1-What is ethnography?
A branch of anthropology dealing with the scientific description of individual cultures.
2-What is linguistic ethnography (ethnolinguistics)?
The study of language as an aspect or part of culture, especially the study of the influence of language on culture and of culture on language.
3-Who have been the most representative in linguistic ethnography studies?
Edward Sapir. A founder of ethnolinguistics, which considers the relationship of culture to language, he was also a principal developer of the American (descriptive) school of structural linguistics.From 1910 to 1925 Sapir served as chief of anthropology for the Canadian National Museum, Ottawa, where he made a steady contribution to ethnology. Sapir suggested that man perceives the world principally through language. He wrote many articles on the relationship of language to culture.
Franz Boas: the founder of the relativistic, culture-centred school of American anthropology that became dominant in the 20th century. Boas was an innovative and prodigiously productive scholar, contributing equally to statistical physical anthropology, descriptive and theoretical linguistics, and American Indian ethnology, including important studies of folklore and art. Boas established the International Journal of American Linguistics, was one of the founders of the American Anthropological Association, and served as president (1931) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.It is largely because of Boas’s influence that anthropologists and other social scientists from the mid-20th century onward believed that differences among the races were a result of historically particular events rather than physiological destiny and that race itself was a cultural construct.
Benjamin Lee Whorf, under the influence of Edward Sapir, at Yale University, Whorf developed the concept of the equation of culture and language, which became known as the Whorf hypothesis, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
4-Where did ethnographic linguistics has taken the most of research?
Most of the researches of ethnographic linguistics have been made by analizing remote small civilizations.This may be becuase the language of these cultures is not as contaminated by other languages as in other cultures, so they can study it without the influences of other civilizations.
References:
dictionary.com
http://www.uklef.net/linguisticethnography.html http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/523671/Edward-Sapir
