Our linguistic anthropology class.

1. Kim Michelle Perales Ponzio
Cristina Martínez Chávez
José Alejandro Aguilar Rodríguez

2. Linguistic Anthropology
The study of
communication in It also studies the It usually refers to
cultural contexts and the relation between work on languages
linguistic analysis of human that have no written
particular (usually non- biology, cognition and records.
Indo-European) language.
languages.

3. In the United States a close
relationship between Through anthropological
anthropology and linguistics linguistic, languages are described
developed as a result of and interpreted in a certain
research by anthropologists sociocultural context, the time and
into the American Indian the geographic space.
cultures and languages.
Conventional linguistic
anthropology also has
implications for sociology and self-
organization of peoples.
This strongly overlaps the field
of linguistic anthropology which is
the branch of anthropology that
studies humans through the
languages that they use.

4. Historical development
Alessandro Duranti has noted three paradigms that
have emerged over the history of the subdiscipline.
The first known as The second, known
“anthropological as "linguistic The third
linguistics”. anthropology”. paradigm, studies
questions related
to other subfields
of anthropology
with the tools of
It engages in linguistic inquiry
Focuses on the
theoretical
documentation of
studies of
languages.
language use.

5. Problems between interlinguistic and intercultural translation
When a translator or a researcher face a language for
the first time, he would find problems with the
translation or definition of a word or term.
Intralinguistic translation Interlinguistic translation
In the second one, the
linguistic won't find an
It is used a synonymous. equivalent, so as an
interpreter, he would process
the message in the other
language.

6. Benjamin Lee Whorf
• Instead of merely assuming that language influences the
thought and behavior of its speakers he looked at Native
American languages and attempted to account for the
ways in which differences in grammatical systems and
language use affected the way their speakers perceived
the world. Whorf was also concerned with how a
scientific account of the world differed to such an extent
from a religious account, which led him to study the
languages of old religious scripture and to write several
anti-evolutionist pamphlets.

7. Among Whorf's well known examples of
linguistic relativity are examples of instances
where an indigenous language has several
terms for a concept that is only described with
one word in English and other European
languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE
"Standard Average European" to allude to the
rather similar grammatical structures of the
well-studied European languages in contrast to
the greater diversity of the less-studied
languages).
One of Whorf's examples of this was
the supposedly many words for 'snow'
in the Inuit language, which has later
been shown to be a
misrepresentation, but also for example
how the Hopi language describes water
with two different words for drinking
water in a container versus a natural
body of water.

8. These examples of polysemy served the double
purpose of showing that indigenous languages
sometimes made more fine grained semantic
distinctions than European languages and that direct
translation between two languages, even of seemingly
basic concepts like snow or water, is not always
possible.

9. Edward Sapir
Sapir's special focus among American
languages was in the Athabaskan languages, a
family which especially fascinated him. In a
private letter, he wrote: "Dene is probably the
son-of-a-bitchiest language in America to
actually know...most fascinating of all
languages ever invented.“.
Sapir also studied the languages and cultures
of Wishram
Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Paiute, Takelma, and
Yana. His research on Southern Paiute, in
collaboration with consultant Tony
Tillohash, led to a 1933 article which would
become influential in the characterization of
the phoneme.

10. Although noted for his work on American
linguistics, Sapir wrote prolifically in linguistics in
general. His book Language provides everything
from a grammar-typological classification of
languages (with examples ranging from Chinese to
Nootka) to speculation on the phenomenon
of language drift, and the arbitrariness of
associations between language, race, and culture.
Sapir was also a pioneer
in Yiddish studies in the United
States.
Sapir was active in the international
auxiliary language movement. In
his paper "The Function of an
International Auxiliary
Language", he argued for the
benefits of a regular grammar and
advocated a critical focus on the
fundamentals of
language, unbiased by the
idiosyncrasies of national
languages, in the choice of an
international auxiliary language.

11. Sapir and Worf studies
Sapir was the teacher of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who
studied with him at Yale and substitute-taught for
him during his illness. Whorf produced important
work on Hopi and developed in his own way some of
Sapir's ideas about the relation of language and
thought, resulting in the so called Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis or, in Whorf's terms, the principle of
linguistic relativity.

12. Sapir's intellectual breadth and
eclecticism, and his genius for
observing and describing in simple
and elegant fashion what at first
seem to be impossibly confusing
linguistic patterns have always
attracted graduate students, even
long after his death and in periods
in which American linguistics has
been dominated by schools
minimizing his interests.

13. He has inspired many a linguist to try
to think more widely and to delve
more deeply into their
subjects, whatever their theoretical
orientation. It is likely that his
position in American Linguistics as
one of the founding and most
intellectually prominent members of
the modern field will long remain
undiminished.

14. • Anthropological linguistics deals with
describing many languages and issues
such as the influence of language on the
behavior of the community that uses it.
The well known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is
a result of such investigations. According
to this theory the language that people use
has strong influence on the perception of
the world.

15. Therefore, anthropolinguists deal with
problems such as how it happens that peoples
sharing a culture might speak different
languages and peoples who have different
cultures sometimes share a language.