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Because anthropology is very broad, it follows that linguistic anthropology also has a
similar wide-ranging scope. Linguistic anthropology is concerned with the consequences of the
process that led to language. As a branch of scientific inquiry, linguistics is different from
linguistic anthropology. How do they differ is one thing we need to learn.

Linguistics versus Linguistic Anthropology

Autonomous linguistics is primarily concerned with language structure while linguistic
anthropology is concerned with speech use and the relations between language and its users
(Stanlaw et al., 2018, p. 24) . Take note of the following statements and tell which ones are
made by linguists and which ones by linguistic anthropologists:
1. Only three vowels occur in native Minasbate words: the high front vowel i, the low
central vowel a, and the high back vowel u.
2. Numerous Minasbate words are borrowed from Spanish.
3. In Minasbate, there are native words for the different colors of fighting cocks (pambulang
na manok), which may suggest the importance of these differences to the cockfighting
aficionados or the sabungeros.
4. Politicians and religious officers like priests and pastors use the language of their
audience when they talk, appeal, or preach to them and this choice is conscious and
deliberate.
The first two sentences are made by linguists while the last two statements are made by
linguistic anthropologists. The key difference is that linguists don’t say much about the users or
speakers of the language they are studying while linguistic anthropologists do. Note that the first
two statement just say something about the sounds and words of the language in question
(Minasbate) but do not mention anything about the speakers of this language. On the other
hand, the last two statements have something to say about the speakers of the language.

Autonomous Linguistics Linguistic Anthropology

The interest of the linguist is primarily on The interest of the linguistic anthropologist is
language structure and less often in language in speech use and the relations that exist
changes over time. between language, on one hand, and its
users, on the other.
Autonomous linguistics focuses on formal Linguistic anthropology focuses on social
structures – the code of language. structures, speakers and language use.
Three Strains of Linguistic Anthropology, and More: Theoretical and Historical
Perspectives

Formal linguistics and linguistic anthropology complement each other (Stanlaw et al., 2018, p.
25). Language teachers need to have some working knowledge of the theories and methods of
these two fields in order to become more effective in their teaching practice. Theories aid in
making sense of the world around us, especially as concerned with the teaching of languages
such as English or Filipino. The following two tables summarize these two fields:

Table 1: TWO MAJOR PARADIGMS AND TRENDS IN MODERN LINGUISTICS

Classic structural linguistics is concerned with the outward manifestations of languages

and proceeds to discover their classifications and connections. Structural linguists were
interested in scientifically and objectively analyzing and describing the world’s languages, as
well as tracing their historical relationships and typologies. They developed extensive
methodologies and tools to find the rules and patterns that governed a language’s sound
system (phonology), word structure (morphology), grammar (syntax), and vocabulary (lexicon);
they also tried to develop ways to find the structure of meaning (semantics). They borrowed
certain ideas from American behaviorist psychology (e.g., stimulus-response learning theory) to
explain language acquisition (Stanlaw et al., 2018, p. 27).
Generative grammar takes the view that there are inherent characteristics of language
and it looks inwardly or to the mental state of the language speaker. Instead of describing the
various structures a language had, we needed to ask what the tacit rules were that allowed
speakers to create and use languages in the first place. If viewed from afar, Chomsky showed
the remarkable similarities shared by all languages (which he sometimes called universal
grammar), even though French might appear to be very different from English on the surface,
especially if a student has a French quiz on Friday. Thus, each native speaker possessed in his
or her head competence in all the aspects of how that language operates. Later called I-
language—the I vaguely standing for all the internalized and intensional knowledge an individual
possesses— this part of language contrasts with E-language, the speech actually produced by
speakers under specific external conditions (the material that often holds the most interest for
linguistic anthropologists). While admitting that people’s manifestations of language can be quite
disparate, Chomsky and his followers believe it is by examining this underlying formal code that
the most important things about language will be revealed. This often is done by giving
informants test sentences (looking for hypothetical underlying rules) and asking them for their
judgments on their acceptability (Stanlaw et al., 2018, p. 27).

Table 2: SOME PARADIGMS AND TRENDS IN LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Americanist anthropological linguistics emphasized the description of the

languages studied. It made linguistics as a tool for cultural and historical analysis. To be
successful, practitioners need a high level of technical linguistic ability. One important
theoretical issue that arose in this climate was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that
“languages provide their native speakers with a set of hard-to-question dispositions (e.g., to
hear only certain sound distinctions, to favor certain classifications, to make certain
metaphorical extensions) that have an impact on their interpretation of reality, and
consequently, on their behavior”(Duranti, 2003).
In the linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics paradigm, Hymes and Gumperz
said that language should be studied in ways very different from those of the Boasians and
Chomskyans. Language must be studied within a social context or situation and go
beyond the study of grammar. Ethnographers need to examine and describe the patterns of
the spoken “speech activity” in the “speech community.” The unit of interest, then, is not the
ideal speaker-listener informant, but the speech community and its speech events. Language
performance is to take precedence over knowledge of a language. Language became not so
much a way to get at cognition (which both Boas and Chomsky believed), but a way to express
social phenomena and social relationships. Language register and language variation—as a
means of seeing how speech practices organize culture and society—came to take precedence
over grammar as a way of seeing how people organize the world.
Social constructivism was called as such by Duranti (2003) because this work focuses
on the role language plays in constituting social encounters. Although speech events
and speech communities are not dismissed, many people working in this tradition are acutely
aware of the interactionism and improvisational aspects of language use. There has been a shift
away from looking at language forms to looking at the way language is involved in symbolic
domination, identity construction, power relations, and other issues of ideology. Some of
the areas of interest are language and gender; performativity (the power of language to effect
change in the world: language does not simply describe the world but may instead [or also]
function as a form of social action) (Cavanaugh, 2015); race and racism; language and space;
temporality; and language use in gay, lesbian, and transgendered communities. As Duranti says
(2003), “The interest in capturing the elusive connection between larger institutional structures
and processes and the ‘textual’ details of everyday encounters (the so-called micro-macro
connection)” has produced a whole range of projects; whereas earlier generations of students
who were interested in “linguistic forms and languages (in the first paradigm) or from their use in
concrete and culturally significant social encounters (in the second), students today typically ask
questions such as ‘What can the study of language contribute to the understanding of this
particular social/cultural phenomena (e.g., identity formation, globalization, nationalism)?’” This
means, then, that linguistic anthropologists today are “using language as a tool for studying
what is already being studied by scholars in other fields” and the rest of anthropology.
In cognitive linguistic anthropology, some of the insights from the new discipline of
cognitive science are influencing research by those working in the linguistic anthropology
tradition. This is not so much a radical departure because, as we saw in our earlier discussions,
an interest in the relationships among language, thought, culture, and mind goes back to the
earliest work of Boas in the early part of the twentieth century, through Sapir and Whorf at the
time of World War II. A cognitive linguistic anthropology could be seen as a way of trying to
connect the mentalism of current Chomskyan autonomous linguistics; the earlier work in
cognitive anthropology of the 1970s; the conceptualizing of speech events of the “second
paradigm”; and the interest in social life, social justice, and social constructivism found in the
“third paradigm.”
A cognitive linguistic anthropology attempts to find patterns of shared cultural
knowledge within and across societies: what people from different groups know and how
this knowledge is conceived, organized, and transmitted linguistically. Both language (and
its formal properties like grammar) and society (and it manifestations like social structure) are
understood as conceptualizations and mental representations. Cognitive linguistic anthropology
interprets language use in terms of concepts—sometimes universal, sometimes culturally
specific. In short, cognitive linguistic anthropology uses language as the doorway to enter
the study of cognition and the study of language-in-use: how people perceive the real physical
world, the constructed social world, and the imagined conceptual world.