.
  23. ^ Woolard, Kathryn A. 2004. Codeswitching. In Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. A. Duranti, ed. Pp. 73–94. Malden: Blackwell.
  24. ^ Kroskrity, Paul V. 1998. Arizona Tewa Kiva Speech as a Manifestation of Linguistic Ideology. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard, and P. Kroskrity, eds. Pp. 103–122. New York: Oxford University Press.
  25. .
  26. .
  27. ^ Guardado, Martin. 2018. " Discourse, Ideology and Heritage Language Socialization: Micro and Macro Perspectives. New York & Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
  28. .
  29. ^ Errington, J. Joseph. 1988. Structure and Style in Javanese: A Semiotic View of Linguistic Etiquette. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
  30. ^ a b Silverstein, Michael. 2004. "'Cultural' Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus." Current Anthropology 45(5):621–652.
  31. ^ Wilce, James M. 2006. Magical Laments and Anthropological Reflections: The Production and Circulation of Anthropological Text as Ritual Activity. Current Anthropology. 47(6):891–914.
  32. OCLC 939637358.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
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  33. , retrieved 2019-10-08
  34. .
  35. .
  36. OCLC 769275666.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link
    )

Further reading

  • Ahearn, Laura M. 2011. Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Blount, Ben G. ed. 1995. Language, Culture, and Society: A Book of Readings. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
  • Bonvillain, Nancy. 1993. Language, culture, and communication: The meaning of messages. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
  • Brenneis, Donald; and Ronald K. S. Macaulay. 1996. The matrix of language: Contemporary linguistic anthropology. Boulder: Westview.
  • Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Duranti, Alessandro. ed. 2001. Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  • Giglioli, Pier Paolo. 1972. Language and social context: Selected readings. Middlesex: Penguin Books.
  • Salzmann, Zdenek, James Stanlaw and Nobuko Adachi. 2012. Language, culture, & society. Westview Press.

External links

The Jurgen Trabant Wilhelm von Humboldt Lectures (7hrs)