Unit 9
Ethnolinguistics

Overview

Ethnolinguistics deals with the relationships between the categories of a language and the world views of the people who speak it. The emphasis is on the relationships between people and their physical and cultural environments. The relationship of language to thought and culture is a central concern of ethnolinguistics. The concerns about language and world views, which were first raised by Benjamin L. Whorf in 1941, continue to be debated in the work on language and cognition done today.

Objectives

After completing this unit, you should be able to

1. outline the Whorfian hypothesis.
2. describe what metaphor and extension of meaning tell us about cultural emphasis.
3. explain how taxonomies develop, and describe what they tell us about cultural emphasis.
4. outline four approaches to the study of colour cross-culturally.
5. describe the lexicon of the environment and what it suggests about the people who create and use it.
6. explain what personal names can tell us about the culture of the people who generate and use them.
7. list the six types of kinship terminologies, and describe what they tell us about alternative ways of classifying relatives.