focal vocabularies

I noticed that there wasn’t much posted online about a linguistic anthropological topic that is of particular interest to the study; focal vocabularies.  These are vocabularies that a particular culture or people have developed in relation to something that is a central focus point or important aspect of their respective livelihood.  For instance, “many circumpolar languages have rich focal vocabularies related to snow…[Likewise,] in mountainous areas of Afghanistan, people use many terms for varieties of rocks”.

Source:  Barbara Miller’s “Cultural Anthropology,” (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2012), 262.