The study of language variation and use in relation to the cultural patterns and beliefs of speech communities. It frequently examines linguistic evidence for allegiance to religious, occupational, or kinship groups.
Anthropological linguistics is the study of language through human genetics and human development. This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.
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 surroundings. 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".
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 the study of linguistic divergence and language families, comparative linguistics, etymology, and philology.Recent work
Mark Fettes, in Steps Towards an Ecology of Language (1996), sought "a theory of language ecology which can integrate naturalist and critical traditions"; and in An Ecological Approach to Language Renewal (1997), sought to approach a transformative ecology via a more active, perhaps designed, set of tools in language.
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