In one Papua New Guinea village, choosing a language means choosing an identity
Children in Gapun hear two tongues: Taiap, spoken nowhere else on Earth, and Tok Pisin, the national lingua franca. Speaking the first signals local pride and personal autonomy but also being backward; the second signals a modern, Catholic, cooperative self. Linguistic anthropologists study exactly this kind of hidden social work done by speech.
Linguistic anthropology asks how language shapes social life: how it builds group membership, carries ideologies and gives a community a shared picture of the natural and social world. It began as an effort to record endangered languages and has widened over roughly a century to cover almost every aspect of how language is structured and used.
Three approaches grew up in sequence and all survive. The earliest, called anthropological linguistics, concentrated on documenting languages at risk of dying out, especially those of Native North American peoples, and stayed closest to technical linguistics. Swapping the word order marks the second approach. Dell Hymes favoured the name linguistic anthropology and, with John Gumperz, developed the ethnography of communication, which studies speech in its real setting and community, helped along by new tools such as mechanical recording.
Hymes argued on two fronts. He faulted folklorists for fixating on oral texts instead of the artistry of live performance, and he resisted the cognitive turn in linguistics led by Noam Chomsky, insisting on language as it is actually used. His new unit of study was the speech event, an occasion like a lecture or debate where talk runs throughout, as opposed to a speech situation such as dinner where talk merely might happen. Ironically, his hope of drawing the subfield closer to anthropology backfired and pushed it further away.
A third approach, from the late 1980s, flips the priority and uses linguistic tools to probe anthropological questions such as identity and storytelling, often with heavy use of video. Don Kulick's Gapun research is one example. In later work he showed how Brazilian travesti sex workers use loud public scenes, known as um escândalo, to shame clients and push back against the stigma society directs at them.
Source: Linguistic anthropology
