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 Humboldt and their followers in the idealist-romanticist tradition, emerged again in the United States as a result of the discovery of the vastly different structure of American Indian languages, as delineated by the American anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin L. Whorf. They noticed, for example, that Eskimo has many words for snow, whereas Aztec employs a single term for the concepts of snow, cold, and ice. The notion that the structure of a language conditions the way in which a speaker of that language thinks is known as the Whorfian hypothesis, and there is much controversy over its validity.