Folklore, Ethnolinguistics and anthropology ~ University Notes

Folklore

Folklore may be treated as one of the branches of Cultural Anthropology. But it has also been treated as a separate discipline. It is a science "which deals with the survivals of archaic beliefs and customs in civilized peoples. It embraces everything relating to ancient observances and customs, to the notions, beliefs, traditions, superstitions and prejudice of the common people. But also folk tales, songs, legends, myths, proverbs, riddles, folk music and folk dance as well as folk drama belong to the sphere of folklore"

Ethnolinguistics

Another branch of Cultural Anthropology is the Ethnolinguistics which is highly specialized. Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is a field of linguistics which studies the relationship between language and culture, and the way different ethnic groups perceive the world. It is the combination between ethnology and linguistics. The former refers to the way of life of an entire community, i.e., all the characteristics which distinguish one community from the other. Those characteristics make the cultural aspects of a community or a society.

It is the study of human speech and of the various dead and living languages and dialects of the different groups of people of the world. By studying these anthropologist tries to find out the origin and development of the languages and their interrelationships. Then they are classified. The linguist also helps to unveil the men's past and the diffusion of their culture. In the American universities there is a growing trend to establish independent departments of ethnolinguistics. As a science the study of language is somewhat older than Anthropology. The two disciplines become closely associated in the early days of anthropological fieldwork, when anthropologists took the help of linguistics to study unwritten languages. An example is the way spatial orientation is expressed in various cultures. In many societies, words for the cardinal directions east and west are derived from terms for sunrise/sunset. The nomenclature for cardinal directions of Inuit speakers of Greenland, however, is based on geographical landmarks such as the river system and one's position on the coast. Similarly, the Yurok lack the idea of cardinal directions; they orient themselves with respect to their principal geographic feature, the Klamath River