what kinds of questions do linguistic anthropologists ask in their research

A linguistic anthropologist could ask many questions, including:

• Why is one language preferred over another?
• Why do different geographic regions have different language accents?
• What types of values and ideologies are communicated through language?
• Does language vary according to gender, beliefs, and other criteria?

Full Answer

What does "Nuka Ni Kugi" mean?

There is a Japanese proverb, "Nuka ni kugi." This is translated into English as "To pound a nail into rice bran" and means "a waste of effort, " because it is a scientific fact that we cannot put a nail firmly in powder.

How many languages are there in the world?

In the world, there are roughly 7,000 languages belonging to a hundred different language families. The most popular theoretical assumptions regarding word order were developed by Greenberg in 1963. His word order universals have received great interest from linguists and grammarians alike, who have been trying to account for 'cross-language word order patterns'. My question is (Can we point out that all his word order universals are applicable to all languages in the world taking into consideration that Greenberg proposed his linguistic universal based primarily on a set of 30 languages?

What is Praat useful for?

Praat could be practically useful for doing various tasks of phonetic analysis by computer.

How does linguistics affect social status?

Olga is right. Linguistics can influence social status both in the single language and multi-language background. In the case of single language, this will be due to differences in dialect, accent and use of slang. The novel I mentioned earlier (Pygmalion of GBS) is about the accent and slang in English. Multi-language effect seen most importantly in the case of English where its learning is sought for by many people in many nations all over the world as aMUST for moving up the social ladder, as much as professionally. This effect starts when two languages come into contact and one is dominant over the other; hence works language contact is use ful to learn about this too. Here are some references on this:

What is social memory?

Social memory is, according to Halbwachs, a social construct. In this sense, the dialogues between social forms and their contents can directly reflect on the modulation of individual and collective memory.

How is linguistic relatedness defined?

Linguistic relatedness is defined by shared ancestry, not by synchronically measured distance. Of course (some) distance metrics may be correlated with the degree of relatedness, since the older the last common ancestor of languages A and B, the more independent innovations are likely to have accumulated in either lineage over time, increasing the difference between them -- although it has to be kept in mind that the rate at which innovations arise and get fixed is anything but uniform. There is, however, no simple algorithm for computing the structure of the family tree, given just the measured distances.

What is the study of language and culture?

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language. This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

What do linguistic anthropologists look for in written texts?

Many linguistic anthropologists look closely at various written texts: historical documents copied from archives, personal letters (such as the love letters I studied – see Ahearn 2001a), newspaper articles, e-mails, or official documents. Researchers who are interested in stud-ying literacy practices – the ways in which people produce, consume, or refer to written texts in their everyday lives – often analyze written texts as mundane as shopping lists or sign boards, drawing insightful conclusions about important cultural values and social relations. Even linguistic anthropologists who are not primarily concerned with literacy practices often find that paying close attention to the intersec-tions between texts and contexts is not only beneficial but unavoidable in societies that are saturated by the written word.

What is participant observation?

Scholars who conduct participant observation take copious notes, called fieldnotes, while participating in an event or taking part in an interaction, or as soon as possible afterwards. This sort of intensive, in-depth immersion in the group or groups being studied can provide essential insights and build important rapport with research subjects.4

Why do anthropologists record conversations?

Linguistic anthropologists often record hours and hours of “naturally occurring” conversations in order to study actual utterances produced by speakers in their everyday interactions. Researchers also often record folk tales, political speeches, rituals, songfests, performances, and other speech events. Of course, introducing a tape recorder or video recorder frequently makes the context something other than “naturally occurring,” but linguistic anthropologists are well aware of this and have responded in several ways. First, they have noted that every context is “natural,” and as long as the various aspects of the context are noted and brought into the analysis, some very interesting insights can be obtained. Second, they note that people often lose whatever self-consciousness they might at first feel as they get used to being recorded. Third, some researchers have removed themselves from the immediate conversational context by giving tape recorders to the participants themselves to control, or by setting up video or tape recorders that run for long periods of time without the research-er’s needing to be present. Finally, some researchers have recorded interactions surreptitiously – though this raises ethical issues that will be discussed at greater length below. One way some linguistic anthro-pologists have attempted to abide by the standards of ethical research is to obtain informed consent ahead of time to record people surrep-titiously at some point in the future. Then, once the recording has been made, these researchers play it back for the participants to make sure that they still consent to the recording.

Fieldwork

• Doing anthropological research is called “fieldwork,” or “going out into the field.” These are the terms for when an anthropologist goes into another culture to study it. And the specific kind of fieldwork anthropologists do is called participant observation. This means that the anthropologist lives in another culture, usually for about a year, and...

See more on anthropology4u.com

Background Work

in The Field

After The Research Is Done

Learn More