Anthropology of Language

For the inaugural virtual issue of American Anthropologist, editor Tom Boellstorff created "The Anthropology of Language". The broad theme allows readers to track ways in which language has been central to anthropological inquiry from its beginnings but in differing ways over the years and with differing linkages to other domains of anthropological scholarship. The virtual issue includes 86 articles from 1888 (On the Chane-Abal (Four-Language) Tribe and Dialect of Chiapas by Daniel G. Brinton) until 2010 (Traces of a Lost Language and Number System Discovered on the North Coast of Peru by Jeffrey Quilter). In the years between issues such as language and gender, identity (transformation), race, citizenship, ideology and many more are presented and discussed by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, B.L. Whorf, Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Del Hymes, Erving Goffman, Wiliam Labov, Emanuel A. Schegloff, Allessandro Duranti and many others. Their articles can be downloaded for free.

Boellstorff's goal with this virtual issue is to identify some signal contributions to the anthropological conversation on language so as to build interest in that conversation as it continues to flourish into the future.