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 of humans through the languages that they use. Human genetics is the study of genetics as applied to humans. ... Developmental psychology is the scientific study of age related changes in behavior across the life span. ...

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. Visual perception is one of the senses, consisting of the ability to detect light and interpret (see) it as the perception known as sight or naked eye vision. ... Color is an important part of the visual arts. ... Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e. ...

Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and self-organization of peoples. Study of the Penan people, for instance, reveals that they have six different and distinct words for "we" — which may imply a more detailed understanding of co-operation, consensus and consensus decision-making than English. 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". Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... Self-organization refers to a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source. ... The Penan are, a nomadic aboriginal people living in Borneo. ... We is the nominative case of the first-person plural pronoun in English. ... Co-operation refers to the practice of people or greater entities working in common with commonly agreed-upon goals and possibly methods, instead of working separately in competition. ... For other uses, see Consensus (disambiguation). ... Consensus decision-making is a decision process that not only seeks the agreement of most participants, but also to resolve or mitigate the objections of the minority to achieve the most agreeable decision. ... For the religious publishing house, see LifeWay Christian Resources. ... Situated ethics, often confused with situational ethics, is a view of applied ethics in which abstract standards from a culture or theory are considered to be far less important than the ongoing processes in which one is personally and physically involved, e. ...

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 phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and grammar.
• Historical (or diachronic) linguistics Describing changes in dialects and languages over time. This study includes the study of linguistic divergence and language families, comparative linguistics, etymology, and philology.
• Ethnolinguistics Analyzing the relationship between culture, thought, and language.
• Sociolinguistics Analyzing the social functions of language and the social, political, and economic relationships among and between members of speech communities.

Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. ... Morphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. ... The first meaning of the term syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (sun, meaning ‘together’) and ταξις (taxis, meaning sequence/order), can be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Grammar is the discovery, enunciation, and study of rules governing the use of language. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families (families hereforth). ... The comparative method (in linguistics) is a method used to detect genetic relationships between languages and to establish a consistent relationship hypothesis by reconstructing: the common ancestor of the languages in question, a plausible sequence of regular changes by which the historically known languages can be derived from that common... In historical linguistics, etymology is the study of the origins of words. ... Philology is the study of ancient texts and languages. ... Ethnolinguistics is a field of linguistic anthropology which studies the language of a particular ethnic group. ... Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ...

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. This may cross a line between science and activism, but is within the anthropological tradition of study by the participant-observer. Related to problems in critical philosophy (for instance, the question who's we, and the subject-object problem). Sociological naturalism is a term used in sociology, for the view that natural world and social world are roughly identical and governed by similar principles. ... Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action to bring about social or political change. ... Philosophy is a discipline or field of study involving the investigation, analysis, and development of ideas at a general, abstract, or fundamental level. ... In philosophy, the subject-object problem arises out of the metaphysics of Hegel. ... In philosophy, the subject-object problem arises out of the metaphysics of Hegel. ...

See anthropology, linguistics. Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθρωπος, human) consists of the study of humankind (see genus Homo). ... Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ...

See also

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. ...

External links

• David Nettle, in "Linguistic Diversity" 1998
• "Steps Towards an Ecology of Language", Mark Fettes, 1996
• "An Ecological Approach to Language Renewal", Mark Fettes, 1997.
• Ethnolinguistic studies on African Pygmies