• Anthropology is a holistic science in that it can encompass every aspect of human society and culture in the present, and can trace human evolution and development stretching back into prehistory.

• There are two main branches of anthropology: 1) Cultural or social anthropology which studies living human societies and their cultural systems; 2) Physical or biological anthropology which is primarily concerned with human evolution at a much greater time depth.

• The first type of anthropology, social anthropology, has a linguistic dimension to it. It studies the use of language in different cultures and is concerned with how cultures reflect their specific features in the language or languages they speak. Linguistic anthropology can thus be seen as a superset to sociolinguistics is that it is concerned with large-scale differences.