ABSTRACT
Linguistic anthropology is a subfield of cultural anthropology, and uses the methodologies of both linguistics and anthropology to comparatively study the languages of the world. Linguistic anthropologists study a large range of topics, including the relationship of language to cognition and concepts of reality. They do comparative studies of core topics in linguistics such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In general, linguistic anthropologists are interested in how language shapes everyday life. The linguistic relativity hypothesis, which was one of the centerpieces of early anthropological linguistics, proposed that people of different cultures think and behave differently because the languages that they speak either impel them to do so or influence them to do so. Language is an important part of the national identity for many ethnic groups. Also, the language that someone speaks in a multinational society or global economy might influence the power that person has.
