Language is a means of communication of higher living beings, most developed in humans. Anthropology is a scientific discipline whose independence as a university subject endowed with degrees, chairs and research programs is more than 100 years old.

The construction of our reality (whatever your reality is) is based in the way in which we give value to everything that surrounds us. Language is one way in which we ascribe a shared value to things and actions to make sense of the world.

Anthropology studies our relationship, as societies, with the world that surrounds us, and it recognises language as one of the core generators of shared values (commonly agreed) to understand what, how and why we do what we do as societies.

Please have in mind I am being quite reductive here. For further, and better explained information, I suggest to can refer to the following texts:

- Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, by Alessandro Duranti

- Language and mind, by Noam Chomsky

- Culture, language and personality: Selected essays, by Edward Sapir

- Race, language, and culture, by Franz Boas

Best,

One should know that the term anthropology has a different history and reception in the USA than in Europe, which does not become clear if one simply becomes a few books with the title anthropology. In the European (contintental) understanding, which founded this term about in the 17th century, "ethnology" is much closer to the Anglo-American understanding of anthropology as Social and Cultural Anthropology, represented by Boas, R. Benedict, M. Mead, (polish-english) Malinowski and others - here is term anthropology used in a social and etthnic manner; this is in Germany "Völkerkunde" (ethnology) in the German resp. European understanding, while anthropology as a term has double significance: Anthropology is a dicipline of (natural) science, often as discipline within faculty of medicine: It is the science of the descent of man, in the sense of evolution. But- second - the term anthropology has become more significant as a cross-sectional science - as the totality of knowledge about human knowledge. It had its first heyday after the First World War with works by Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, Helmuth Plessner, Rudolf Portmann and others.

(Following up on comments made by David SPR and C. Lewis K): It can be interesting to look at the way in which languages develop differently according to where they get adopted. For example, Latin evolved into several quite distinct versions - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalán, Italian ... and also Rumanian, which in many ways is somewhat 'distant' from the others. And English has given rise to a number of 'variants' by acquiring new words [and even grammar rules?] in the USA, Australia, South Africa, West Africa, India and southeast Asia. Of course that is [partly?] just a result of languages and cultures with which it has happened to come into contact - but we might also ask if other factors are involved too, which is why linguistic features are an important part of our anthropological studies. The future perfect and pluperfect tenses occur in Modern Arabic - but were not present 1000 years ago. And why is there no pluperfect tense in Russian? ... Because of differences in the concept of Time in those other cultures, perhaps?

"Anthropology" literally means the study of humankind (Gk: anthropos = human), which would imply that any discipline which studies anything human (such as psychology, neuroscience, politics, economics, and of course linguistics) is a subdiscipline within anthropology. That happens to be my view. But anthropology was not always conceived like that. Much early anthropology (especially British) was motivated in part as a study of "other" people to help colonial authorities to manage the "natives". The four "legs" of anthropology (originating with Franz Boas in the USA) were cultural, biological, archaeological, and linguistic. Anthropology today is more commonly thought of as the study of human cultures and societies, and language is of course a cultural and social phenomenon (contra Chomsky). A very influential theory proposed by Emil Durkheim in 1912 held that language could only begin through ritual. Durkhein argued that language differs from all non-human communications in that it refers to things in the mind of the speaker, as opposed to things in the here-and-now which everyone else can perceive directly. Therefore mental contents must be made public through some kind of collective pantomime which everyone understands - that is, ritual. Only then can mental contents be referred to in a language-like way. This idea has evolved into "ritual-speech co-evolution theory". You can't have religion without language, so Durkheim makes ritual the origin of both language and religion, which implies many other features of human culture (excluding e.g. song, dance, and visual art, which I believe had a much earlier origin and are even preconditions for ritual). Thus language is a fundamental part of the study of culture.

What is the relation between language and anthropology?

This question is a good one in this era when scholars are trying to decipher or re-read knowledge produced by the West and on the rest of the world. As one of the respondent of this network said, the language is a tool to access and to acknowledge a reality, either physical, non-physical, or spiritual. The more commodities are indigenously produced, the more words are created to name the given realities. At the same time, the less we create, the less the local language is enriched. So bringing products in a given place/society is, in the long run, a strategy to erase memory unless the place/society of destination indigenizes the commodities by creating words in their own language. To put is differently, preventing indigenous people from producing local devices with their technologies and introducing new devices is one of the causes of disappearance of languages, especially in the areas where colonizers have committed cultural genocides. Once the commodities become obsolete, unused, forgotten, the word used to name them also disappears gradually from the memory of the society. When a society stops inventing devices, it also stops enriching its language. Language is another facet of the production.

The dictionary is the manifestation of the language policy and confers to words their officiality. The colonial powers have reduced the languages of their former colonized to the level of dialect. Though these languages have the same operationality with the ones of the colonizers, they have been neglected along the time while the foreign languages are promoted in schools, churches, administrations. The fact is so important that is why the Canadian French have been trying to look for equivalent words to mean technological devices, tools, habits created by Internet and the information technologies. For instance, ‘’courriel’’, ‘’télécharger’’, téléverser are invented in French to mean respectively ‘’email’’, download, upload, etc. And these words are gradually adopted by French speakers even in France. Up-grade the repertoire of words in a language and by the same time ‘’prohibit’’ the use of other words because they are no more politically correct or that the reality they designated is out-of-date

The ability to speak human language lies in the genome, but must be practiced through use. Anthropology is not an inheritance - that is the difference to language, but a mental construct for the order of facts.

quality need

Language is a means of communication which becomes important in the higher animal world, among primates, but especially in humans through oral and written utterances on the one hand, understanding and precise reaction to this utterance on the other hand.

Three basic functions of language can be distinguished (Organon model according to Karl Bühler).

1/ Function of expression. He calls the sign a symptom for the speaker, because he always reveals something of himself. He conveys, for example, his feelings or opinions.

2/ Communicative function (also called appeal function): Here the speaker (sender) addresses one or more listeners (receivers) by means of linguistic signs. The linguistic sign is directed at the receiver and acts as a signal for him. The request (the linguistic signa) is intended to trigger a reaction in the recipient and to prompt him to do something.

3/ Here the language refers neither to the sender nor to the receiver, but concerns object, facts. This is, through the written fixation of the signs, the basis of culture and the passing on of cultural achievements to subsequent generations.

Language is the main means of communication between human beings and is the most important tool for expressing the civilization and culture of different peoples