Linguistic Anthropology

The study of linguistic anthropology is an integral part of the sociocultural anthropology program at the University of Washington. The importance of language in culture cannot be overstated: as a medium of symbolic communication, it enables the existence of culture. Language permeates consciousness and allows people make sense of their world. In using language people not only convey meanings, but also create them.

While no study of society and culture is possible without using and analyzing language, the field of linguistic anthropology explicitly focuses on understanding the power and the constraints of the linguistic medium. Does language shape thought? What cognitive structures are revealed in the ways that people categorize their world? How does language use enact social identities? How does language reinforce social inequalities? How do structures of narratives reveal value systems and efforts to make sense of what has happened? In what ways do unconscious rules of conversation compel people to act in certain ways? How are political, cultural, and economic struggles played out through language use?

The field of linguistic anthropology encompasses all of these questions, and thus includes a wide variety of methodological approaches. While the field of linguistics traditionally treats language as a system separable from its context of social use, it provides a grounding in the structural features of language, which is a prerequisite for study in linguistic anthropology as well. Within linguistics, the subfield of sociolinguistics studies the impact of social factors on linguistic structures and thus has much in common with linguistic anthropology.