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Linguistic anthropologists regard language as a form of social action. In other words, we explore how language is one of the ways people create and sustain cultural beliefs, relationships, and identities. As a means of expression and an expressive practice, language fashions most aspects of the human experience—from the pronouns we use to the political rhetoric we hear. Because language and culture influence one another, linguistic anthropologists analyze grammatical forms and communicative practices to understand how language shapes thought. Even subtle linguistic choices—such as the decision to put a “the” in front of a word—can shape people’s inferences, memories, and judgments. The ways people use and learn language in everyday contexts also significantly impacts creativity, perception, and cognition. Linguistic anthropology further asks how language use reflects, creates, and transforms social life across diverse settings. People hold beliefs and ideas or make statements about language that reflect their values, norms, and political stances. Language is thus a reflexive tool for commenting on and guiding social and political ideologies. Studying communicative styles and beliefs about language helps characterize the power structures and inequalities operating in a society. Finally, linguistic anthropology investigates how linguistic and other signs, like clothing and makeup, inform our beliefs, ways of communicating, and classificatory systems. This field, referred to as semiotics, views language not as distinctly separate from other cultural phenomena but as contributing to how people make meaning and understand differences. Linguistic anthropology is one of anthropology’s four major fields. Linguistic anthropologists may be also trained as cultural anthropologists, and cover similarly wide-ranging topics, including race, gender, politics, economics, the climate and environment, media, health, law, and conflict. The field of linguistic anthropology also shares certain theories, methods, and topics with select fields in linguistics (the broader discipline that includes all aspects of language). In turn, like linguistic anthropologists, some linguists investigate language use in context, including how language varies in a community or changes over relatively brief time periods. Linguistic anthropology is nonetheless a distinct field. A trademark feature is that linguistic anthropologists use ethnographic methods to study how people use language in daily life. Furthermore, linguistic anthropologists take a holistic view of language as shaped by and shaping institutions, networks, and social relations. This means they see language as part of the larger social and historical context that surrounds it. HOW DO LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGISTS STUDY LANGUAGE? Language often operates at an unconscious level to influence our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. To participate competently in society, people cannot be too self-conscious about the use of language in everyday life. But those aspects of language about which people are least aware have the greatest impact on how people perceive the world. Thus, linguistic anthropologists draw on different methodological techniques to analyze the conventions and patterns embedded in and across speech, writing, sign language, gesture, and bodily movement. They consider how grammar, language use, and people’s beliefs and ideas about language interact. Linguistic anthropologists typically use ethnographic methods to participate in and observe communicative styles and social interactions. These methods rely on documentation, through writing fieldnotes and/or using audio or film to record language use in practice. Some linguistic anthropologists may interview people to find out more about how their practices and beliefs around language shape politics and society. Other linguistic anthropologists design experiments or use computational methods to evaluate how grammatical forms or writing systems reflect and influence human cognition and thought. Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. Like cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology is mainly concerned with present-day phenomena, though some linguistic anthropologists also rely on archival methods to investigate how contemporary sociolinguistic forms have or appear to have changed historically. Some also conduct longitudinal studies to look at the socialization of language over time. Socialization refers to how novices use spoken language, sign language, and homesigns (gestural systems with language-like structures) to acquire cultural and communicative competence. These studies examine how identities and languages are reproduced over people’s lifespans. Some linguistic anthropologists also study virtual worlds and digital spaces to understand how new media, information, and communication technologies impact the way people communicate and use language. That may include looking at how people use social media platforms, smartphones, or virtual meeting platforms. WHAT SUBJECTS DO LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGISTS STUDY? Linguistic anthropologists cover a wide range of subjects, but what unites these studies is a recognition that communication has multiple functions and aspects. Oral, written, and sign languages do more than simply name and describe objects, actions, or concepts. Linguistic anthropologists are most interested in non-referential functions, or the functions that reveal how language generates meaning in context beyond merely conveying information. They may, for instance, examine how language is culturally organized into genres such as folklore, myth, humor, gossip, oratory, narrative, et cetera. Linguistic anthropologists also study how verbal art is poetry. Analyses of storytelling practices and ritual performances, sometimes accompanied by music, demonstrate that language is both formulaic and creative. Many linguistic anthropologists are keenly interested in how language is related to identity. Language forms and practices act as markers of gender, ethnicity, religion, race, class, age, and sexual orientation. Linguistic anthropologists examine how identities are performed through language and how, in turn, language can challenge established categories of identities, such as female and male. These studies view identity as a creative construction and site of contestation, rather than seeing it as static and fixed. Other studies focus on multilingual contexts to understand how a language and its users change as they come into contact with other languages, through colonialism, migration, or other forms of global exchanges. Often, people’s attitudes and identities play an influential role in determining how they shift from using one language to another. The examples of “code-switching” and “translanguaging” and the development of various creole and pidgin languages around the world reveal the complex ways some individuals combine and move between multiple language systems. Research on multilingualism suggests that most human communities are and have always been linguistically diverse. Some linguistic anthropologists investigate how powerful institutions, including nation-states, connect language with nationalism. Some nation-states endorse the belief that national unity relies on the use of one standard language, while others adopt multilingual policies. These studies often reveal how educational, legal, and medical institutions undergird inequalities by enacting policies and enforcing standard definitions of “proper” language across diverse populations. Some studies instead highlight people’s agency in challenging inequalities through the use of language. Many linguistic anthropologists work with members of minority language communities to describe and analyze their experiences of belonging. Some compare how children learn and use heritage languages and dominant languages in schools, at home, or other settings. Others document how languages change due to intergenerational shifts in language learning and use. Some linguistic anthropologists also work alongside community leaders and/or collaborate with government officials and other researchers to reclaim endangered languages. To assist in language documentation, linguistic anthropologists often work collaboratively with local experts to record stories and Oral Traditions that are important to specific communities of speakers. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LINGUISTICS AND LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY? Linguists tend to regard language as a formal system with predefined and unchanging rules. Linguistic anthropologists, on the other hand, generally examine language as part of social life. What does this mean in practice? Whereas linguists might elicit examples of specific words, phrases, and the like from speakers for their data, linguistic anthropologists take a different approach. They record speech, writing, gestures, and sign language in everyday contexts or natural environments. Linguistic anthropology does closely overlap with two linguistic subfields: applied linguistics and qualitative (or interactional) sociolinguistics. These subfields examine the social meaning of language use in society and share an interest in social inequality and institutional practices. Like linguistic anthropologists, applied and qualitative linguists are unique in regarding human identities not as fixed but as “performed,” or created through and transformed by linguistic practices. This view contrasts with quantitative sociolinguistics’ focus on how linguistic forms correlate with fixed variables, such as race, gender, or class. Linguistic anthropology also overlaps with the subfields of archaeolinguistics and historical linguistics, which investigate language change over time. Whereas the latter two fields are interested in reconstructing language families, linguistic anthropology is mostly concerned with identifying how beliefs about language alter linguistic structures and practices. Linguistic anthropologists are usually limited to the present or recent past due to constraints on when this data can be collected. Some researchers, though, examine archives and literary texts from other historical periods, such as during times of colonial expansion, to evaluate the long-term impact of beliefs about language. HOW DO YOU BECOME A LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGIST? Typically, professional linguistic anthropologists obtain a doctoral degree in anthropology. Students spend six to eight years on average in a Ph.D. program. During the first three to four years, they take courses in theory, methods, and topics in linguistic anthropology and related fields. These might include courses on phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. Linguistic anthropologists also acquire in-depth knowledge of the history and contemporary society of a particular geographic region where they plan to conduct in-depth research. They might take courses on related topics in cultural anthropology, such as law, environmental studies, and medical anthropology. Linguistic anthropologists also study one or more languages to use for their field research. Sometimes they work with a tutor if language courses are not available at their educational institution. After finishing their coursework and passing a series of exams to test for their comprehension and readiness, students typically conduct ethnographic and linguistic research in the field for one or two years. They then transcribe interactions, code their data, and write up their results to produce a book-length dissertation. Upon defending their dissertation, students receive a Ph.D. in anthropology and may apply for academic and non-academic jobs. WHAT TYPES OF JOBS DO LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGISTS HOLD? Linguistic anthropologists hold both academic and non-academic jobs. Academic jobs include positions in community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and research universities. These positions can be tenure-track, leading to permanent employment, or non–tenure track, sometimes with options for renewal. Professors may teach introductory and advanced courses in linguistic anthropology and related fields, such as cultural anthropology and linguistics. In addition to teaching, professors provide service to their academic community and maintain an active research agenda. They usually continue to publish articles and books, write grants, research, and present at conferences throughout their academic careers. Other linguistic anthropologists pursue jobs in industry or government. They often have area studies and language skills that make them attractive candidates for these sectors. Linguistic anthropologists may have jobs researching social media and information technologies practices, policymaking for bilingual language education, or even inventing new languages, such as Klingon from Star Trek. WHY IS LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY IMPORTANT? Linguistic anthropology is the only academic discipline dedicated to investigating how language is used in socially and culturally meaningful ways. It pays attention to what, how, where, when, and with whom social interactions happen. This offers a holistic and nuanced view of communication in context. This approach, like the other fields within anthropology, sheds light on the diverse and complex ways that humans everywhere live, struggle, and express themselves. Linguistic anthropology demonstrates how different ways of speaking, writing, and signing build individual identities and communities—and also shape political, economic, legal, and other social institutions. Language practices can facilitate intergenerational change or, alternatively, contribute to relatively stable cultural forms. By analyzing the ideas and beliefs about language that underlie systems of domination, linguistic anthropology can also offer opportunities to challenge entrenched forms of inequality. In a world that is constantly changing—through social movements, migrations, new technologies, environmental crises, and other upheavals—the role of language changes too. Social, economic, and political changes often disrupt taken-for-granted notions about human communication and introduce new ways of speaking, writing, and signing that can either exclude some people from the conversation or present new ways of belonging. Linguistic anthropology offers an invaluable lens onto the myriad and dynamic ways people use language to inhabit, create, and transform their social worlds."

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages? These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity. I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts? Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form. Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages? For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly. Scholars on the other side of the debate don't find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don't include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn't mean that English speakers aren't paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they're not talking about them. It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently. Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it's distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say. Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it's impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it's impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can't be true, let's find out what is true. Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello." The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out. To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do? The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month"). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.4 Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long" Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)5 An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures? One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6 In practical terms, it means that when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also meddle in basic aspects of visual perception — our ability to distinguish colors, for example. Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages. To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category. For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time. Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers. When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access to language by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear. Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things." What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. For example, to say something like "my chair was old" in Russian (moy stul bil' stariy), you'd need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with "chair" (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you'd use the masculine form of "my," "was," and "old." These are the same forms you'd use in speaking of a biological male, as in "my grandfather was old." If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat'), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of "my," "was," and "old." Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.7 In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman. The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That's a lot of stuff! I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives."