Bambi B. Schieffelin (born April 26, 1945) is a linguistic anthropologist and professor emerita at New York University in the department of Anthropology. Along with Elinor Ochs, she pioneered the field of language socialization. [1] In addition, she has written extensively about language contact, language ideology, literacy, Haitian Creole, and missionization.
She received her undergraduate and doctorate degrees in anthropology from Columbia University, and masters and postdoctorate in developmental psychology.
She held a faculty position in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education until 1986, when she was denied tenure within the context of an alleged culture of sexism and personal vendettas influencing decisions at the school. [2] Several other faculty members (including William Labov, Lila R. Gleitman, Fred L. Block, and Frank Furstenberg) severed ties with the School of Education to protest her tenure denial, citing her "international reputation" and "work... of the highest quality". [3]
She has carried out extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, often in collaboration with ethnomusicologist Steven Feld. Together they compiled a dictionary of Kaluli, a Bosavi language.
She has recently researched youth language use in instant messaging and text messaging, particularly the use of the word like . [4] [5] She is currently interested in the linguistic aspects evidentiality, focusing on how children learn culturally appropriate ways of referencing sources of knowledge. [6]
In sociology, socialization or socialisation is the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society. Socialization encompasses both learning and teaching and is thus "the means by which social and cultural continuity are attained".
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is defined as any human communication that occurs through the use of two or more electronic devices. While the term has traditionally referred to those communications that occur via computer-mediated formats, it has also been applied to other forms of text-based interaction such as text messaging. Research on CMC focuses largely on the social effects of different computer-supported communication technologies. Many recent studies involve Internet-based social networking supported by social software.
The Korowai, also called the Kolufo, are the people who live in southeastern West Papua in the Indonesian province of South Papua, close to the border with Papua New Guinea. They number about 3,000.
Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed language (CDL), caregiver register, parentese, or motherese.
Language ideology is, within anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural studies, any set of beliefs about languages as they are used in their social worlds. Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are influenced by political and moral interests, and they are shaped in a cultural setting. When recognized and explored, language ideologies expose how the speakers' linguistic beliefs are linked to the broader social and cultural systems to which they belong, illustrating how the systems beget such beliefs. By doing so, language ideologies link implicit and explicit assumptions about a language or language in general to their social experience as well as their political and economic interests.
Kira Hall is professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, as well as director for the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP), at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture." Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
Charles Leslie Briggs is an anthropologist who works at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. Before working at Berkeley he held a position as Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at University of California, San Diego.
Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and served as Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA from 2009 to 2016. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Social interactionist theory (SIT) is an explanation of language development emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. It is based largely on the socio-cultural theories of Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky.
Elinor Ochs is an American linguistic anthropologist, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. Ochs has conducted fieldwork in Madagascar, Italy, Samoa and the United States of America on communication and interaction. Together with Bambi Schieffelin, Professor Ochs developed language socialization, a field of inquiry which examines the ways in which individuals become competent members of communities of practice to and through the use of language. Professor Ochs is also known for her contributions to applied linguistics and the theorization of narrative and family discourse.
Frances Jane Hassler Hill was an American anthropologist and linguist who worked extensively with Native American languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family and anthropological linguistics of North American communities.
The Kaluli are a clan of illiterate indigenous peoples who live in the rain forests of the Great Papuan Plateau in Papua New Guinea. The Kaluli, who numbered approximately 2,000 people in 1987, are the most numerous and well documented by post-contact ethnographers and missionaries among the four language-clans of Bosavi kalu that speak non-Austronesian languages. Their numbers are thought to have declined precipitously following post-contact disease epidemics in the 1940s, and have not rebounded due to high infant mortality rates and periodic influenza outbreaks. The Kaluli are mostly monolingual in an ergative language.
Elizabeth Mertz is a linguistic and legal anthropologist who is also a law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she teaches family law courses. She has been on the research faculty of the American Bar Foundation since 1989. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Duke University and a JD from Northwestern University. Her early research focused on language, identity and politics in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and her dissertation dealt with language shift in Cape Breton Scottish Gaelic, drawing on semiotic anthropology. Her later research examines the language of U.S. legal education in detail using linguistic anthropological approaches. She writes on semiotics, anthropology, and law, among other topics. She has been editor of Law & Social Inquiry and of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Social media language learning is a method of language acquisition that uses socially constructed Web 2.0 platforms such as wikis, blogs, and social networks to facilitate learning of the target language. Social media is used by language educators and individual learners that wish to communicate in the target language in a natural environment that allows multimodal communication, ease of sharing, and possibilities for feedback from peers and educators.
Haitian French is the variety of French spoken in Haiti. Haitian French is close to standard French. It should be distinguished from Haitian Creole.
Kathryn Ann Woolard is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in linguistic anthropology and received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.
Paul V. Kroskrity is an American linguistic anthropologist known primarily for his contributions to establishing and developing language ideology as a field of research. He is professor of anthropology, applied linguistics, and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the past President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and past Chair of the American Indian Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Sonja L. Lanehart is an American linguist and professor of linguistics in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona who has advanced the study of language use in the African American community. Her work as a researcher, author, and editor includes African American English, education, literacy, identity, language variation, women’s languages, intersectionality, and inclusivity within the African American community. Lanehart’s sociolinguistic orientation prioritizes language as a phenomenon influenced by sociocultural and historical factors. She also utilizes the perspectives of Critical Race Theory and Black feminism in her work. Lanehart was the Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Literature and Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio from 2006 to 2019, and was selected by the Linguistic Society of America as a 2021 Fellow.