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Language as Social Action

Linguistic anthropologists view language as a way people create and maintain cultural beliefs, relationships, and identities.

Language and Culture Influence

The interaction between language and culture is analyzed to understand how language shapes thought and influences social life.

Linguistic Choices Impact

Even subtle linguistic choices, like using specific words or grammar structures, can affect people's inferences, memories, and judgments.

Language and Social Life

Linguistic anthropology explores how language use reflects, creates, and transforms social life in various contexts.

Semiotics and Language

Linguistic anthropology considers language as part of a broader system of signs that contribute to how people make meaning and understand differences.

Ethnographic Methods

Linguistic anthropologists use ethnographic methods to study how people use language in daily life within social and historical contexts.

Non-referential Functions of Language

Linguistic anthropologists focus on how language generates meaning beyond conveying information, including through genres like folklore and humor.

Language and Identity

Language serves as a marker of identity, reflecting aspects such as gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation.

Multilingual Contexts

Studies in linguistic anthropology explore how languages and identities change in multilingual settings due to factors like colonialism and migration.

Linguistics Anthropology

Linguistic anthropologists study language as part of social life, contrasting with linguists who view language as a formal system with predefined rules.

Language and Thought

The idea that languages shape the way we see the world, think, and live our lives, leading to differences in cognitive processes.

Polyglots

Individuals who speak multiple languages and may exhibit different thinking patterns when using different languages.

Empirical Research

Recent studies conducted at Stanford University and MIT that have provided data supporting the notion that people who speak different languages think differently.

Linguistic Relativity

The concept that languages require different things from their speakers, potentially influencing how individuals attend to, partition, and remember their experiences.

Spatial Cognition

Differences in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages using absolute reference frames (e.g., Kuuk Thaayorre) and those using relative reference frames (e.g., English).

Temporal Representation

Variations in how people think about time based on their language, as demonstrated by different arrangements of temporal progression pictures by English, Hebrew, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers.

Spatial Orientation

The way individuals arrange objects or concepts in space based on their cultural and linguistic influences.

Temporal Metaphors

Different ways languages use spatial metaphors to talk about time, such as horizontal metaphors in English and vertical metaphors in Mandarin.

Duration Perception

Variances in how languages influence the perception of time duration, like English speakers focusing on length while Spanish and Greek speakers emphasize amount.

Color Perception

The impact of language on color perception, as seen in the distinctions between shades of blue for Russian and English speakers.

Grammatical Gender

The classification of nouns into genders in languages like Spanish and Russian, affecting how speakers perceive and describe objects based on gender assignments.