While this distinction is neither sharp nor absolute, it is useful and perhaps an example might help in establishing this. Consider the variable pronunciation of the progressive/gerundive ending, so that running can be pronounced [rΛnIŋ] or [rΛnIn] (informally described as “dropping the g,” i.e., “runnin”). If we approach this variable from a sociolinguistic perspective, we will note the correlation between each pronunciation and particular social groupings, for example, the higher frequency of the [In] variant with male speakers, and [Iŋ] with female speakers; or, again, the higher frequency of the [In] variant with speakers of a working or lower‐class background, while higher frequencies of [Iŋ] are correlated with middle and upper‐class backgrounds. Such would be a typical sociolinguistic approach (see, e.g., Labov, 1972). However, an anthropological linguistic approach, while taking note of all these correlations, would ask a further fundamental question: what do speakers mean when they use an [In] versus an [Iŋ] variant? Of course, the answer may vary in different contexts, but one possible answer, following Trudgill (1972), is that the use of [In], considering its link to the social variables of maleness and the working class, could be an assertion of a strong masculine self‐identity. Trudgill (1972) points out that male, middle‐class speakers in Norwich, Britain, often use variables like [In] to stake exactly this claim, regarding the values perceived to be associated with working‐class life, such as toughness, struggles against the odds, and physical labor, as indicative of enhanced masculinity.
Because anthropological linguistics seeks to uncover the meaning behind the uses of language within culture, it also presents some overlap with semantics and pragmatics, particularly the latter. Again, without insisting on sharp boundaries, we can distinguish among these along the following lines. Semantics (Reimer, 2010; Löbner, 2013) is that subfield of linguistics that studies the meanings of signs, their interrelations and combinations, while pragmatics (Cummings, 2005; Huang, 2013), albeit a bit hazy in its own delimitations, investigates how speakers create meaning in context in ongoing acts of language use. In view of its definition offered above, anthropological linguistics can be contrasted with these two other fields by the central role that culture and cultural practices play in its descriptions. Consider the word wampu from the Yimas language of New Guinea, which can be described semantically as polysemous, with the meanings “heart, care, desire.” A pragmatic description will investigate its various uses in differing contexts to determine what extended meanings it can take on in appropriate contextual frames. But an anthropological linguistic description would go farther and explore how this word is central in indigenous conceptualizations of morality and cultural practices of reciprocal gift exchange. Linguistic expressions and metaphors for culturally valorized practices related to generosity and exchange are built on this word (see Kulick, 1992, for similar data). Finally, a detailed anthropological linguistic study will uncover the cultural beliefs and practices which account for why this word has the polysemous meanings it does; what, for instance, connects “heart” with “care” in indigenous ideology?
Humans are by definition social beings and, as emphasized by Geertz (1973), largely fashioned by culture. Culture is transmitted and society reproduced by ongoing interaction between persons. What people do in such ongoing interactions is make meanings, and this process is what we call communication. Cultural practices, then, are nothing other than processes of communication that have become recurrent and stable and hence transmitted across generations, and in so doing, they become prereflective practical ways of doing things, a habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). Anthropological linguistics, then, studies how humans employ these communicative cultural practices, or semiotic practices, as resources to forge large and small, transient or permanent social groups (Agha, 2007). In an insightful overview, Enfield and Levinson (2006) argue that all such communicative practices occur at three levels. The first is an individual‐based “interaction engine.” This is where concerns of anthropological linguistics overlap with cognitive psychology. The “interaction engine” consists of the cognitive and biological abilities that underlie our capacity to communicate, such as the capability to interpret the intentions and mental states of others (the so‐called “theory of mind”; Carruthers & Smith, 1996). Such substrates make all human communication possible. The second is the interpersonal “interaction matrix.” This is an emergent level of behavior formed by coordinated practices of social actors, much of it culturally shaped and habitual, although there are clearly panhuman aspects as well. Examples include turn taking in conversations and other mechanisms studied in conversational analysis (Sacks, 1992; Sidnell & Stivers, 2012). Finally, level three is the sociocultural level proper. Included here are the culturally mandated routines or rituals in which particular types of linguistic practices are selected and sanctioned, such as courtroom summations, divination rituals, political oratory, or barroom chitchat. This is the conventional domain for the notions of register and genre, although the interpersonal moves which actually construct a particular register are features of level two, and the cognitive underpinnings which allow us to interpret the intentions of the speaker in using a particular register belong to level one.
We can usefully look at much of the research work done in anthropological linguistics under the banners provided by this schema of the three levels. The breadth of work in this subfield is enormous, and space will only permit the exploration of a few key illustrative areas. Perhaps the most persistently fascinating area within it has been the question of linguistic relativity, whether features of the language we speak influence our cognition. This is a question that spans levels one and three: whether deeply sedimented features of our conventional publicly shared language developed and transmitted over generations (level three) influence the way we cognize the world, make inferences, or remember information (level one). While this has been an area of vigorous speculation over the centuries, nothing amounting to serious empirical work emerged until recently, and here the focus will be on some pioneering work on the language and cognition of space. Earlier work on spatial cognition assumed it to be strongly informed by innate, presumably biologically based, universals, so that it is essentially the same in all languages and cultures. Given these universal conditions and our ecological niche as terrestrial, diurnal creatures, it is claimed that we are predisposed to conceive of space in relativistic and egocentric terms, projecting out from the anatomical patterns of our bodies. Thus, the coordinates through which spatial orientation are established are projected from ego, the deictic, central reference point for all spatial reckoning, along two horizontal axes and one vertical. The vertical one, drawn from our upright position or, perhaps, the experience of gravity establishes the UP–DOWN axis; the horizontal axes are FRONT–BACK, derived from the anatomically asymmetrical division of the body into two halves, and LEFT–RIGHT, from the symmetrical division. The location of objects in space, then, is always determined relative to the orientation of the speaker: If we are standing eye to eye across from each other, my left is your right. There are no fixed, absolute angles used in human spatial orientation.
Recent research has shown these assumptions to be unfounded. Languages (and speakers) actually differ as to whether they employ this speaker‐centered relative system of LEFT–RIGHT, FRONT–BACK, or an absolute system based on fixed parameters of geographical space like the cardinal directions or landward/seaward or upriver/downriver. Such absolute systems are in fact very common and occur in Aboriginal Australia, Oceania, and Mesoamerica. A particularly striking example is Guugu‐Yimidhirr, of northeastern Australia. This language completely lacks all spatial terms which are relative to body orientation; in particular there are no terms for locating the position of objects in space equivalent to FRONT, BACK, LEFT, RIGHT (e.g., the last two terms can only be used to refer to the left and right hands and perhaps other symmetrical body parts, like eyes, legs, etc.). Rather, the language