Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
by Daniel L. Everett · Daniel Everett
Everett's account of three decades among the Pirahã of the Amazon, whose language lacks numbers and recursion. Readers see how fieldwork is actually done and why the Pirahã case challenges universal grammar.
This link may earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate disclosure
More resources on Linguistic Anthropology
Miracles of Human Language
Leiden University's Coursera course, taught by Marc van Oostendorp, surveys how human languages differ and what they share, with interviews of native speakers and guest linguists. Completing it gives a working grasp of phonology, morphology, syntax and language typology.
Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Site of the American Anthropological Association section for linguistic anthropology, with news, conference programs, teaching materials, and access to the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Useful for tracking current scholarship and finding practitioners.
Language, Culture, and Society
Standard introductory textbook for linguistic anthropology courses, covering language structure, variation, thought, ideology, and globalization. Students finish able to describe how speech communities encode social identity and how fieldwork on language is conducted.
ethnologue.com
Ethnologue is a comprehensive, searchable database of the world’s living languages, featuring detailed language profiles, language-family classifications, speaker numbers, endangerment status, dialect information, and maps of geographic distribution.
livingtongues.org
Living Tongues is a nonprofit dedicated to documenting endangered languages and supporting language preservation. The site features project overviews, language profiles, multimedia recordings, and resources on language documentation, revitalization, and community language work.