Language and culture: Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language endangerment, code-switching
Anchor (Master): Sapir, E. — Language (1921)
Intuition Beginner
Does the language you speak shape the way you think? Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf argued yes — that language structures perception and thought. This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity. The strong version (language determines thought) has been rejected — bilingual people do not become different people when switching languages. But the weak version (language influences thought) has support: Russian speakers, who have separate words for light and dark blue, are faster at distinguishing those shades.
Languages also encode cultural values. Some require speakers to mark social hierarchy in every sentence (Japanese honorifics); others mark whether you saw something yourself or heard about it (Tuyuca evidential markers). About 7,000 languages are spoken today, but half could disappear this century. When a language dies, an entire way of understanding the world dies with it. Revitalization efforts — like Hawaiian immersion schools and the Wampanoag language rebirth — show that languages can be brought back from the edge.
Speakers who know more than one language often code-switch, moving between languages or varieties within a single conversation. Code-switching is not confused or sloppy speech. It is a skilled practice that signals identity, shifts the tone, and fits the right word to the moment. A bilingual speaker might tell a joke in one language and explain it in another, weaving both into one act of communication.
Visual Beginner
| Version of Sapir-Whorf | Claim | Current standing |
|---|---|---|
| Strong (linguistic determinism) | Language determines what is thinkable | Largely rejected |
| Weak (linguistic relativity) | Language influences habitual thought and perception | Supported by evidence |
| Endangerment class (Krauss 1992) | Definition |
|---|---|
| Safe | All children learn it; population stable |
| Endangered | Children no longer learning it as first language |
| Moribund | Only older adults speak it |
| Extinct | No fluent speakers remain |
| Code-switching type | Definition |
|---|---|
| Situational | Switch follows a change in setting or participants |
| Metaphorical | Switch carries symbolic or rhetorical force |
| Conversational | Switch woven into the flow of talk itself |
Worked example Beginner
Example 1: Russian blue and the weak hypothesis
Different languages carve up the colour spectrum differently. English treats light blue and dark blue as one colour, blue. Russian splits them into two basic colours: goluboy (light blue) and siniy (dark blue). Does this change perception? In timed tests, Russian speakers spot the difference between cross-boundary blues faster than English speakers do. Their language has trained a habit of attention. This supports the weak Sapir-Whorf claim: language nudges perception rather than locking it in.
Example 2: Guugu Yimithirr and absolute direction
Most English speakers give directions using left, right, front, and back — terms that depend on which way you face. Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian Aboriginal language, use fixed compass directions instead: north, south, east, west. To speak it at all, you must always know where north is. Speakers develop a remarkable sense of absolute orientation, keeping their bearings even in unfamiliar places. The grammar demands a constant awareness of direction that English never requires.
Example 3: code-switching at a family table
A Puerto Rican family in New York might speak Spanish at the dinner table, switch to English when a teacher calls, and mix both within a single sentence when teasing a cousin. This is code-switching. John Gumperz showed that each switch carries social meaning — it can quote someone, shift the mood, or mark who is included in the conversation. Far from broken speech, code-switching requires command of both languages and follows strict grammatical rules.
Check your understanding Beginner
Formal definition Intermediate+
Linguistic relativity: strong and weak versions
Edward Sapir treated language as a guide to social reality, arguing that human beings are "very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society." His student Benjamin Lee Whorf developed these claims through study of Hopi, proposing that Hopi conceptualizes time differently from the objectifying, countable time encoded in Indo-European languages. Whorf's "empty gasoline drums" example argued that the label "empty" leads workers to treat dangerous fume-filled drums as harmless, illustrating how grammatical and lexical categories shape perception and action.
The strong version, linguistic determinism, holds that language determines thought and renders certain concepts unthinkable. It has been largely abandoned: speakers of any language can express any idea, even by borrowing or circumlocution, and bilinguals do not become cognitively different people when switching tongues. The weak version, linguistic relativity, holds that language influences habitual patterns of attention, memory, and categorization. This version has accumulated substantial experimental support across colour, space, number, and grammatical-gender domains.
Colour term research
Berlin and Kay's 1969 study of basic colour terms found a constrained universal sequence: all languages have terms for dark and light; a third term, if present, is red; further terms accrue in a predictable order. This challenged strong relativism by revealing universal perceptual constraints. Kay and Kempton then showed that Tarahumara speakers, whose language does not separate green and blue, categorize the boundary differently from English speakers. Winawer and colleagues demonstrated that Russian speakers discriminate across the goluboy/siniy boundary faster than within a single category, an advantage English speakers lack. Language thus tunes the speed and salience of perceptual discrimination without determining what can be seen.
Spatial frames of reference and grammatical gender
Stephen Levinson's work on Guugu Yimithirr and related languages showed that speakers of absolute-frame languages (using cardinal directions) maintain a near-constant sense of orientation that speakers of relative-frame languages (using left/right) do not. Lera Boroditsky found that the grammatical gender of nouns in Spanish and German influenced speakers' object associations: a "key," masculine in German and feminine in Spanish, was described with different adjective clusters by each group. These effects are modest and context-dependent, but they recur across carefully matched tasks.
Number systems
The Piraha of Amazonia, studied by Daniel Everett, have limited exact number words. Michael Gordon's discrimination tasks showed that Piraha speakers performed well on approximate quantity but struggled with exact matching beyond small numerosities. The Munduruku show similar approximate competence without exact arithmetic. These findings support the view that exact number cognition depends in part on the linguistic resources a language provides, while approximate magnitude perception is independent of language.
Speech acts
J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words argued that utterances do more than describe: they perform actions. A judge saying "I sentence you" does not report a sentencing but enacts one. Austin distinguished the locutionary act (saying something), the illocutionary act (what is done in saying it — promising, ordering, warning), and the perlocutionary act (the effect achieved — persuading, frightening). John Searle systematized this into a taxonomy of speech acts — assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations — providing analytic tools for ritual, law, and everyday interaction.
The ethnography of communication and politeness
Dell Hymes's SPEAKING model (Setting, Participants, Ends, Act sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genre) frames any communicative event as a structured social occasion. It shifted linguistic study from isolated sentences to situated practice and introduced communicative competence — knowing when to speak, how to be polite, and what register fits the moment. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson built on this with politeness theory, positing that every interactant has positive face (the desire for approval and connection) and negative face (the desire for autonomy and freedom from imposition). Face-threatening acts prompt strategies ranging from bald-on-record delivery through positive and negative politeness to off-record indirection.
Code-switching
John Gumperz distinguished situational code-switching (tied to a change in setting or participants) from metaphorical code-switching (carrying symbolic meaning within a single situation). His conversational analysis showed that bilinguals switch to quote, signal identity, shift footing, or manage inclusion and exclusion. Carol Myers-Scotton's markedness model treated the unmarked code as the expected choice and switches as negotiations of social rights and obligations. Peter Auer's sequential analysis examined how switches organize turn-by-turn interaction. In education, code-meshing (advocated by Young and Martinez) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Students' Right to Their Own Language challenge the insistence on a single standard, arguing that fluent multilingual practice should be valued rather than corrected away.
Language endangerment: classification and causes
Michael Krauss's 1992 classification sorted languages as safe, endangered, moribund, or extinct. UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger places roughly 2,500 languages at risk. The causes are systemic: globalization, state language policies that privilege a single national language, urbanization, and the dominance of major languages in media and employment. Parents may stop transmitting a heritage language because the dominant language appears to offer better prospects. The result is shift within a single generation. The consequences extend beyond communication: endangered languages often encode detailed ecological knowledge — plant classifications, seasonal calendars, land-management practices — that disappears with the last speakers. Luisa Maffi's work on biocultural diversity frames language loss and knowledge loss as a single process.
Key result: linguistic relativity and its empirical test Intermediate+
The central, testable claim of this unit is the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the grammatical and lexical categories of a language measurably influence the habitual thought of its speakers. The strong version — that language determines thought — is rejected because speakers can entertain and express any concept regardless of their language. The weak version survives because converging experiments show that language tunes attention, memory, and categorization in reproducible ways.
The evidence is strongest in four domains. In colour, Berlin and Kay established universal constraints on basic term evolution, while Winawer's Russian-blue experiments showed that lexical category boundaries accelerate perceptual discrimination. In space, Levinson demonstrated that speakers of absolute-frame languages maintain orientation skills absent in relative-frame speakers. In number, Gordon's Piraha tasks showed that exact quantity discrimination depends in part on the availability of counting words. In grammatical gender, Boroditsky showed that noun gender shapes object association. These effects are modest, context-dependent, and bidirectional — thought also reshapes language — but they are not zero.
The principal criticism is methodological: separating linguistic effects from cultural and ecological ones is hard, and much evidence comes from laboratory settings that may not reflect everyday cognition. Geoffrey Pullum's "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" essay warned against exaggerating the evidence (the claim that Inuit have hundreds of snow words is a myth). Yet the field has become rigorously experimental. Lucy's 1992 methodology set standards for matched comparison, and recent cognitive-anthropology and psycholinguistics continue to find effects. The current consensus: language is one tool among several — alongside perception, embodiment, and culture — that shapes how humans think.
Exercises Intermediate+
Advanced results Master
Linguistic relativity revisited
John Lucy's 1992 Language Diversity and Thought set methodological standards for testing relativity, demanding matched comparison across grammatical categories rather than isolated vocabulary. Subsequent work refined the picture: Wolff and Medlin retested colour memory against Kay's findings; Daniel Casasanto examined motion in language and mind; Boroditsky extended relativity to spatial metaphors for time, finding that Mandarin speakers — whose language can represent time vertically — show vertical time associations absent in English speakers. Gary Lupyan framed the "paradox of linguistic relativity": language is both shaped by cognition and a tool that reshapes it, acting as context that tunes online processing.
The strong-determinist reading has been dismantled. Pullum's "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" exposed how a careless claim about Inuit snow words became an urban legend inflated far beyond the evidence. Yet relativity survives in experimental form. Gentner and Goldin-Meadow's Language in Mind collected converging evidence that language categories guide reasoning about space, time, number, and agency. The contemporary field treats language as one factor among several — embodied cognition, perception, and culture all interact — and cognitive anthropology now meets psycholinguistics through shared experimental methods.
Indexicality and the total linguistic fact
Michael Silverstein argued that language is not only referential (describing the world) but indexical (pointing to features of the context of utterance). Indexical signs, or "shifters" — pronouns, tense, honorifics, demonstratives — take their meaning from the situation of use: "I" designates whoever is speaking, "here" wherever they stand. Silverstein's metapragmatics analysed how speakers use such forms to signal identity, status, stance, and relationship. The total linguistic fact, in Hymes's and Silverstein's sense, treats any utterance as simultaneously structured form, ideologically loaded meaning, and social practice. This three-part view anchors contemporary linguistic anthropology.
Language ideology
Language ideologies are the culturally shared beliefs about what language is, what counts as proper speech, and how language links to social identity. The Schieffelin-Woolard-Kroskrity volume Regimes of Language established the field. Judith Irvine and Susan Gal's concept of iconization explains how a linguistic feature comes to stand for an inherent property of its speakers: an accent is heard not as a habit but as a sign of intelligence or its absence. Jane Hill's analyses of mock Spanish — casual Anglo uses of "no problemo" or "hasta la vista" — showed how dominant-group appropriation of minority-language forms reproduces racial hierarchy even in seemingly harmless jokes. Mary Bucholtz traced how white "nerd" identity is built through deliberate linguistic self-fashioning, and Webb Keane examined language and modernity in Sumba. Joel Kuipers and others have shown how ideologies about correctness, purity, and authenticity shape which varieties are valued and which are stigmatized.
Language and race
The study of language and race has become central. Hill's "Language, Race, and White Public Space" argued that white linguistic norms are treated as neutral and unmarked, while the speech of racialized groups is marked as deviant. H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman's Articulate While Black analysed Barack Obama's skilful movement across varieties as a model of how race shapes the reception of language. Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores developed the concept of raciolinguistic ideologies: language and race are co-constructed, so that the speech of racialized speakers is heard as deficient regardless of its actual features. Their argument about the "white listening subject" holds that the listener's racial frame, not the speaker's grammar, drives judgements of deficiency. Rosa and Flores's call to "undo appropriateness" challenges the assumption that standard-language norms are neutral. Bonnie Urciuoli's work on language, race, and class borders showed how institutions gate-keep through speech norms.
Ethnographic methods in linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology has long relied on close ethnographic attention to language in use. John Haviland's work on Tzotzil showed how gesture integrates with speech to build spatial meaning. Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin founded the study of language socialization, demonstrating that children learn culture and language together through caregiver interaction. Don Kulick's Gapun study traced language shift from Taiap to Tok Pisin, showing how decisions about which language to speak to children reshape a community within a generation. Laura Ahearn's Invitations to Love connected literacy and changing courtship practices in Nepal. Jack Sidnell and conversation analysts brought fine-grained sequential study of talk-in-interaction into anthropology, revealing the orderly machinery of everyday exchange.
Language documentation and revitalization
Nikolaus Himmelmann distinguished language documentation (creating lasting records — audio, video, annotated texts) from language description (grammars and dictionaries). Both are needed for endangered languages. Claire Bowern's fieldwork guides and Nicholas Evans's Dying Words argued that each vanishing language carries unique analytical value. Funding programmes such as ELDP, DoBeS, and NSF-DEL have built corpora housed in archives like AILLA and PARADISEC. Ethnobiological work by Luisa Maffi and others links language to traditional ecological knowledge. Community-based language research, articulated by Margaret Czaykowska-Higgins, places the speech community's priorities at the centre: decisions about what to document, who controls access, and how materials are used belong to the community. Grassroots reclamation is anchored in the Native American Languages Act of 1990 and visible in the Cherokee immersion school, the Blackfeet programs, and the Mohawk Akwesasne Freedom School.
Successful revitalization takes varied forms. Hebrew is the only fully revived liturgical-to-vernacular language, rebuilt through Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's late-nineteenth-century efforts and the institutions of twentieth-century settlement. Maori kohanga reo (language nests) immerse preschool children with elders. Hawaiian Punana Leo schools rebuilt a fluent generation from a few dozen native speakers. Welsh language policy combined education, broadcasting, and official status. The Wampanoag reclamation, led by Jessie Little Doe Baird, revived a "sleeping" language with no native speakers using colonial-era documentation, demonstrating that even languages without living speakers can be brought back through archival recovery and community commitment.
Multilingualism and globalization
Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook's Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages challenged the very idea that languages are bounded, nameable units, arguing that the named-language concept is a political artefact. Ofelia Garcia and Li Wei's translanguaging framework treats speakers as drawing on a single integrated repertoire rather than switching between discrete systems. Translanguaging in education (Blackledge and Creese) builds pedagogy on this insight. Jan Blommaert and Steven Vertovec's work on superdiversity describes the intense multilingual patterning of global cities, where mobility produces complex repertoires rather than stable bilingualism. Blommaert's "language on the move" treats speech as shaped by the trajectories of its speakers across borders.
Sign languages
William Stokoe's 1960 analysis proved that American Sign Language is a full language with its own phonology, syntax, and semantics. Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima extended the linguistic analysis of ASL. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries's Deaf in America framed Deaf communities as linguistic and cultural minorities. Harlan Lane's Mask of Benevolence critiqued oralism — the insistence that deaf children learn speech rather than sign — as an ideology that suppressed a language. H-Dirksen Bauman and Joseph Murray's Deaf Gain reframed deafness as cultural and linguistic difference rather than deficit. The emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language in the late twentieth century, studied by Judy Kegl and Ann Senghas, offered a rare observed case of a new language forming within a generation. Village sign languages such as Kata Kolok and Adamorobe Sign Language show distinct endangerment dynamics, since their survival depends on local intergenerational transmission.
Writing systems
Florian Coulmas and Geoffrey Sampson provided systematic surveys of writing systems. Stephen Houston's The First Writing examined the independent origins of writing in Mesopotamia (cuneiform), Egypt (hieroglyphs), China (characters), and Mesoamerica (Maya glyphs); the Indus script remains undeciphered. Decipherment is its own history: Jean-Francois Champollion decoded Egyptian hieroglyphs through the Rosetta Stone; Michael Ventris and John Chadwick cracked Linear B; Yuri Knorosov, with later work by Stephen Houston and David Stuart, advanced the reading of Maya glyphs. Jack Goody's argument that literacy is a technology that reorganizes thought was challenged by Brian Street's "ideological" model of literacy, which treats reading and writing as socially embedded practices. David Barton and Mary Hamilton documented vernacular literacies — the reading and writing people do in everyday life — showing that literacy is plural, not singular.
Connections Master
Connections to cognitive science and psychology
The experimental study of linguistic relativity links linguistic anthropology to cognitive science. Findings on colour, space, number, and gender provide cross-cultural evidence that bears on theories of cognitive architecture, testing universalist claims against the diversity of human languages. The convergence of cognitive anthropology and psycholinguistics has made relativity a shared laboratory problem.
Connections to education
Code-switching and code-meshing research connects directly to pedagogy. The mismatch between students' home varieties and the standard required at school produces inequality that linguistic anthropology helps diagnose. Translanguaging pedagogy and the Students' Right to Their Own Language tradition argue for building on students' full repertoires rather than correcting them toward a single standard, with measurable consequences for achievement and identity.
Connections to sociolinguistics and linguistic theory
Speech act theory, politeness theory, and the ethnography of communication inform both sociolinguistic fieldwork and formal linguistic pragmatics. The study of language ideologies bridges to variationist sociolinguistics by explaining why certain variants are stigmatized and how those judgements reproduce hierarchy. Conversation analysis, shared across the disciplines, supplies the methods for studying talk-in-interaction.
Connections to law and public policy
Language rights — the right to interpretation, to education in one's own language, and to official recognition — are grounded in the analysis of language ideology and raciolinguistics. Forensic linguistics applies speech-act and discourse analysis to legal settings, while language-revitalization policy draws on documentation and community-based research to shape legislation such as the Native American Languages Act.
Connections to ecology and biocultural diversity
The biocultural-diversity framework links language endangerment to environmental loss. Traditional ecological knowledge encoded in indigenous languages — species classifications, agricultural calendars, fire and water management — is increasingly recognized in conservation science, tying linguistic anthropology to ecology and climate research.
Historical and philosophical context Master
Boas, Sapir, and the relativist program
Franz Boas established that each language must be described on its own terms, refusing to force Native American languages into Indo-European categories. Edward Sapir, his student, extended this into a theory of language as a guide to thought. Sapir's 1921 Language remains a foundational text, pairing rigorous description with wide-ranging theory. Benjamin Lee Whorf, a fire-prevention engineer by trade and a linguist by vocation, developed the relativist program through study of Hopi and Uto-Aztecan languages, arguing that grammatical categories encode worldviews. The strong reading of their work — that language imprisons thought — oversimplifies what Sapir and Whorf actually wrote, but it was this exaggerated form that later scholars tested and rejected.
From structuralism to the ethnography of communication
Saussurean structuralism treated language as a system of differences, an approach the Prague School extended into phonology. Mid-century American linguistics, dominated by Chomsky's generative program, prioritized an innate universal grammar and an idealized speaker-listener. Dell Hymes challenged this abstraction, arguing that communicative competence — knowing how to use language in social context — is as fundamental as grammatical competence. Hymes's program became the ethnography of communication and the seed of contemporary linguistic anthropology, reuniting language study with social context.
The relativity debate in the laboratory
The strong relativism of the mid-twentieth century was widely dismissed in the Chomskyan era, when universality dominated. Berlin and Kay's 1969 colour-term sequence seemed to confirm universalism. Yet the later experimental work of Kay, Levinson, Boroditsky, and Winawer reopened the question with tighter methods, producing the present consensus on weak relativity. Lucy's 1992 methodology and Lupyan's reframing have kept the debate empirical rather than ideological.
Language ideology, race, and the critical turn
From the 1990s, linguistic anthropology took a critical turn toward ideology, power, and race. The Schieffelin-Woolard-Kroskrity volume on language ideologies, Hill's work on mock Spanish and white public space, and the raciolinguistic program of Rosa and Flores shifted the field toward analyzing how language is made to bear social meaning that justifies inequality. This turn linked linguistic anthropology to critical race theory and to the political economy of language.
Documentation, revitalization, and the ethics of the archive
The acceleration of language loss in the late twentieth century prompted a documentation movement. Himmelmann's distinction between documentation and description, the founding of ELDP and DoBeS, and the growth of archives such as AILLA and PARADISEC institutionalized the field. Alongside this came an ethical reckoning: who owns linguistic data, who controls access, and who decides whether revitalization is wanted. The community-based research model and the Native American Languages Act of 1990 codified the principle that speech communities, not outside researchers, must lead. Revitalization successes — Hebrew, Maori, Hawaiian, Welsh, Wampanoag — demonstrate that language death is not always irreversible, even when it often is.
Bibliography Master
Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Harcourt, Brace.
Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings (J. B. Carroll, ed.). MIT Press.
Boas, F. (1911). Handbook of American Indian Languages (Part 1). Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge University Press.
Myers-Scotton, C. (1993). Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford University Press.
Auer, P. (ed.) (1998). Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity. Routledge.
Berlin, B. and Kay, P. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press.
Kay, P. and Kempton, W. (1984). "What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?" American Anthropologist, 86(1), 65-79.
Winawer, J. et al. (2007). "Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 7780-7785.
Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge University Press.
Boroditsky, L. (2001). "Does Language Shape Thought? Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of Time." Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1-22.
Everett, D. L. (2005). "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language." Current Anthropology, 46(4), 621-646.
Gordon, P. (2004). "Numerical Cognition without Words: Evidence from Amazonia." Science, 306(5695), 496-499.
Lucy, J. A. (1992). Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge University Press.
Pullum, G. K. (1991). "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 7, 275-281. (Reprinted in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays, University of Chicago Press, 1991.)
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, M. (1976). "Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description." In Basso and Selby (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology, pp. 11-55. University of New Mexico Press.
Schieffelin, B. B., Woolard, K. A., and Kroskrity, P. V. (eds.) (1998). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford University Press.
Irvine, J. T. and Gal, S. (2000). "Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation." In Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language, pp. 35-83. School of American Research Press.
Hill, J. H. (2008). The Everyday Language of White Racism. Wiley-Blackwell.
Bucholtz, M. (2001). "The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11(1), 84-100.
Alim, H. S. and Smitherman, G. (2012). Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. Oxford University Press.
Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017). "Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective." Language in Society, 46(5), 621-647.
Urciuoli, B. (1995). "Language and Borders." Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 525-546.
Krauss, M. (1992). "The World's Languages in Crisis." Language, 68(1), 4-10.
Himmelmann, N. P. (1998). "Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics." Linguistics, 36(1), 161-195.
Bowern, C. (2008). Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide. Palgrave Macmillan.
Evans, N. (2010). Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Wiley-Blackwell.
Maffi, L. (ed.) (2001). On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment. Smithsonian Institution Press.
Czaykowska-Higgins, E. (2009). "Research Models, Community Engagement, and Linguistic Fieldwork." Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 152-165.
Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (eds.) (2007). Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Multilingual Matters.
Garcia, O. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Wiley-Blackwell.
Wei, L. (2018). "Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language." Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9-30.
Stokoe, W. C. (1960). Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf. University of Buffalo.
Padden, C. and Humphries, T. (1988). Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Harvard University Press.
Bauman, H-D. L. and Murray, J. M. (eds.) (2014). Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity. University of Minnesota Press.
Senghas, R. J., Senghas, A., and Pyers, J. E. (2005). "The Making of Nicaraguan Sign Language." Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(9), 431-436.
Coulmas, F. (2003). Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis. Cambridge University Press.
Houston, S. (ed.) (2004). The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge University Press.
Goody, J. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge University Press.
Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press.
Sapir, E. (1929). "The Status of Linguistics as a Science." Language, 5(4), 207-214.