Anthropological linguistics is one of many disciplines which studies the role of languages in the social lives of individuals and within communities.
[4] In the 1960s and 1970s, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics were often viewed as one single field of study, but they have since become more separate as more academic distance has been put between them.
Study of the Penan people, for instance, reveals that their language employs six different and distinct words whose best English translation is "we".
[2] Indexicality refers to language forms that is tied to meaning through association of specific and general, as opposed to direct naming.
For example, an anthropological linguist may utilize indexicality to analyze what an individual's use of language reveals about his or her social class.
[2] Anthropological linguistics is largely interpretative, striving to determine the significance behind the use of language through its forms, registers, and styles.
[1] Sociolinguistics instead examines how language relates to various social groups and identities like race, gender, class, and age.
[8] Morphology looks broadly at the connection of word forms within a specific language in relation to the culture or environment it is rooted within.
There are two major trends in the theoretical and methodological study of attitudes in the social sciences - mentalist and behaviorist.
A special adaptation of this technique, called mirror image, appears promising for measuring consensual evaluations of language switching at the situational level.
[13] In anthropological linguistics, code-switching has been approached as a structurally unified phenomenon whose significance comes from a universal pattern of relationships between form, function, and context.