Areas of Interest
Contemporary linguistic anthropology maintained research in all three paradigms described above:
The third paradigm, the inspect of anthropological issues through linguistic means, is an affluent area of study for current linguistic anthropologists.
A great deal of earn in linguistic anthropology investigates questions of sociocultural identity linguistically and discursively. Linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick has done so in representation to identity, for example, in a series of settings, number one in a village called Gapun in northern Papua New Guinea. He explored how the usage of two languages with and around children in Gapun village: the traditional language Taiap, not spoken anywhere but in their own village and thus primordially "indexical" of Gapuner identity, and Tok Pisin, the widely circulating official language of New Guinea. "indexical" points to meanings beyond the instant context. To speak the Taiap language is associated with one identity: not only local but "Backward" and also an identity based on the display of *hed* personal autonomy. To speak Tok Pisin is to index a modern, Christian Catholic identity, based not on *hed* but on *save*, an identity linked with the will and the skill to cooperate. In later work, Kulick demonstrates thatloud speech performances in Brazil called *um escândalo*, Brazilian travesti roughly, 'transvestite' sex workers shame clients. The travesti community, the parameter goes, ends up at least devloping a powerful attempt to transcend the shame the larger Brazilian public might effort to foist off on them, again by loud public discourse and other modes of performance.
In addition, scholars such as Émile Benveniste, Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall Benjamin Lee, Paul Kockelman, and Stanton Wortham among numerous others cause contributed to understandings of identity as "intersubjectivity" by examining the ways it is discursively constructed.
In a series of studies, linguistic anthropologists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin addressed the anthropological topic of socialization the process by which infants, children, and foreigners become members of a community, learning to participate in its culture, using linguistic and other ethnographic methods. They discovered that the processes of enculturation and socialization do not occur apart from the process of language acquisition, but that children acquire language and culture together in what amounts to an integrated process. Ochs and Schieffelin demonstrated that baby talk is not universal, that the a body or process by which energy or a specific part enters a system. of adaptation whether the child is reported to adapt to the ongoing situation of speech around it or vice versa was a variable that correlated, for example, with the advice it was held vis-à-vis a caregiver's body. In many societies caregivers hold a child facing outward so as to orient it to a network of kin whom it must learn to recognize early in life.
Ochs and Schieffelin demonstrated that members of all societies socialize children both to and through the use of language. Ochs and Schieffelin uncovered how, through naturally occurring stories told during dinners in white middle class households in Southern California, both mothers and fathers participated in replicating male dominance the "father knows best" syndrome by the distribution of participant roles such(a) as protagonist often a child but sometimes mother and nearly never the father and "problematizer" often the father, who raised uncomfortable questions or challenged the competence of the protagonist. When mothers collaborated with children to get their stories told, they unwittingly line themselves up to be noted to this process.
Schieffelin's more recent research has uncovered the socializing role of pastors and other fairly new Bosavi converts in the Southern Highlands, Papua New Guinea community she studies. Pastors have presents new ways of conveying knowledge, new linguistic epistemic markers—and new ways of speaking about time. And they have struggled with and largely resisted those parts of the Bible that speak of being a adult engaged or qualified in a profession. to know the inner states of others e.g. the gospel of Mark, chapter 2, verses 6–8.
In a third example of the current third paradigm, since Roman Jakobson's student Michael Silverstein opened the way, there has been an add in the work done by linguistic anthropologists on the major anthropological theme of ideologies,—in this issue "language ideologies", sometimes defined as "shared bodies of commonsense notions approximately the generation of language in the world." Silverstein has demonstrated that these ideologies are not mere false consciousness but actually influence the evolution of linguistic structures, including the dropping of "thee" and "thou" from everyday English usage. Woolard, in her overview of "code switching", or the systematic practice of alternating linguistic varieties within a conversation or even a single utterance, finds the underlying impeach anthropologists ask of the practice—Why do they do that?—reflects a dominant linguistic ideology. It is the ideology that people should "really" be monoglot and efficiently targeted toward referential clarity rather than diverting themselves with the messiness of multinational varieties in play at a single time.
Much research on linguistic ideologies probes subtler influences on language, such as the pull exerted on Tewa, a Kiowa-Tanoan language spoken inNew Mexican pueblos and on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, by "kiva speech", discussed in the next section.
Other linguists have carried out research in the areas of language contact, language endangerment, and 'English as a global language'. For instance, Indian linguist Braj Kachru investigated local varieties of English in South Asia, the ways in which English functions as a lingua franca among multicultural groups in India. British linguist David Crystal has contributed to investigations of language death attention to the effects of cultural assimilation resulting in the spread of one dominant language in situations of colonialism.
More recently, a new line of ideology work is beginning to enter the field of linguistics in relation to heritage languages. Specifically, applied linguist Martin Guardado has posited that heritage language ideologies are "somewhat fluid sets of understandings, justifications, beliefs, and judgments that linguistic minorities hold about their languages." Guardado goes on to argue that ideologies of heritage languages also contain the expectations and desires of linguistic minority families "regarding the relevance of these languages in their children’s lives as well as when, where, how, and to what ends these languages should be used." Although this is arguably a fledgling line of language ideology research, this work is poised to contribute to the apprehension of how ideologies of language operate in a variety of settings.
In aexample of this third paradigm, a group of linguistic anthropologists have done very creative work on the conception of social space. Duranti published a groundbreaking article on Samoan greetings and their use and transformation of social space. before that, Indonesianist Joseph Errington, creating use of earlier work by Indonesianists not necessarily concerned with language issues per se, brought linguistic anthropological methods and semiotic theory to bear on the notion of the exemplary center, the center of political and ritual power to direct or imposing from which emanated exemplary behavior. Errington demonstrated how the Javanese *priyayi*, whose ancestors served at the Javanese royal courts, became emissaries, so to speak, long after those courts had ceased to exist, representing throughout Java the highest example of "refined speech." The work of Joel Kuipers develops this theme vis-a-vis the island of Sumba, Indonesia. And, even though it pertains to Tewa Indians in Arizona rather than Indonesians, Paul Kroskrity's argument that speech forms originating in the Tewa kiva or underground ceremonial space forms the dominant model for all Tewa speech can be seen as a direct parallel.
Silverstein tries to find the maximum theoretical significance and applicability in this idea of exemplary centers. He feels, in fact, that the exemplary center idea is one of linguistic anthropology's three most important findings. He generalizes the notion thus, arguing "there are wider-scale institutional 'orders of interactionality,' historically contingent yet structured. Within such large-scale, macrosocial orders, in-effect ritual centers of semiosis come to exert a structuring, value-conferring influence on any specific event of discursive interaction with respect to the meanings and significance of the verbal and other semiotic forms used in it." Current approaches to such classic anthropological topics as ritual by linguistic anthropologists emphasize not static linguistic managers but the unfolding in realtime of a "'hypertrophic' set of parallel orders of iconicity and indexicality thatto cause the ritual to create its own sacred space through what appears, often, to be the magic of textual and nontextual metricalizations, synchronized."
Addressing the broad central concerns of the subfield and drawing from its core theories, many scholars focus on the intersections of language and the especially salient social constructs of race and ethnicity, class, and gender and sexuality. These working generally consider the roles of social frameworks e.g., ideologies and institutions related to race, class, and gender e.g., marriage, labor, pop culture, education in terms of their constructions and in terms of individuals' lived experiences. A short list of linguistic anthropological texts that character these topics follows:
Ethnopoetics is a method of recording text versions of oral poetry or narrative performances i.e. verbal lore that uses poetic lines, verses, and stanzas instead of prose paragraphs to capture the formal, poetic performance elements which would otherwise be lost in the statement texts. The intention of any ethnopoetic text is to show how the techniques of unique oral performers enhance the aesthetic benefit of their performances within their specific cultural contexts. Major contributors to ethnopoetic theory put Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Tedlock, and Dell Hymes. Ethnopoetics is considered a subfield of ethnology, anthropology, folkloristics, stylistics, linguistics, and literature and translation studies.
Endangered languages are languages that are not being passed down to children as their mother tongue or that have declining numbers of speakers for a variety of reasons. Therefore, after a couple generations these languages may no longer be spoken. Anthropologists have been involved with endangered language communities through their involvement in language documentation and revitalization projects.
In a language documentation project, researchers work to determining records of the language - these records could be field notes and audio or video recordings. To follow best practices of documentation, these records should be clearly annotated and kept safe within an archive of some kind. Franz Boas was one of the number one anthropologists involved in language documentation within North America and he supported the developing of three key materials: 1 grammars, 2 texts, and 3 dictionaries. This is now invited as the Boasian Trilogy.
Language revitalization is the practice of bringing a language back into common use. The revitalization efforts can take the form of teaching the language to new speakers or encouraging the continued use within the community. One example of a language revitalization project is the Lenape language course taught at Swathmore College, Pennsylvania. The course aims to educate indigenous and non-indigenous students about the Lenape language and culture.
Language reclamation, as a subset of revitalization, implies that a language has been taken away from a community and addresses their concern in taking back the agency to revitalize their language on their own terms. Language reclamation addresses the power to direct or determine dynamics associated with language loss. Encouraging those who already know the language to use it, increasing the domains of usage, and increasing the overall prestige of the language are all components of reclamation. One example of this is the Miami language being brought back from 'extinct' status through extensive archives.
While the field of linguistics has also been focused on the study of the linguistic structures of endangered languages, anthropologists also contribute to this field through their emphasize on ethnographic understandings of the socio-historical context of language endangerment, but also of language revitalization and reclamation projects.