Languages and Their Speakers

Rating:
Summary: Language and culture for beginners or advanced students
Review: This book and the companion volume (Languages and Their Status, also edited by Shopen) provide and excellent introduction to linguistic anthropology through several case studies. Each chapter is written by a different author. The text does not assume any knowledge of linguistics and jargon is kept to a minimum. Each chapter focuses on one language and provides a discussion of a theoretical topic (e.g. morphemes, formality, word order) and several sections presenting a small grammatical "lesson" about the language. Coupled with a discussion of the language's grammatical feautres is a discussion of how native speakers USE the language. Thus the reader gets a nice package of some linguistic theory, grammatical description, and cultural anthropology in each chapter.