<p>What is the difference between Anthropological Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology? I’m mainly interested in endangered language revitalization. I’m interested in endangered language preservation/documentation as a means to end in terms of revitalization, but not as the be-all, end-all. Does this mean I’m interested in Anthropological Linguistics or Linguistic Anthropology?</p>
<p>The people I know who do what you are interested in come out of Linguistics, not Anthropology. It’s like if your car has a problem. You are mainly interested in getting where you need to go, not in perfecting your car per se. But you take the car to an auto mechanic to get it serviced – you need a car specialist, not a traffic specialist or a specialist on your relationship with your grandmother whom you drive to visit.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that the Linguistics professors who do this work don’t care about the cultures. They do. One of them, for example, whose linguistics work is completely arcane and theoretical, also founded and led the interdisciplinary native peoples studies program at her university. They like spending time in remote places, and meeting with native speakers, and working with the ways in which language and community relate to one another.</p>
<p>Thanks! I just wasn’t really sure of the distinction, or who focuses on revitalization vs documentation.</p>
<p>Revitalization vs. documentation is a false opposition. Documentation is one of the first, critical steps of any revitalization/preservation project. Once the community using a language dips below critical mass, you basically need some kind of academic documentation for people to have any chance of keeping it alive. If it’s not a real, fully functioning language, no one is going to bother with it, and you need to have some way that people can learn it without spending all of their time with fluent native speakers (of whom there may be very few, and some of them old and cranky). So documentation is totally critical. The professor to whom I referred above spent the first half of her academic career working on one native American language, and spent 3-4 months a year living in a tent for a decade. There was tons of politics involved, too. It wasn’t just a question of working alone, she had to get buy-in from the community.</p>
<p>It just occurred to me, but I’m not certain anthropologists feel all that good about deliberately trying to change the communities they are studying, and language revitalization means deliberately trying to change a community.</p>
<p>I understand the inherent necessity of language documentation, but that isn’t all I want to do and I got the impression that anth. linguistics was focused on the documentation, and didn’t go into the revitalization. Good point about anthropologists not wanting to change the community. Hm…</p>