Ethnolinguistics

Ethnolinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that studies the relationship between language and culture. It investigates how language both expresses and constructs cultural knowledge, social identity, and worldviews. By analyzing speech styles, designated terms, narratives, and discourse practices, ethnolinguistics seeks to understand how communities categorize the world and conduct social life. The field overlaps with linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics and often emphasizes language as a culturally embedded practice rather than a neutral code.

Methodology includes fieldwork in communities, ethnographic observation, interviews, recording and transcriptions, and analysis of material such as myths, folktales, kinship terms, and ethnoscience vocabularies. Key concepts include ethnolinguistic repertoire (the range of language styles and languages used in a community), language ideologies, and the ways language encodes cultural knowledge in areas like kinship, color terms, ontology, and ritual speech. Topics include language endangerment and revival, multilingualism and code-switching, language contact, naming practices, folk taxonomy, and the social politics of language.

Ethnolinguistics emerged from anthropological and linguistic research in the 20th century and remains closely linked with linguistic anthropology. It informs efforts to document endangered languages, support language education and revitalization, and analyze how discourse reinforces or challenges social hierarchies. The field emphasizes qualitative, ethnographic methods supplemented by linguistic analysis.