Describe briefly the theoretical perspectives in linguistic anthropology to explain the relationship of culture, language and thought

Boas, Sapir and Whorf

Franz Boas treated language as a window on culture and insisted that each language be described in its own terms. Edward Sapir argued that language is a social guide to reality. Benjamin Lee Whorf, using Hopi and English contrasts, claimed that grammatical categories can channel habitual thought. This is linguistic relativity.

The strong version — language determines thought, so speakers live in sealed worlds — is not accepted. The weak version — language biases attention and memory — still organises research. Colour-term work by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed both universals and language-specific splits, which cooled the strongest Whorfian claims without killing the question.

• Kinship vocabularies are an anthropological example: a language that splits maternal and paternal uncles trains a social eye that English “uncle” blurs. That is culture, language and thought in one kinship term.

Language as social action

• Dell Hymes moved the field from inner thought to the ethnography of speaking: who may speak, in which code, on which occasion. Competence is cultural, not only grammatical. Mikhail Bakhtin (read into anthropology) and later Michael Silverstein treated indexicality: words point to context, rank and identity.

Here thought is less a private mental grammar and more a public skill. A court oath, a Sanskrit verse, factory Hindi, and an English-medium classroom are different speech events in the same country.

Constraint, interaction and practice

Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar is a neighbouring theory of an innate language faculty. Linguistic anthropologists usually reply that the interesting variation for culture sits in use, ideology and socialisation, not only in deep syntax. Elinor Ochs and language-socialisation studies show children acquiring culture as they acquire clauses.

Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of legitimate language links accent to class. Thought here includes what one dares to say.

Emoji, code-mixing, or English-medium schooling are new channels for old questions about whose language counts as knowledge.

How to close the relationship

Language is a cultural system, a cognitive habit and a field of power. Relativity without social use is too mental. Speech-event analysis without cognition is too thin. The relationship is that joint.