Ethnolinguistics

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Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language or group of languages and the cultural behavior of the people who speak those languages.^[1]

It examines how different cultures conceptualize and categorize their experiences, such as spatial orientation and environmental phenomena. Ethnolinguistics incorporates methods like ethnosemantics, which analyzes how people classify and label their world, and componential analysis, which dissects semantic features of terms to understand cultural meanings. The field intersects with cultural linguistics to investigate how language encodes cultural schemas and metaphors, influencing areas such as intercultural communication and language learning.