ABSTRACT
The discipline of linguistics emerged in the nineteenth century as an autonomous science of language. One of its main branches is sociolinguistics, which studies the relation of language to social systems, ideas, and behaviors; another one is linguistic anthropology (originally called anthropological linguistics), which studies how language, mind, and culture interact to produce people’s beliefs and worldviews. This chapter looks at what both these branches are about and what kinds of research method they utilize to gather relevant data. The contemporary sociolinguist focuses on how language units underlie and reveal details of social and cultural systems. The ideas presented here are discussed in a schematic way. Many of these are developed and illustrated in subsequent chapters.
