How to Learn Linguistic Anthropology

Study the intellectual origins of the field through the work of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Understand how the discipline emerged from efforts to document Indigenous languages in the Americas.

Explore the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in both its strong and weak forms. Examine contemporary research on linguistic relativity, including cross-cultural studies on color perception, spatial reasoning, and temporal concepts.

Study Dell Hymes's frameworks for analyzing language in social context, including the SPEAKING model, speech events, and the concept of communicative competence. Practice analyzing real speech events.

Investigate how language ideologies shape social hierarchies related to race, class, gender, and nationality. Study topics like linguistic discrimination, standard language ideology, and the politics of accent and dialect.

Examine what happens when languages come into contact, including pidginization, creolization, borrowing, and code-switching. Study multilingual communities and the social dynamics of language choice.

Understand the global crisis of language loss, methods of language documentation, and community-based revitalization efforts. Study case studies such as Hawaiian, Maori, and Welsh language revival programs.

Explore current research frontiers including language in digital media, linguistic dimensions of globalization, and language in legal and medical settings. Learn ethnographic fieldwork methods specific to linguistic anthropology.