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Anthropological Linguistics

Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics (and anthropology), which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in forging and sustaining cultural practices and social structures. While many linguists believe that a true field of anthropological linguistics does not exist, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, many others regard the two terms as interchangeable.

Overview

Anthropological linguistics is one of many disciplines dedicated to the study of the role of languages in the social life of individuals and within communities. To do this, experts have had to understand not only the logic of linguistic systems – such as their grammars – but also record the activities in which those systems are used. In the 1960s and 1970s, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics were often viewed as one single field of study, but they have since become more separate as more academic distance has been put between them. Though there are many similarities and a definite sharing of topics – such as gender and language – they are two related but separate entities. Anthropological linguistics came about in the United States as a subfield of anthropology, when anthropologists were beginning to study the indigenous cultures, and the indigenous languages could no longer be ignored, and quickly morphed into the subfield of linguistics that it is known as today.

Methodology

There are two major trends in the theoretical and methodological study of attitudes in the social sciences - mentalist and behaviorist. The mentalist trend treats attitude as a mediating concept while the behaviorist trend operationally defines it as a probability concept, though in research practice both derive their attitude measures from response variation. While there are many different views concerning the structure and components of attitudes, there is, however, an overwhelming agreement that attitudes are learned, lasting, and positively related to behavior. Methodology in attitude studies includes direct and indirect measures of all kinds, but language attitude studies have tended to make more use of questionnaires than of other methods. The matched guise technique - a sociolinguistic experimental technique used to determine the true feelings of an individual or community towards a specific language, dialect, or accent - has been extensively used for studies relating to the social significance of languages and language varieties. A special adaptation of this technique, called mirror image, appears promising for measuring consensual evaluations of language switching at the situational level. Situational based self-report instruments such as those used by Greenfield and Fishman also promise to be very effective instruments for studies pertaining to normative views concerning the situational use of languages and language varieties. The commitment measure has been found to be particularly suited for collecting data on behavioral tendencies. Data obtained through interviewing may be difficult to process and score – and may provide bias from those being interviewed – but the research interview can be particularly effective for attitude assessment, especially when used to complement the observational method. Data collected through the observational method can be formally processed like data obtained through more formalized instruments if attempts are made to record the data in more public forms instead of only through the approach most characteristic for this kind of data have used so far.

Many linguists believe that comparisons of linguistic and social behavior have been blocked by the fact that linguistic and anthropological studies are rarely based on comparable sets of data. While an anthropologist’s description refers to specific communities, linguistic analysis refers to a single language or dialect, and the behaviors formed through verbal signs and structural similarities. The process of linguistic analysis is oriented towards the discovery of unitary, structurally similar wholes. The effect of these procedures is the selection of one single variety out of the many varieties that characterize everyday speech and behavior. English is often thought of as one single language, as though people forget the many dialects and accents that come with it. English spoken in the United States of America will not be the same English spoken in Australia, or in the countries of Africa. Even American English spoken in New York will not be exactly the same as American English spoken in Alabama.

Code-switching in Anthropological Linguistics

While code-switching, a situation in which a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation, is not the only form of linguistic variability to carry a social, or referential meaning, it does provide a particularly clear approach to understanding the relationship between social processes and linguistic forms, because both the social and the linguistic boundaries in question tend to be most evident than in other monolingual settings. In anthropological linguistics, code-switching has been approached as a structurally unified phenomenon whose significance comes from a universal pattern of relationships between form, function, and context. Many linguists are approaching code-switching as a form of verbal strategy, which represents the ways in which the linguistic resources available to individuals may vary according to the nature of their social boundaries within their communities. While the emphasis is on language use in social interaction as the preferred focus for examining exactly how those processes work, it is clear that future research must take into account the situation of that interaction within the specific community, or across communities. The study of code-switching will increasingly be able to contribute to an understanding of the nature of speech communities.