Ethnolinguistics

Ethnolinguistics, that part of anthropological linguistics concerned with the study of the interrelation between a language and the cultural behaviour of those who speak it. Several controversial questions are involved in this field: Does language shape culture or vice versa? What influence does language have on perception and thought? How do language patterns relate to cultural patterns? These questions, which had been posed earlier by the German scholars Johann Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von...