Anthropological linguistics is perhaps a branch of linguistic anthropology, however, it inverts the usual study of humans through the languages they use, to study language through human genetics and human development - thus it is properly a branch of linguistics more than anthropology.

It has had a major impact in the studies of visual perception (especially colour) and bioregional democracy, both of which are concerned with distinctions that are made in languages about perceptions of the environment.

Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and self-organization of peoples. Study of the Penan people, for instance, reveals that they have six different and distinct words for "we" - which may imply a more detailed understanding of cooperation, consensus and consensus decision-making than English. Anthropological linguistics studies these distinctions, and relates them to lifeways and to actual bodily adaptation to the senses, much as it studies distinctions made in languages regarding the colours of the rainbow: seeing the tendency to increase the diversity of terms, as evidence that there are distinctions that bodies in this environment must make, leading to situated knowledge and perhaps a situated ethics, whose final evidence is the differentiated set of terms used to denote "we".

David Nettle, in Linguistic Diversity (1998), notes "the amazing fact that the map of language density in the world is the same as the map of species diversity: i.e. where there are more species per unit of area, there will be more languages too." Thus to increase linguistic adaptation and respect for diversity may also be to conserve habitat and increase biodiversity.

Mark Fettes, in Steps Towards an Ecology of Language (1996), sought "a theory of language ecology which can integrate naturalist and critical traditions"; and in An Ecological Approach to Language Renewal (1997), sought to approach a transformative ecology via a more active, perhaps designed, set of tools in language. This may cross a line between science and activism, but is within the anthropological tradition of study by the participant-observer. Related to problems in critical philosophy (for instance, the question who's we, and the subject-object problem).

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