As humans, our lives are permeated by language. It
constitutes every telephone call, face-to-face interaction
as well as each email we send and billboard we read.
Language, however, is about more than communicating ideas,
it is also about how language creates identity,
relationships, gender and the like. Linguistic
anthropology focuses on the role of language in everyday
and not so everyday social interactions. For linguistic
anthropologists, language is best viewed as a
fundamentally social action, one with real world
consequences. By taking this perspective, linguistic
anthropology provides opportunities to investigate what
may be the most common of all social practices: language
use.
In order to comprehend language as an
inherently social practice, linguistic anthropology builds
upon methods in cultural anthropology and descriptive
linguistics. Linguistic anthropologists work with
specific communities to understand their cultural as well
as linguistic practices, yet they also bring with them
knowledge of language as a formal system. Bringing
together these two perspectives, linguistic anthropology
is uniquely situated to understand speakers and writers as
social actors by examining linguistic structures that are
grounded in specific sociohistorical contexts.
As an interdisciplinary field, linguistic anthropology at
UNLV draws from faculty in cultural anthropology as well
as linguists in the departments of philosophy, English,
and foreign languages. Overseeing the linguistic
anthropology program is Dr.
Swank, who is both a linguist and an
anthropologist by training. Her research focuses on
everyday written language in the form of text messages and
poetry as well as indigenous education systems and popular
culture, taking these as the springboard for understanding
youth. In her work, she has also explored the ways in
which video, databases, and digital media can be used for
linguistic anthropological fieldwork and analysis. The
program in linguistic anthropology at UNLV provides
students with hands-on training and accessible faculty to
enable students to achieve their own educational and
research goals.