Ethnolinguistics

Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language or group of languages and the cultural practices of the people who speak those languages.

Quotes

• Ethnicity and language are not so easily wedded to an archaeological signature. Material residues as well as the units of analysis in archaeology are too frequently incongruent with what we wish to investigate. The Arab, Turk, and Iranian may share a laundry list of general attributes but they are neither linguistically nor culturally similar entities.
  • ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE The case of the Bronze Age Indo-Iranians by Carl C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, in : Bryant, E. F., & Patton, L. L. (2005). The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history. Routledge.**145

• Contemporary methodologies, linguistic or archaeological, for determining the spoken language of a remote archaeological culture are virtually nonexistent. Simplified notions of the congruence between an archaeological culture, an ethnic group, and a linguistic affiliation millennia before the existence of texts is mere speculation, often with a political agenda. Archaeology has a long way to go before its methodology allows one to establish which cultural markers, pottery, architecture, burials, etc., are the most reliable for designating ethnic identity.
  • Lamberg-Karlovsky, C.C. (2002). Archaeology and Language. Current Anthropology, 43, 63 - 88.

• Linguists too often assign languages to archaeological cultures, while archaeologists are often too quick to assign their sherds a language.
  • Lamberg-Karlovsky, C.C. (2002). Archaeology and Language. Current Anthropology, 43, 63 - 88.

• Denis Sinor (1999:396), a distinguished linguist and historian of Central Asia, takes a position that more might consider: “I find it impossible to attribute with any degree of certainty any given language to any given prehistoric civilization.”
  • Lamberg-Karlovsky, C.C. (2002). Archaeology and Language. Current Anthropology, 43, 63 - 88.
  • Sinor , Denis . 1999. “Some thoughts on the Nostratic theory and its historical implications,” in Nostratic: Examining a linguistic macrofamily. Edited by Colin Renfrew and Daniel Nettle. Cambridge: McDonald Institute.

• Linguists cannot associate an archaeological culture with words, syntax, and grammar, and archaeologists cannot make their sherds utter words.
  • Lamberg-Karlovsky, C.C. (2002). Archaeology and Language. Current Anthropology, 43, 63 - 88.

• In the context of a renewed fashion of relating archaeology, culture, and language it is well to remember that neither sherds nor genes are destined to speak specific languages, nor does a given language require a specific ceramic type or genetic structure.
  • Lamberg-Karlovsky, C.C. (2002). Archaeology and Language. Current Anthropology, 43, 63 - 88.

• It has yet to be demonstrated that language expansions can be traced through similarities in material culture or that a widely distributed culture, existing for a millennium and consisting of substantial variation, means that a population shares a common or related ethnicity.
  • ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE The case of the Bronze Age Indo-Iranians by Carl C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, in : Bryant, E. F., & Patton, L. L. (2005). The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history. Routledge.**157

• A question therefore arises: what is the relevance of archaeological material if any sort of assemblage present at the expected or supposed time/space spot can function as the tag of a linguistic group?
  • The Archaeology of Proto-historic Central Asia and the Problems of Identifying Indo-European and Uralic-speaking Populations. Francfort, H.P. pp. 151-163 in ―Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations, ed. Carpelan, Parpola, Koskikallio Suomalais- Ugrilainen Seura, Helsinki, 2001.. Quoted in Talageri, S. G. (2010). The Rigveda and the Avesta. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987)

Anthony D. Smith (1987). The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: B. Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-16169-4. 

• Examples could be multiplied to show that language, long held to be the main, if not the sole, differentiating mark of ethnicity, is often irrelevant or divisive for the sense of ethnic community.... Yet scholars persist in regarding language as the distinguishing mark of ethnicity, a standpoint that leads to gross simplification and misunderstanding of both ancient and modem periods of ethnic community. ... Besides language is one of most malleable and dependent of cultural categories ... particular linguistic formations are largely the product of the interplay of religion and political organization in a given area. Hence any delineation of the “cultural” aspect of ethnie must include all manifestations of culture and look beneath the immediate and salient sign of communication which a shared language expresses, to the underlying lifestyles and values of a community.
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