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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 influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting linguistic relativity, and this hypothesis is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists.
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 most aspects of language structure and use.
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. While many linguists believe that a true field of anthropological linguistics is nonexistent, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, many others regard the two as interchangeable.
Language ideology is, within anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural studies, any set of beliefs about languages as they are used in their social worlds. Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are influenced by political and moral interests, and they are shaped in a cultural setting. When recognized and explored, language ideologies expose how the speakers' linguistic beliefs are linked to the broader social and cultural systems to which they belong, illustrating how the systems beget such beliefs. By doing so, language ideologies link implicit and explicit assumptions about a language or language in general to their social experience as well as their political and economic interests.
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest.
Nancy Currier Dorian is an American linguist who has carried out research into the decline of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic for over 40 years, particularly in the villages of Brora, Golspie and Embo. Due to their isolation from other Gaelic-speaking communities, these East Sutherland villages presented a good opportunity to study language death. Dorian's study is possibly the longest such study in the field. She is considered "a prime authority" on language death. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect, her study into the decline of Gaelic in East Sutherland, is considered "the first major monograph" on language death. According to linguist Joan Argenter, Dorian's name "is well known to scholars working in" several areas of linguistics.
Don Kulick is professor of anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and Sweden. Kulick is also known for his extensive fieldwork on the Tayap people and their language in Gapun village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.
Kira Hall is professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, as well as director for the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP), at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture." Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
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Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.
Monica Heller is a Canadian linguistic anthropologist and Professor at the University of Toronto. She was the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) from 2013 to 2015.
The gender paradox is a sociolinguistic phenomenon first observed by William Labov, in which "Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not." Specifically, the "paradox" arises from sociolinguistic data showing that women are more likely to use prestige forms and avoid stigmatized variants than men for a majority of linguistic variables, but that they are also more likely to lead language change by using innovative forms of variables.
Kathryn Ann Woolard is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in linguistic anthropology and received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.
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Within the linguistic study of endangered languages, sociolinguists distinguish between different speaker types based on the type of competence they have acquired of the endangered language. Often when a community is gradually shifting away from an endangered language to a majority language, not all speakers acquire full linguistic competence; instead, speakers have varying degrees and types of competence depending on their exposure to the minority language in their upbringing. The relevance of speaker types in cases of language shift was first noted by Nancy Dorian, who coined the term semi-speaker to refer to those speakers of Sutherland Gaelic who were predominantly English-speaking and whose Gaelic competence was limited and showed considerable influence from English. Later studies added additional speaker types such as rememberers, and passive speakers. In the context of language revitalization, new speakers who have learned the endangered language as a second language are sometimes distinguished.
Ana Celia Zentella is a Puerto Rican/Mexican linguist known for her "anthro-political" approach to linguistic research and expertise on multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and language intolerance, especially in relation to U.S. Latinx languages and communities. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
References
- ↑ "Susan Gal". University of Chicago Department of Anthropology. 2012. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
- ↑ "Google Scholar - Susan Gal citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2022-02-11.
- ↑ "Susan Gal". Department of Anthropology - University of Chicago. Retrieved September 22, 2018.
- ↑ Gal, Susan (1978). "Peasant Men Can't Get Wives: Language Change and Sex Roles in a Bilingual Community". Language in Society. 7 (1): 1–16. doi:10.1017/S0047404500005303. JSTOR 4166971. S2CID 144342959.
- 1 2 "Susan Gal". Department of Linguistics - University of Chicago. Archived from the original on September 23, 2018. Retrieved September 22, 2018.
- ↑ "Susan Gal". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 2013. Archived from the original on 2013-03-04. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
- 1 2 "Laurels to Linguists Archive". Linguistic Society of America. 2012. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
- ↑ "Editorial board". American Anthropologist. doi:10.1111/(ISSN)1548-1433 . Retrieved April 6, 2019.
- ↑ Coates, Richard (1981). "S. Gal Language shift. Social determinants of linguistic change in bilingual Austria. New York: Academic Press, 1979. Pp. xii + 201". Journal of Linguistics. 17 (1): 131–133. doi:10.1017/S0022226700006824. S2CID 144444713 – via Cambridge Core.
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