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The attempt to systematize language—to objectify, idealize and abstract it into a static set of rules and conventions for signification—is falsely posited as a descriptive or scientific activity, when in reality it is a form of socio-political activism. [7] According to Bakhtin, language is always a multiplicity of languages.
Language ideology (also known as linguistic ideology) is, within anthropology (especially linguistic anthropology), sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural studies, any set of beliefs about languages as they are used in their social worlds. Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices.
The term antonym (and the related antonymy) is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite, but antonym also has other more restricted meanings. Graded (or gradable) antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum (hot, cold).
Also called humanocentrism. The practice, conscious or otherwise, of regarding the existence and concerns of human beings as the central fact of the universe. This is similar, but not identical, to the practice of relating all that happens in the universe to the human experience. To clarify, the first position concludes that the fact of human existence is the point of universal existence; the ...
The essays of Paul Graham explore similar themes, such as a conceptual hierarchy of computer languages, with more expressive and succinct languages at the top. Thus, the so-called blub paradox (after a hypothetical programming language of average complexity called Blub) says that anyone preferentially using some particular programming language ...
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.
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. Ethnosemantics studies the way people label and classify the cultural, social, and environmental phenomena in their world and ...
The language–species analogy nonetheless continues to enjoy popularity in linguistics and other human sciences. [51] Since the 1990s there have been numerous attempts to revive it in various guises. As Jamin Pelkey explains, Theorists who explore such analogies usually feel obliged to pin language to some specific sub-domain of biotic growth.