Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 53

Linguistic anthropology studies human language, the animal kingdom’s most uniquely powerful — and at the same time subtle — system of communication between individuals.

Language is basically a system of information transmission and reception; humans communicate these messages by sound (speech), by gesture (body language), and in other visual ways such as writing. Because language is one of humanity’s most distinctive characteristics, I devote all of Chapter 13 to a detailed examination of what language is and what we know about how it evolved.

Linguistic anthropology traditionally focuses on several key issues, each resulting from a new research paradigm developed over the last 60 or so years. Interestingly, these interests haven’t steamrolled the previous ones but rather incorporated and complemented earlier types of investigations. The following list details some of those key issues:

 Classification of languages, to identify which languages evolved when and where

 Understanding of language structure, units, and grammar

 Identification of the ways language constructs and reflects identity, ideology, and narratives

Another topic of considerable interest has been when, where, and among what species language first appeared, and how it subsequently evolved. This is one of the great questions of anthropology, but it’s such a massively complex topic that all you really need to know at this level is that, at present, no single model or theory has convinced all anthropologists just how language first evolved. People have presented some compelling theories, but anthropologists are still evaluating them. You can read more about these theories in Chapters 7 and 13.