The anthropological and
ethnographic concepts in the
study of language
By: Lorraine M. Carmona Torres
Prof. E. Lugo ENGG 604
Objectives

After discussing this topic, the participants will
be able to:
 Define significant concepts regarding
the study of
linguistics, ethnography, and anthropology.
 Compare and
contrast the relationship between
these concepts and culture and language.
 Analyze
the importance of ethnography and
anthropology in the study of linguistics.
Introduction

This presentation aims to discuss concepts
regarding ethnography and anthropology and
how these are pertinent to the study of language.
Linguistic Anthropology


Linguistic anthropology is an interdisciplinary
field dedicated to the study of language as a
cultural resource and speaking as a cultural
practice.
It assumes that the human language faculty is a
cognitive and a social achievement that provides
the intellectual tools for thinking and acting in
the world.

American anthropology has played an important
part in the progress of linguistics in this country,
through the careers of Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, and
their students, and through the opportunities
offered by American Indian languages.

Anthropology was conceived as comprising four
subfields: archaeology, physical (now `biological')
anthropology, linguistics (now `linguistic
anthropology'), and ethnology (now `sociocultural
anthropology').


Boas believed that each language should be
studied on its own terms rather than according
to some preset categories based on the study of
other, genetically unrelated languages (e.g.,
Latin).
Hybridization between linguistic concepts, and
the technologies of the computers and
experimental psychology, is producing perhaps
the most rapidly growing sector in the study of
speech, one with which anthropology must keep
informed liaison.

Diffusion of the tools of modern linguistics may be
a hallmark of the second half of this century. In the
course of such diffusion, presumably three things
will hold true:
1. the discipline of linguistics will continue to contribute
studies of the history, structure, and use of languages.
 2. in other disciplines, linguistic concepts and practices
will be qualified, reinterpreted, subsumed, and perhaps
sometimes re-diffused in changed form into linguistics.
 3. linguistics will remain the discipline responsible for
coordinating knowledge about verbal behavior from the
viewpoint of language itself.

Ethnography



Fills the gap between what is usually described in
grammars, and what is usually described in
ethnographies.
Both use speech as evidence of other patterns;
neither brings it into focus in terms of its own
patterns.
In another sense, this is a question of what a child
internalizes about speaking, beyond rules of
grammar and dictionary, while becoming a fullfledged member of its speech community.
Or, it is a question of what a foreigner must
learn about a group's verbal behavior in
order to participate appropriately and
effectively in its activities.
 The ethnography of speaking is concerned
with the situations and uses, the patterns
and functions, of speaking as an activity in
its own right.



That means that the basic architecture of
ethnography is one that already contains
ontology, methodologies and epistemologies
that need to be situated within the larger
tradition of anthropology and that do not
necessarily fit the frameworks of other
traditions.
Central to this is humanism: "It is
anthropology's task to coordinate knowledge
about language from the viewpoint of man"
(Hymes 1964: xiii).


Language is approached as something that has a
certain relevance to man, and man in anthropology
is seen as a creature whose existence is narrowly
linked, conditioned or determined by society,
community, the group, culture.
Language, from an anthropological perspective, is
almost necessarily captured in a functionalist
epistemology, and questions about language take
the shape of questions of how language works and
operates for, with and by humans-as-social beings.

Language is typically seen as a socially loaded
and assessed tool for humans, the finality of
which is to enable humans to perform as social
beings. Language, in this tradition, is defined as
a resource to be used, deployed and exploited by
human beings in social life and hence socially
consequential for humans. Further implications
of this will be addressed below. A second
important implication is about context.


There is no way in which language can be
'context-less' in this anthropological tradition in
ethnography. To language, there is always a
particular function, a concrete shape, a specific
mode of operation, and an identifiable set of
relations between singular acts of language and
wider patterns of resources and their functions.
Language is context, it is the architecture of
social behavior itself, and thus part of social
structure and social relations.


These anthropological roots provide a specific
direction to ethnography, one that situates
language deeply and inextricably in social life
and offers a particular and distinct ontology and
epistemology to ethnography.
Ethnography contains a perspective on language
which differs from that of many other branches
of the study of language.
Language


Language is seen as a set of resources, means
available to human beings in societies. These
resources can be deployed in a variety of
circumstances, but when this happens it never
happens in a neutral way (Blommaert, 2006).
Every act of language use is an act that is
assessed, weighed, measured socially, in terms
of contrasts between this act and others
(Blommaert, 2006).


In fact, language becomes the social and
culturally embedded thing it is because of the
fact that it is socially and culturally
consequential in use.
Hymes differentiates between a linguistic
notion of language and an ethnographic notion
of speech. Language, Hymes argues, is what
linguists have made of it, a concept with little
significance for the people who actually use
language.


Speech is language-in-society, i.e. an active notion
and one that deeply situates language in a web of
relations of power, a dynamics of availability and
accessibility, a situatedness of single acts vis-à-vis
larger social and historical patterns such as genres
and traditions
Speech is language in which people have made
investments – social, cultural, political, individualemotional ones. It is also language brought under
social control - consequently language marked by
sometimes extreme cleavages and inequalities in
repertoires and opportunities (Blommaert, 2006).
Conclusion


Anthropology and ethnography have played a key
role in the study of language. Both disciplines see
language as derived from culture, but without one
of them, the study of language can not be effective.
It is important for us as teachers to know the origins
of language in order to understand how it works
and to aim our class to fulfill the needs of our
students focusing on their cultural background.
This background provides us information valuable
for us to give a class that can be relevant to them.


These concepts have proven to be of valuable
relevance for English teachers because they
show us where language comes from and how it
works cognitively.
This helps us to understand the way our
students learn the language and provides us
with the necessary information to work
accordingly.
References



Blommaert, J. (2006). Ethnography as counterhegemony:. Working Papers in Urban Language
&, (34), 2-6.
Duranti, A. (2001). Linguistic anthropology.
International Encyclopedia of the Social &
Behavioral Sciences, 8899-8906.
Hymes, D.H. (n.d.). The Ethnography of
speaking. Retrieved September 5, 2010, from
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~thompsoc/Hymes.h
tml