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Penelope "Penny" Eckert (born 1942) is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. [1] [2] She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. [1] [3] She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018. [4]
Eckert received her PhD in linguistics in 1978 from Columbia University, where she was a student of William Labov. She is the author or co-author of three books on sociolinguistics, the co-editor of three collections, and author of numerous scholarly papers in the field. She attended Oberlin College in 1963 as an undergraduate. [5]
Eckert served as the president of the International Gender and Language Association from 2000–2003. [6] She was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. [7] In 2012, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, where she had previously served on a number of committees, including the ethics, ethnic diversity in linguistics, nominating, and status of women in linguistics, where she served as committee chair from 1990–1991. [6] [8] In 2016, she was elected president of the LSA. [9]
As president of the organization, Eckert worked to combat workplace harassment and power dynamics in the linguistics community, through a panel entitled "Our Linguistics Community: Addressing Bias, Power Dynamics, Harassment", as well as developing an open dialogue among the ethics, status of women in linguistics, and ethnic diversity in linguistics committees. [10]
Eckert is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University where she is an active affiliate of the feminist, gender and sexuality studies program, and is a member of various committees. [5]
Eckert's research shows that adolescents are the "movers and shakers of linguistic change", which explains her focus on this demographic in much of her research, specifically the creation of adolescence in the United States. [11]
Eckert became interested in her field of work through her own experience, dissatisfied with the way that it was being approached from a scholarly standpoint. Eckert has mainly collaborated with Sally McConnell-Ginet, a Professor Emeritis at Cornell University. [12] The two started working together in 1990, have given talks together, and worked on one of her most well known works, Language and Gender. [13] [ non-primary source needed ]
Her early work focused on phonological variation in Gascon. [14] During this period she specialized in the spread of sound change across geographical regions, specifically in Southern France. She studied the elderly population, who were the first generation to learn French as a second language after their regional language. [15] She returned to Gascon in 2005 to continue her work there, focusing on the diversity of isoglosses in the area.
Her more recent work focuses on the social meaning of linguistic variables, particularly in English.
Eckert's research aims to address shifts in linguistic patterns in how gender is addressed and concentrates on adolescents since they are the "movers and shakers in linguistic change". [16] She does this through the use of "in-depth ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the relation between variation, linguistic style, social identity and social practice." [16]
Eckert developed three waves of analytic practice to facilitate the study of sociolinguistics and how it varies within communities. The first wave focuses on how linguistic variations relate to different demographic communities in highly populated American cities. The second wave deconstructed social structures with a more ethnographic approach. Finally, the third wave built upon the first two waves by articulating how these social structures are interpreted in a local context. [17]
Eckert's focus on language in adolescence and preadolescence began in the early eighties with Jocks and Burnouts , an ethnographic project set in suburban Detroit high schools. [18] Eckert's work highlighted social categories as cultures that structured the use of phonological variables within the high school setting. [19] [20]
Jocks, embodying middle-class values, profit from the corporate organization of education which simulates expectations and norms of the corporate workplace, one in which personal values coincide with those of the organization; their social networks are restricted to those within the school environment and within similar age groups. Burnouts, on the other hand, embody working-class cultures, resisting the corporate norms of education in preparation to enter the blue-collar workforce; burnouts' social networks extend across age groups and local and urban environments. Rather than restrict students to the two categories, Eckert emphasizes the hegemonic nature of the dichotomy that structures students' self-identification. In other words, few students exist outside the dichotomy, instead locating themselves as "In-betweens." [19] [20]
Eckert examined the extreme backing and lowering of (uh), a step in the Northern Cities Chain Shift, among jocks, in-betweens, and burnouts, as well as the effect of parents' socioeconomic status on the backing and lowering (uh), finding no correlation; this would indicate that parents' socioeconomic status had no substantial effect. Rather, it was students' jock/burnout identities and social network clusters that showed the stronger correlation, wherein burnouts exhibited the highest frequency of (uh) backing and lowering. [19] [20]
In the late nineties, Eckert conducted ethnographic work at two elementary schools in San Jose, California; one school served a predominantly working-class and middle-class Anglo-American population, while the other served a primarily poor and ethnically diverse student population. [18] Adopting a communities of practice approach, Eckert studied the stylistic development of a heterosexual marketplace or field of gender difference among fifth and sixth graders. In particular, Eckert examined the role of linguistic variation in this development, including nasal variation in /ae/, emotional expression via pitch range, and indexicality of /o/, /ay/, and /ow/ fronting. [21] [22]
Eckert researches language in discourse communities as well as recognizing the linguistic and ethnic dialects that continue to grow. She not only studies the change in children's and teenagers' vernacular in California, but she also analyses how the language and vowels are pronounced. [23] Both Eckert and her graduate students from Stanford University created a study called "Voices of California", which examines English language variation in different parts of California. [24] California is one of the newer states as well as an ethnically diverse state. The pre-conceived notion that California speech is based solely on Hollywood is false and the cultural and linguistic diversity throughout the state is sizable. [1]
Eckert's work employs ethnographic research and follows preadolescents' linguistic development throughout elementary and middle school years. [23] Eckert notes that pitch is in relation to gender when referring to women and their tonality. She explains that the tone of a woman's voice displays theatrical appeal and variability in language. [25] Valley girl-speak stereotypes are known to be a distinctive Californian cultured dialect. California women are known for valley-girl language, whereas California men are known for their pitch rising throughout their sentences following a plateau. Uptalk also occurs later in their phrases and Eckert is known to analyze uptalk in detail. [26]
The California dialects also play a role in establishing vowel shifts throughout the state. Californians view their dialect as similar and identifiable to most states, excluding locations with distinct accents such as Chicago and New York. California English is known for the linguistic and paralinguistic features that articulate vowels "o" and "u", pronounced "eeuw". Popular California vernacular is known for transitional words like "oh", said like "oeeuw" and phrases consisting of, "I'm like" and "she's like", "I'm all" and "he's all", alongside the cliché surfer and skateboarder slang that California English dialect includes. [27]
In the Californian vernacular, vowels are either merged or form a diphthong. Words like "dawn" and "don" are pronounced similarly; different vowels that are pronounced with the same sound. A common word like "mom" can sound like "mawm". [28] Diphthong is the combined sound of two vowels in one syllable. Words like "coin" and "house" are examples of a diphthong. [29]
Central to Eckert's sociolinguistic theoretical framework is the concept of community of practice. The notion of community of practice was formulated by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger both of whom Eckert met in 1989 while working at the Institute for Research on Learning in Palo Alto. A community of practice is a group of people who, through interaction and shared context, define a set of practices based upon language style, values, belief systems, dynamics of power, and performance. [23] Examples of communities of practice could be mechanics working at a shop, regular members of a religious congregation, faculty members in a specific department, and members of a sports team that practice and play regularly together. [30] The community of practice is defined by the context of the environment and social dynamics which include age, gender, sex, sexuality, and social class of the participants. One's identity is thus shaped by one's membership and participation in a variety of communities of practice. While originally based on sociological research on 'newcomers' and 'old-timers' in a place of employment, [30] communities of practice, according to Eckert, have a legitimate role in shaping identity through language.
Eckert expanded upon Lave and Wenger's concept by focusing on language use within communities of practice. Through commonalities in the use of language, identities are constructed and co-constructed. [31] In each community, membership is negotiated through language use. Phoneme variation, topics of interest, vocabulary use, discursive practices, and avoidance or uptake of standardized English are all language variables in which one negotiates identity, relationships, and power within and across communities of practice. [13]
Perhaps the greatest focus of Eckert's work has been the construction of gender within communities of practice. Eckert is cautious of many sociolinguistic studies that draw conclusions about language and gender without taking multiple contextual factors and the variety of community of practices into consideration. [31] While praising William Labov's 1966's department store study and Robin Lakoff's work on gender and language, Eckert points out the contextual limits of making generalizations from those studies. She also highlights that studies of gender and language ought to not solely focus on linguistic differences but also examine overlaps in language use.
Eckert points out that gender is not solitary, but socially constructed through multi-modal factors such as class, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and sex. For example, tag questions and rising intonations are typically attributed to be common markers of 'women's language'. [32] Historically, tags and intonation have been thought of as the language of subordination in mixed-gender settings. Eckert, however, points out that in all-female communities, tags and intonation are used to assert dominance and power. [33] Eckert emphasizes that under a community of practice paradigm, language and gender must avoid generalizations, must be seen as active, must be viewed under an intersectional lens, and that ethnographic studies are central to understanding the social classification that exists within and between communities of practice. [19]
Furthermore, Eckert posits language style as a mechanism by which one establishes identity within communities of practice. For example, Eckert provides examples of early adolescent girls' use of profanity in a variety of communities of practice. She points out that generalizations about the use of profanity are problematic because the reasons for such discourse could be varied. Profanity could be used as an affront to authority, a marker of style to establish a rougher identity, as dissociating from communities of practice of the 'goodies' social groups, or as associating with a profanity-using mother. [33] Eckert claims that as hair and dress change across communities of practice, so does language style and use as people seek connections across various linguistic communities. [23] [34] [35] [36]
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Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.
In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called an isolect or lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. The use of the word "variety" to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard varieties thought of as less prestigious or "correct" than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard (vernacular) varieties. "Lect" avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.
Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. While many linguists believe that a true field of anthropological linguistics is nonexistent, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, many others regard the two as interchangeable.
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.
In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige. In addition to dialects and languages, prestige is also applied to smaller linguistic features, such as the pronunciation or usage of words or grammatical constructs, which may not be distinctive enough to constitute a separate dialect. The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form among speakers of a language or languages.
California English collectively refers to varieties of American English native to California. A distinctive vowel shift was first noted by linguists in the 1980s in southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area of northern California. This helped to define an accent emerging primarily among youthful, white, urban, coastal speakers, and popularly associated with the valley girl and surfer dude youth subcultures. The possibility that this is, in fact, an age-specific variety of English is one hypothesis; however, certain features of this accent are intensifying and spreading geographically.
An ethnolect is generally defined as a language variety that mark speakers as members of ethnic groups who originally used another language or distinctive variety. According to another definition, an ethnolect is any speech variety associated with a specific ethnic group. It may be a distinguishing mark of social identity, both within the group and for outsiders. The term combines the concepts of an ethnic group and dialect.
Mary Bucholtz is professor of linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. Bucholtz's work focuses largely on language use in the United States, and specifically on issues of language and youth; language, gender, and sexuality; African American English; and Mexican and Chicano Spanish.
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax. But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in sentence word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate with language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect.
In sociolinguistics, the notion of linguistic marketplace, also known as linguistic market or talk market, refers to the symbolic market where linguistic exchanges happen.
Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics, and feminist language reform and media studies.
LGBT linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBT communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBT communities, and queer linguistics, which refers to the linguistic analysis concerning the effect of heteronormativity on expressing sexual identity through language. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBT communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.
In sociolinguistics, a style is a set of linguistic variants with specific social meanings. In this context, social meanings can include group membership, personal attributes, or beliefs. Linguistic variation is at the heart of the concept of linguistic style—without variation, there is no basis for distinguishing social meanings. Variation can occur syntactically, lexically, and phonologically.
Norma Catalina Mendoza-Denton is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, including work in sociophonetics, language and identity, ethnography and visual anthropology.
In linguistics, age-graded variation is differences in speech habits within a community that are associated with age. Age-grading occurs when individuals change their linguistic behavior throughout their lifetimes, but the community as a whole does not change.
In the field of sociolinguistics, social network describes the structure of a particular speech community. Social networks are composed of a "web of ties" between individuals, and the structure of a network will vary depending on the types of connections it is composed of. Social network theory posits that social networks, and the interactions between members within the networks, are a driving force behind language change.
The gender paradox is a sociolinguistic phenomenon first observed by William Labov, in which "Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not." Specifically, the "paradox" arises from sociolinguistic data showing that women are more likely to use prestige forms and avoid stigmatized variants than men for a majority of linguistic variables, but that they are also more likely to lead language change by using innovative forms of variables.
Penelope Brown is an American anthropological linguist who has studied a number of aspects of cross-linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cross-cultural studies of language and cognition.
Sally McConnell-Ginet is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Cornell University. She is known for her work on the language of gender and sexuality.
In sociolinguistics, covert prestige is a type of scenario in which nonstandard languages or dialects are regarded to be of high linguistic prestige by members of a speech community. This is in contrast to the typical case of linguistic prestige, wherein only the standard varieties of a speech community are considered prestigious.
