ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language.

Anthropological linguistics is concerned with:

• Descriptive (synchronic) linguistics: Describing dialects (forms of a language used by a specific speech community).
• Historical (diachronic) linguistics: Describing changes in dialects and languages over time.
• Ethnolinguistics: Analyzing the relationship between culture, thought, and language.
• Sociolinguistics: Analyzing the social functions of language and the social, political, and economic relationships among and between members of speech communities.

Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology. He was born in Minden, Germany, west of Hannover, and studied physics, geography, and geology at various universities, finishing his Ph.D. in Kiel in 1881. In the holistic tradition established by Franz Boas in the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropology was conceived as comprising four subfields: archaeology, physical (now `biological') anthropology, linguistics (now `linguistic anthropology'), and ethnology (now `sociocultural anthropology'). Boas contributed to all four of his named branches of anthropology, in studies ranging from racial classification to linguistic description focusing primarily on the languages and the peoples of northwestern U.S. and Canada.
Boas is the early-twentieth-century scholar most responsible for discrediting the then-dominant scientific theories of racial superiority. He showed that while culture and language have powerful influences on thought and behavior, they are historically recent and malleable. Even the profoundest differences in language and culture found among the world's peoples, he showed, do not affect the fundamental sameness and equality of human beings.
Boas was appointed lecturer in physical anthropology at Columbia University in 1896. Through his writing and teaching, Boas brought scientific rigor to linguistic description and helped demolish stereotypes about the languages that were then called `primitive.’ during this time Boas played a key role in organizing the American Anthropological Association as an umbrella organization for the emerging field.
In his `Introduction' to the Handbook (1911), Boas provided an overview of the grammatical categories and linguistic units necessary for the analysis of American Indian languages and argued against overgeneralizations that would obscure differences across languages. He identified the sentence (as opposed to the word) as the unit for the expression of ideas, and listed a number of grammatical categories that are likely to be found in all languages, while pointing out that the material content of words (the meaning of lexical items) is language specific and that languages classify reality differently. One language might express the semantic connections among words pertaining to the same semantic field by modifying one basic stem, whereas another language might have words that are etymologically completely unrelated.
His personal research contributions gave him an important place in the history of anthropology. Even Boas has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology.” Although Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, he left it to colleagues and students such as Edward Sapir to research the relationship between culture and language.

Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. His name is borrowed in what is now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.
Sapir was born in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania to an orthodox Jewish family. His family immigrated to New York in the United States in 1888.
His linguistic interests proved to be much broader. In the next two years he took up studies of the Wishram and Takelma languages of Native Americans in southwestern Oregon. In 1909 he received his Ph.D. in anthropology, just emerging as a new field of study.
While a graduate student at Columbia, Sapir met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas. The latter was likely the person who provided the most impetus for Sapir's study of indigenous languages of the Americas.
Sapir's classifies all the languages in North America into only 6 families:

• Eskimo–Aleut
• Algonkin–Wakashan
• Nadene
• Penutian
• Hokan–Siouan
• Aztec–Tanoan.

Sapir's classification (or something derivative) is still commonly used in general languages-of-the-world type surveys.