Anthropological linguistics

Families of languages in the world.

Anthropological linguistics is the branch of linguistics and anthropology that studies the role of language in a social and cultural context, and its role in determining cultural practices. A true field of anthropological linguistics does not exist, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to refer to this subdiscipline, others consider both terms to be interchangeable as synonyms.

Whatever its name, this discipline has had an important impact on the studies of visual perception (especially color) and bioregional democracy, both studies take into account the distinction that different languages make of the perception of the environment.

Introduction

Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and the self-organization of human communities. For example, a study of the Penan people reveals that they have six different words for the first person plural nominative us/us. This may imply a greater understanding of cooperation, consensus and consensual decision making than in our Hispanic culture. Anthropological linguistics studies this distinction and relates it to ways of life and adaptations to the senses. Just as he studies the distinction made in languages in relation to the colors of the rainbow, observing the tendency to increase the diversity of terms, as shown by the fact that there are distinctions of bodies in this environment that must be made. Leading to localized knowledge and perhaps localized ethics, the final evidence of which is the various terms used to refer to "we".

Relation between anthropology and linguistics

It should be stated that not all linguists doing fieldwork with languages of traditional pre-industrial societies are anthropologists, and vice versa, many anthropologists are interested in the study of such societies but are not very specifically interested in the languages of these societies, out of the practical need to know something of their languages.

Beginnings of anthropological linguistics

Anthropological linguistics had its heyday between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. At that time one of the main interests was to document and scientifically investigate non-Western societies that had been little influenced by European colonialism or had completely escaped its influence. The large amount of data accumulated on the languages of these societies and the enormous diversity found provided a large amount of new linguistic data that powerfully influenced both American structuralism and linguistic typology.

Similarly, the generativist approach ended up considering much of the data from languages typologically distant from European languages as important, since they more clearly reflected linguistic facts, which although to a large extent were present in the languages that traditionally had been dealt with by the linguistics, were more evident in other languages. For example, the categories of inclusiveness, split ergativity, or evidentiality are important in many American languages, and the proper establishment of classifications for these widely ignored categories in European languages allowed the corpus of relevant linguistic facts to be expanded.

The problems of interlingual and intercultural translation

When confronted for the first time with an unknown language, the researcher encounters the problems of translation and definition of a term and those of the classification and categorization of the collected data. Within the linguistic aspects of translation, a distinction is made between intralinguistic translation and interlinguistic translation; Unlike the first, in which the use of a synonym or circumquiloquy is used, in the second, equivalents are often not found, so the linguist, as an interpreter, recodes the message in the other language. When doing fieldwork, some ethnographers try to learn the language of the ethnic group they are studying, while others work with bilingual interpreters. The advantage of knowing the language is that through it you can recognize concepts that in one way or another would be lost in translation and, furthermore, since language and culture are so closely related, it is much easier to delve into and understand the vision of the language. world of the 'other', from its own logic.

Franz Boas insisted that translation often distorted the concepts of domains as complex as religion, for example, and that by knowing the language of the group studied, that culture could be better understood from its categories and not from those imposed by the investigator. Bronislaw Malinowski shared this opinion: "All the words that describe the native social order, all the expressions that refer to native beliefs, customs, ceremonies and magical, specific rites - all those words, evidently, do not exist in English.", nor in any other European language. Those words can only be translated... by explaining the meaning of each one of them through an exact ethnographic description of the sociology, culture and tradition of that native community." The translation of complex concepts also involves a linguistic analysis because the grammatical structure of a language determines the belonging of the lexicon to a class or category (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) and to the distinctive features that characterize it as such (morphological, syntactic and semantic). It is through this grammatical structure that many of the aspects of the experience are expressed in the language and that when they are not known or are not found in the language into which they want to be translated, they are overlooked or confused and misrepresented. However, it must be taken into account that the translation of a term is not only reduced to linguistic analysis and that "the study of any language spoken by a people that lives under conditions different from ours and has a different culture must be carried out jointly." with the study of their culture and their environment”. It should not be forgotten that in translation, the conjunction of the linguistic and cultural dimension becomes an indispensable tool and that often when the researcher is ignored "even though he is studying a different cultural universe, he ends up boxing the information collected in his own schemes, finding again a structure similar to his own”.

Related disciplines

• Ethnography of communication
• Ethnolinguistic
• Descriptive or synchronous linguistics
• Historical or diachronic linguistics
• Sociolinguistic