This book starts from the assumption that linguistic anthropology is a distinct discipline that deserves to be studied for its past accomplishments as much as for the vision of the future presented in the work of a relatively small but active group of interdisciplinary researchers. Their contributions on the nature of language as a social tool and speaking as a cultural practice have established a domain of inquiry that makes new sense of past and current traditions in the humanities and the social sciences and invites everyone to rethink the relationship between language and culture.

To say that linguistic anthropology is an interdisciplinary field means that it draws a great deal from other, independently established disciplines and in particular from the two from which its name is formed: linguistics and anthropology. In this chapter, I will introduce some aspects of this intellectual heritage – other aspects will be discussed in more depth later in the book. I will also begin to show how, over the last few decades, the field of linguistic anthropology has developed an intellectual identity of its own. It is the primary goal of this book to describe this identity and to explain how it can enhance our understanding of language not only as a mode of thinking but, above all, as a cultural practice, that is, as a form of action that both presupposes and at the same time brings about ways of being in the world.