Ethnolinguistics incorporates methods like ethnosemantics, which analyzes how people classify and label their world, and componential analysis, which dissects semantic features of terms to understand cultural meanings.
Ethnolinguists study the way perception and conceptualization influences language and show how that is linked to different cultures and societies.
The nomenclature for cardinal directions of Inuit speakers of Greenland, however, is based on geographical landmarks such as the river system and one's position on the coast.
[citation needed] Similarly, the Yurok lack the idea of cardinal directions; they orient themselves with respect to their principal geographic feature, the Klamath River.
[5] Ethnosemantics, also called ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology, is a method of ethnographic research and ethnolinguistics that focuses on semantics[6] by examining how people categorize words in their language.
Anthropologists who utilize ethnosemantics to create these models believe that they are a representation of how speakers of a particular language think about the topic being described.
[7] In one section of Oscar Lewis' La Vida, he includes the transcript of an interview with a Puerto Rican woman in which she discusses a prostitute's social world.