Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Over the last one hundred and plus years, linguistic anthropology has grown to cover almost any aspect of language structure and language use. From a discipline that was at first conceived to provide the tools for the documentation of endangered languages, especially in North America, it has become an intellectual shelter and a cultural amplifier for the richness of human communication in social life that is only selectively recognized in other communication-oriented fields such as linguistics or psychology. At any gathering of linguistic anthropologists, it is not uncommon to find experts on a wide range of linguistic and other cultural phenomena, including bilingualism, narrative, poetry, music, sign languages, literacy, socialization, gender, speechmaking, conflict, religion, identity, cognition, pidgins and Creole languages, register, and oratory. Some of these scholars can be thought of as “linguists” in the narrow sense because of their training or because of their knowledge of the grammatical patterns of specific languages or language families. Others belong to linguistic anthropology not because of their expertise in grammars and language families, but because they identify with the methods or concerns of the field, find inspiration in its literature, and want to contribute to it by further expanding the study of language use as a cultural activity. In spite of being the ... log in or subscribe to read full text