Susan Gal | |
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Born | 1949 (age 74–75) |
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Susan Gal (born 1949) is the Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. [1] She is the author or co-author of several books and numerous articles on linguistic anthropology, gender and politics, and the social history of Eastern Europe. [2]
Gal received her B.A. in psychology and anthropology from Barnard College in 1970 and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. [3] [4] She taught at Rutgers University from 1977 to 1994, and then moved to the University of Chicago, serving as the Chair of the Department of Anthropology between 1999 and 2002. [5]
Gal received the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2002 for the study of language ideologies and political authority during and after socialism, [6] and has been awarded the SSRC-ACLS International Fellowship, as well as Fulbright and NIMH Fellowships. [5]
In 2007 Gal was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [7]
Gal is a member of the editorial board of American Anthropologist . [8]
Her first book, Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria, was published in 1979 and examined the linguistic situation of a Hungarian minority in the town of Burgenland, Austria. As Richard Coates states in his review of the book, the book argues that "language shift is essentially a symbolic change correlated with the changing relative status of the value-systems which each language symbolizes, and not a simple function of industrialization, urbanization or some other large-scale social change." [9] Gal co-wrote the book The Politics of Gender After Socialism (2000) with Gail Kligman, which won the 2001 Heldt Prize (awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies), [7] and co-edited the anthology Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism with Kligman. These books examine the complex relationship between ideas and practices of gender and political economic change, taking the post-Soviet transition across a number of East Central European countries as case studies.
Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition. One form of linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, regards peoples' languages as determining and influencing the scope of cultural perceptions of their surrounding world.
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.
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.
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.
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist, anthropologist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest.
Nancy Currier Dorian was an American linguist who carried out research into the decline of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic for over 40 years, particularly in the villages of Brora, Golspie and Embo. Due to their isolation from other Gaelic-speaking communities, these East Sutherland villages presented a good opportunity to study language death. Dorian's study is possibly the longest such study in the field. She was considered "a prime authority" on language death. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect, her study into the decline of Gaelic in East Sutherland, is considered "the first major monograph" on language death. According to linguist Joan Argenter, Dorian's name "is well known to scholars working in" several areas of linguistics.
Don Kulick is a Swedish anthropologist and linguist who is the professor of anthropology at Uppsala University. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and Sweden. Kulick is also known for his extensive fieldwork on the Tayap people and their language in Gapun village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.
Kira Hall is Distinguished 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 who served as 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.
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.
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.
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.
Metaphorical code-switching refers to the tendency in a bilingual or multilingual community to switch codes in conversation in order to discuss a topic that would normally fall into another conversational domain. "An important distinction is made from situational switching, where alternation between varieties redefines a situation, being a change in governing norms, and metaphorical switching, where alternation enriches a situation, allowing for allusion to more than one social relationship within the situation." For example, at a family dinner, where you would expect to hear a more colloquial, less prestigious variety of language, family members might switch to a highly prestigious form in order to discuss school or work. At work interlocutors may switch to a low prestige variety when discussing family.
Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.
Monica Heller is a Canadian linguistic anthropologist and Professor at the University of Toronto. She was the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) from 2013 to 2015.
The gender paradox is a sociolinguistic phenomenon first observed by William Labov, who noted, "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.
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.
Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. This initiative has been adopted in countries such as Sweden, Switzerland and Australia.
Within the linguistic study of endangered languages, sociolinguists distinguish between different speaker types based on the type of competence they have acquired of the endangered language. Often when a community is gradually shifting away from an endangered language to a majority language, not all speakers acquire full linguistic competence; instead, speakers have varying degrees and types of competence depending on their exposure to the minority language in their upbringing. The relevance of speaker types in cases of language shift was first noted by Nancy Dorian, who coined the term semi-speaker to refer to those speakers of Sutherland Gaelic who were predominantly English-speaking and whose Gaelic competence was limited and showed considerable influence from English. Later studies added additional speaker types such as rememberers, and passive speakers. In the context of language revitalization, new speakers who have learned the endangered language as a second language are sometimes distinguished.
Ana Celia Zentella is an American linguist known for her "anthro-political" approach to linguistic research and expertise on multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and language intolerance, especially in relation to U.S. Latino languages and communities. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.