Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is an area of
anthropological linguistics
Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. Whil ...
that studies the relationship between a language and the nonlinguistic cultural behavior of the people who speak that language.
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Examples
Ethnolinguists study the way
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, ...
and
conceptualization influences language and show how that is linked to different cultures and societies. An example is how spatial orientation is expressed in various cultures. In many societies, words for the
cardinal direction
The four cardinal directions, or cardinal points, are the four main compass directions: north, east, south, and west, commonly denoted by their initials N, E, S, and W respectively. Relative to north, the directions east, south, and west are a ...
s ''east'' and ''west'' are derived from terms for sunrise/sunset. The nomenclature for cardinal directions of
Inuit
Inuit (; iu, ᐃᓄᐃᑦ 'the people', singular: Inuk, , dual: Inuuk, ) are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, ...
speakers of
Greenland
Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland is ...
, however, is based on geographical landmarks such as the river system and one's position on the coast. Similarly, the
Yurok
The Yurok (Karuk language: Yurúkvaarar / Yuru Kyara - "downriver Indian; i.e. Yurok Indian") are an Indigenous people from along the Klamath River and Pacific coast, whose homelands are located in present-day California stretching from Trinidad ...
lack the idea of cardinal directions; they orient themselves with respect to their principal geographic feature, the
Klamath River
The Klamath River (Karuk: ''Ishkêesh'', Klamath: ''Koke'', Yurok: ''Hehlkeek 'We-Roy'') flows through Oregon and northern California in the United States, emptying into the Pacific Ocean. By average discharge, the Klamath is the second larges ...
.
Cultural linguistics
Cultural Linguistics is a related branch of linguistics that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations.
Cultural Linguistics draws on and expands the theoretical and analytical advancements in
cognitive science (including complexity science and
distributed cognition Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.
From cognitive ethnography, Hutchins argues that mental representations, which classical cognitive ...
) and anthropology. Cultural linguistics examines how various features of human languages encode cultural conceptualisations, including cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors.
[Sharifian, Farzad (2011). Cultural Conceptualisations and Language: Theoretical Framework and Applications. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.] In , language is viewed as deeply entrenched in the group-level, cultural cognition of communities of speakers. Thus far, the approach of Cultural Linguistics has been adopted in several areas of
applied linguistic
Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, psychology, communication rese ...
research, including
intercultural communication
Intercultural communication is a discipline that studies communication across different cultures and social groups, or how culture affects communication. It describes the wide range of communication processes and problems that naturally appear w ...
,
second language learning, Teaching English as an International Language, and
World Englishes.
Ethnosemantics
Ethnosemantics, also called ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology, is a method of ethnographic research and ethnolinguistics that focuses on semantics by examining how people categorize words in their language. Ethnosemantics studies the way people label and classify the cultural, social, and environmental phenomena in their world and analyze the semantic categories these classifications create in order to understand the cultural meanings behind the way people describe things in their world.
Ethnosemantics as a method relies on
Franz Boas
Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical ...
' theory of
cultural relativity, as well as the theory of
linguistic relativity
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view, worldview or cognition, and ...
. The use of cultural relativity in ethnosemantic analysis serves to focus analyses on individual cultures and their own language terms, rather than using ethnosemantics to create overarching theories of culture and how language affects culture.
Methods and examples
In order to perform ethnosemantic analysis, all of the words in a language that are used for a particular subject are gathered by the researcher and are used to create a model of how those words relate to one another. Anthropologists who utilize ethnosemantics to create these models believe that they are a representation of how speakers of a particular language think about the topic being described.
For example, in her book ''The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology'', Harriet Ottenheimer uses the concept of plants and how dandelions are categorized to explain how ethnosemantics can be used to examine the differences in how cultures think about certain topics. In her example, Ottenheimer describes how the topic "plants" can be divided into the two categories "lettuce" and "weeds". Ethnosemantics can help anthropologists to discover whether a particular culture categorizes "dandelions" as a "lettuce" or a "weed", and using this information can discover something about how that culture thinks about plants.
In one section of Oscar Lewis' ''La Vida'', he includes the transcript of an interview with a Puerto Rican woman in which she discusses a prostitute's social world. Using ethnosemantics, the speaker's statements about the people in that social circle and their behavior can be analyzed in order to understand how she perceives and conceptualizes her social world. The first step in this analysis is to identify and map out all of the social categories or social identities the speaker identified. Once the social categories have been mapped, the next steps are to attempt to define the precise meaning of each category, examine how the speaker describes the relationship of categories, and analyze how she evaluates the characteristics of the people who are grouped in those social categories.
The speaker in this example identified three basic social categories-- the rich, the law, and the poor-- and characterized those people in the higher categories of "rich" and "law" as bad people. The poor are further divided into those with disreputable positions and those with reputable positions. The speaker characterizes the disreputable poor generally as dishonest and corrupt, but presents herself as one of the few exceptions. This analysis of the speaker's description of her social circle thus allows for an understanding of how she perceives the world around her and the people in it.
Componential analysis
Another method that is used in ethnosemantic analysis is
componential analysis Componential analysis (feature analysis or contrast analysis) is the analysis of words through structured sets of semantic features, which are given as "present", "absent" or "indifferent with reference to feature". The method thus departs from the ...
. Componential analysis is used to describe the criteria people use to classify concepts
by analyzing their semantic features. For example, the word "man" can be analyzed into the semantic features "male," "mature," and "human"; "woman" can be analyzed into "female," "mature," and "human"; "girl" can be analyzed into "female," "immature," and "human"; and "bull" can be analyzed into "male," "mature," and "bovine."
By using this method, the features of words in a category can be examined to form hypotheses about the significant meaning and identifying features of words in that category.
See also
*
Anthropological linguistics
Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. Whil ...
*
Associative group analysis Associative group analysis (AGA) is an inferential approach to analyze people's mental representations, focusing on subjective meanings and images to assess similarities and differences across cultures and belief systems. Culture can be regarded as ...
*
Evolutionary psychology of language
Evolutionary psychology of language is the study of the evolutionary history of language as a psychological faculty within the discipline of evolutionary psychology. It makes the assumption that language is the result of a Darwinian adaptation.
T ...
*
Linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass mos ...
*
Ecolinguistics
Ecolinguistics, or ecological linguistics, emerged in the 1990s as a new paradigm of linguistic research, widening sociolinguistics to take into account not only the social context in which language is embedded, but also the wider ecological cont ...
*
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt (, also , ; ; 22 June 1767 – 8 April 1835) was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, which was named after ...
References
Sources
*
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992) ''Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configuration''. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Bartmiński, Jerzy. Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2009/2012.
* (en)
Madeleine Mathiot
Madeleine Mathiot (June 11, 1927 – December 4, 2020) was a Professor emerita of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.
Mathiot received her Ph.D. in 1966 from the Catholic University of America with a dissertation entitle ...
(dir.), Ethnolinguistics: Boas, Sapir, and Whorf revisited, Mouton, La Haye, 1979, 323 p. ()
* (fr) Luc Bouquiaux, Linguistique et ethnolinguistique : anthologie d'articles parus entre 1961 et 2003, Peeters, Louvain, Dudley, MA, 2004, 466 p.
* (fr) Christine Jourdan et Claire Lefebvre (dir.), « L'ethnolinguistique », in Anthropologie et sociétés, vol. 23, no 3, 1999, p. 5-173
* (fr) Bernard Pottier, L'ethnolinguistique (), Didier, 1970, 130 p.
* Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
* Trabant, Jürgen, , Liège: Madarga, 1992.
* Trabant, Jürgen, Traditions de Humboldt, (German edition 1990), French edition, Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1999.
* Trabant, Jürgen, Mithridates im Paradies: Kleine Geschichte des Sprachdenkens, München: Beck, 2003.
* Trabant, Jürgen, ‘L’antinomie linguistique: quelques enjeux politiques’, Politiques & Usages de la Langue en Europe, ed. Michael Werner, Condé-sur-Noireau: Collection du Ciera, Dialogiques, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2007.
* Trabant, Jürgen, Was ist Sprache?, München: Beck, 2008.
* Vocabulaire européen des philosophes, Dictionnaires des intraduisibles, ed. Barbara Cassin, Paris: Robert, 2004.
* Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings (1956), ed. John B. Caroll, Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1984.
* Wierzbicka, Anna, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations, New York, Oxford University Press, 1992.
* Wierzbicka, Anna, Understanding Cultures through their Key Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
* Wierzbicka, Anna, Emotions across Languages and Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
* Wierzbicka, Anna, Semantics: Primes and Universals (1996), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
* Wierzbicka, Anna, Experience, Evidence & Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
External links
Cultural LinguisticsApplied Cultural LinguisticsThe Jurgen Trabant Wilhelm von Humboldt Lectures (7hrs)Farzad Sharifian, publicationsCultural Linguistics: A new multidisciplinary field of research
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Anthropology
Sociolinguistics