Linguistic anthropology
- the study of human speech and language
- linguists have been able to trace historical ties between languages and groups of languages thus facilitating the identification of language families and perhaps past relationships between human populations
- Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes communication, forms social identity and group membership, organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and develops a common cultural representation of natural and social worlds.

There are three paradigms: 

Anthropological linguistics - Documentation of languages thought at the time to be extinct. This focused on grammatical description and Typological classification.


Ethnography - Focusing mainly on speech. More specifically the speech event., which is a situation in which speech may or may not occur.

Issues studied via data and linguistic methods - Investigation of social identities, broadly shared ideologies, and the construction and uses of narrative in interaction among individuals and groups.