Linguistics Anthropology

Lindsey Santillanes
ANT101
Dropbox 2
February 17, 2011
Anthropological Linguistics

Linguistic anthropology has a distinct discipline that deserves to be studied for its precedent achievements as well as its vision for the future. The study is an interdisciplinary field that is dedicated to the domain of language as a cultural resource, and speaking as a cultural ritual. It assumes that human language is a cognitive and social accomplishment that provides tools for thinking and interacting throughout the world. To examine linguistics, anthropologists study features including languages written, vocalized, endorsed and gestured. They also look at factors such as garments, trinkets, and greeting and parting actions.
Anthropological linguistics considers how language exemplifies or articulates cultural meaning. Because this field has so many parts, it is broken into multiple sub-categories. The first being historical linguistics. Historical linguists investigate how languages evolve and change through time, how offspring languages crop up from past parent languages and how cultural contact between speakers of different languages can influence language progress or evolution.   Did you know there are over 5,000 human languages in the world? Discovering this required focus on the interconnections between different languages in the world and their historical maturity. The thing to remember when it come to languages is, they are always changing and are a dynamic part of culture.
There are a few methods to distinguishing languageā€™s development. The term descriptive linguistics is used to depict a true understanding of changes in language. There are a few different parts to this sub-category that can help when trying to distinguish a language and its development such as phonemes, morphemes, syntax, and other semantic elements. These are the backbone of every language. A morpheme would be the plurality of a noun in the English language, such as dog is to dogs as cat...