Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 2008: 532545

Studying language, culture, and society:

Sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology?1
John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz
University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Santa Barbara

INTRODUCTION
As the papers in this issue show, the study of language, culture, and society has,
and always will have, multiple disciplinary roots. In this commentary, we argue
that what we may now regard as two traditions, sociolinguistics and linguistic
anthropology, are in fact historically interrelated approaches. This raises the
question as to whether we should really draw a distinction between the two at
all.
We begin by considering why sociolinguistics, as a field of enquiry, came
to be seen as separate from the broader fields of anthropological linguistics
and formal linguistics. As Dell Hymes (1972: 35) comments in Directions in
Sociolinguistics (Gumperz and Hymes 1972), to claim that sociolinguistics is a
distinct field is to suggest that there are both problems and types of linguistic
data that have not been studied before. Hymess statement, published at the
beginning of the 1970s, argues that staking out a newly designated disciplinary
emphasis does not mean that linguistics is theoretically lacking, but rather that
there are problem areas and sets of issues that previous methods of analysis
overlooked. While linguistic anthropology can trace its origins back nearly
a century, owing its pedigree to the much earlier anthropological linguistics
and fieldwork traditions, sociolinguistics can be seen as a recent development
with a relatively short history and what is more, one that is a lived history
for many of us still working in the field, with all the individual variations
of emphasis that this implies. Let us therefore start with a personal account,
originally presented at the 2006 Sociolinguistics Symposium meeting, where
most of the papers in this special issue were first presented, to place some of the
intellectual issues in context. We then go on to unravel the strands that influenced
the development of sociolinguistics and to explore the long-term history of
the relationship between sociolinguistics and what we now call linguistic
anthropology.


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JOHN GUMPERZ: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT

My Ph.D. degree was in Germanic linguistics, but my graduate training
included anthropological fieldwork experience. Following the traditions of
dialectology then prevalent in some Germanic linguistics departments, my
dissertation dealt with the dialect of a community made up for the most
part by descendants of nineteenth-century German immigrants to rural
Michigan. Rather than concentrating on the isolation of dialect differences
as such, however, I relied on anthropological fieldwork techniques of
participant-observation, informal conversations with local residents, and
in-depth interviewing. These methods allowed me to determine the ways
in which the then-current networks of interpersonal relationships overrode
the patterning of linguistic variants that I would have expected if I had
relied on dialect histories alone. My findings showed that a new set
of variants had been constructed over the hundred or so years of coresidence, which reflected religious affiliation and friendship patterns in
the new homeland rather than conditions in the country of origin.
My first professional position was as a postdoctoral fellow in the newly
established division of modern languages at Cornell University, with a
faculty of what we would now call functional linguists concerned with
structuralist theory and language pedagogy. Theoretical linguistics in
those pre-Chomskyan times was still largely concerned with language
description and structural grammar within university settings. Cornell
had a Ford Foundation grant to undertake comparative area research
combining field-based linguistics with anthropology, sociology, political
science, and economics. The thrust of this work was interdisciplinary
development studies, and while from todays perspective this exercise
might be questioned as Anglocentric hegemony, for Cornells linguists the
project served to bring us out of the university into close daily contact with
anthropologists and others working on social problems in the field and
applying our knowledge to the solution of real-life issues.
My fieldwork as a member of the Cornell University research team
focused on North Indian villagers and the regional dialect of Hindi they
used among themselves. I found myself taking an approach quite similar
to that of my dissertation fieldwork, combining structural analysis with
survey data. Apart from that project, I also served as a faculty member in
the newly established Linguistic Institute of South Asia at Deccan College
in Pune, India. The Institute was financed by a grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation for the training of young South Asian linguists in modern
linguistics. My faculty colleagues in Pune included many major Indian
linguists who were familiar with their own traditions both from the deep
historical roots of language study in India, grounded in Paninis Sanskrit

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grammars, and the more recent British functional linguistics of J. R. Firth

at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
For me this meant an exposure to new ways of looking at language
outside of the American tradition and outside of the usual academic
disciplinary divisions to focus instead on a joint field-based enterprise.
Research emerging from that collaboration was published as a special
issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics titled Linguistic
Diversity in South Asia (Ferguson and Gumperz 1960), with articles by
scholars associated with the Deccan College Institute. William Labov
(personal communication) was the first to recognize the significance of
the Indian research for sociolinguistics when he commented that the
special issue was the first set of studies that centered on sociolinguistic
issues.
The more immediate U.S. contribution of this work to the development
of sociolinguistics was in bringing together interdisciplinary groups of
scholars studying related issues of socioeconomic development, each
from their own disciplinary perspective. This work soon received national
attention, first by the Association for Asian Studies, which set up a
committee on South Asian languages in the 1950s, and later by the
Social Science Research Council. In the 1960s the latter organized the
Committee on Sociolinguistics with a membership drawn largely from
the earlier AAS committee, thus building up a new disciplinary focus out
of an overlapping set of academic interests and friendship groupings
(Murray 1998). It was here that sociolinguistics, under that name, began
its (inter)disciplinary life.

UNRAVELLING THE STRANDS

This account shows that the strands of intellectual influence that underlie the
development of early sociolinguistics were intertwined from the very beginning;
despite apparent academic divisions, sociolinguistic and anthropological
research were closely related. We develop this point by considering three points
of disciplinary boundary crossing in early research on language, culture, and
society:
the relationship between dialectology and sociolinguistics;
the development of the ethnography of communication from anthropological
linguistics; and
the interaction of sociolinguistics with sociology.

Despite their differences, these areas of research shared a theoretical view of the
local community as the site of language use and a methodological commitment
to using fieldwork as the best way to obtain information about such language
use.

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Dialectologys contribution to sociolinguistics

In the years after the publication of William Labovs (1966) The Social Stratification
of English in New York City, which integrates the quantitative techniques
of large-scale sociological surveys into dialectological analysis, variationist
sociolinguistics gradually emerged as a major force in shaping U. S. sociolinguistic
research. Despite some criticisms of gender bias and of theoretical inadequacies
affecting the early work (e. g. Cameron 1992), a closer look at the dialectological
inheritance of sociolinguistics shows that many dialectologists paid close
attention to the empirical patterning of everyday talk. In doing so, they relied on
field-based methodologies that allowed them to examine the linguistic contours
of local communities. This fieldwork tradition remains an important legacy of
dialectology to contemporary sociolinguistics.
Developing out of nineteenth-century concerns with the emerging sense of
nationhood throughout Europe and the role of local traditions in establishing
communities, European dialectology focused on the borders and differentiations
between communities, regions, and populations. Through field research,
this work sought to document the origins of dialects and therefore, by
extension, the historical validity of local communities (e. g. Gauchat 1905).
Using similar methods, social dialectology in the first half of the twentieth
century went further in establishing patterns of sound change that could
document population shifts, and thus changes in language practices. For
example, Uriel Weinreichs (1953) research, relying on his knowledge of Swiss
dialectology, turned away from purely descriptive approaches to focus on the
effects of bilingual and multilingual contact on the structure of constituent
languages.
Labovs classic early work in Marthas Vineyard (1963) as well as his
initial New York City research (1966) were greatly influenced by his studies
with Weinreich. He was able to incorporate some of the insights of this
fieldwork tradition into his notion of style shifting in everyday talk and his
development of a linguistically comprehensive basis for statistical analysis. As
Penelope Eckert comments, Labov makes it clear that local identity is not
simply defined spatially or in a socially abstract sense but in the interaction
between place and the human life that unfolds there (2000: 22). In other
words, Eckert, in reviewing Labovs intellectual contribution, argues that
the early tradition of detailed work with local communities and networks
was essential. Moreover, as Eckerts own contribution to this special issue
demonstrates, this concern with community-based research continues to foster
theoretical advances in contemporary variationist sociolinguistics. In her article,
she provides multiple illustrations of how the patterned indexical values of
linguistic variables can only be understood from the perspective of local
communities. This insight owes a debt to the tradition of fieldwork from
dialectology.


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From anthropological linguistics to the ethnography of communication

While the European dialectological tradition established fieldwork as an
important sociolinguistic methodology as early as the nineteenth century, other
disciplines also contributed to this approach. Throughout the twentieth century,
the United States maintained an area of linguistic study that was motivated by
anthropological concerns with cultural difference and required extensive fieldbased studies in the tradition of Boas, Sapir, and Kroeber. It is as an heir to
this U. S. tradition of field-based studies of language, culture, and society that
the ethnography of communication was developed. Until this time, structural
linguists had worked in two areas: the grammar of hitherto unwritten or
undocumented languages such as American Indian and African languages, and
issues of translation into little-known languages for missionary purposes, such
as the studies of Kenneth Pike (1971 [1947]) and Eugene Nida (1975), among
others.
Hymess initial work on the interpretive analysis of Native American myth
used his concept of ethnography of speaking as an analytic construct (cf.
Hymes 1981), which was later extended to a broader notion of an ethnography
of communication. Building on his and others writings beginning in the
1960s (Gumperz and Hymes 1964, 1972; Hymes 1964; Gumperz 1971),
this new perspective focused on how language functioned in ethnographically
documented speech events, rather than on relations between community-wide
cultural norms and linguistic structures abstracted from talk. The ethnography of
communication provided the insight that culture is essentially a communicative
phenomenon, constituted through talk. Thus anthropologists can study how
culture works by observing or participating in a range of culturally distinct
speech events.
The ethnography of communication laid out an initial program of comparative
research on language use that combined ethnographic fieldwork with linguistic
analysis. Roman Jakobsons (1960) notion of speech event was adopted as an
intermediate level of analysis that provides access to the interpretive process
motivating participants actions. Events are taken to be units of analysis in
terms of which interpretive practices can be examined in detail. At the same
time, events are also valorized entities that frequently enter into public-sphere
discussions, such as commentary about the performances in speech making and
political rhetoric (e. g. Bauman and Sherzer 1974; Duranti 1994).The move from
communities to events as the principal basis of analysis thus shifts the focus to
actual talk and performance.
The early writings in the ethnography of communication stimulated a great
deal of comparative ethnographic research in various parts of the world on
the relevant underlying cultural assumptions and structures of speech events,
such as who could participate, what topics could be discussed, and what social
norms governed participation. Examples of speech events typically described
in the literature of the time are ritual performances, ceremonies, and magical

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rites such as are found in small, traditional, largely face-to-face societies, as

well as urban minority speech events and routines (Bauman and Sherzer
1974). Later on, as more empirical data became available, work began to
focus on the in-depth interpretive examination of the discourse that constitutes
the speech event. The basic insight here is that although research must be
rooted in fieldwork in local communities, traditional analysts community-level
cultural categories do not demonstrably reflect what motivates or accounts for
speakers action in everyday encounters. So far, however, most researchers
were concerned with specifying what such implicit knowledge is, but not on
how it enters into interpretation. Later, sociolinguistics began to address this
problem. Initially, linguistic anthropologists relied on ethnographic observations
to reveal the cultural assumptions that underlie interpretation; similarly,
ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts used close analysis of talk to
understand interaction from the point of view of its participants. Somewhat later,
another approach emerged that, like conversation analysis, focuses directly on
the organization of speech exchanges, but takes a broader view of language as
communicating both content and metapragmatic or indexical information about
content. This later approach has become known as interactional sociolinguistics
(Gumperz 1982, 2001). In this special issue, the analyses by Mary Bucholtz and
Kira Hall and by Jack Sidnell build on these traditions of scholarship in different
ways by examining how the social actions accomplished through linguistic
interaction - which may range as widely as the negotiation of ethnoracial labels,
the interactional manifestation of language ideologies, and patterns of repair
are based on local interpretive repertoires.

The sociological roots of sociolinguistics in an era of social reconstruction

Finally, there is a third strand to early sociolinguistics that, while still focused
on communities and their language use, raised different intellectual issues from
those surveyed above. This strand emerged from social problems that developed
in the rapid societal changes following World War II.
As Tony Judt (2005) points out in his monumental study Postwar: A History of
Europe since 1945, the twin tensions of the forty years that followed the Second
World War revolved around two main concerns: the need to reconstruct and
strengthen a physically damaged society and the need to bring about social
change in order to combat a competing ideology of social values. Apart from
the German population movements, the initial effort of post-war rebuilding only
slowly led to changes in the United Kingdom and Europe. However in the United
States, the population movement and economic recovery brought about by World
War II gave a greater sense of urgency to the need to understand the changing
American urban scene.
Many sociological studies in this post-war period focused on problemdriven issues such as the revitalization of communities as a consequence of
migration to the industrialized regions; achievement of greater equity through

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educational access as well as an emphasis on the transmission of cultural

values across generations through childrens socialization; and awareness of
the dangers of totalitarian regimes and how these could be combated through
understanding the workings of political rhetoric. It was these issues that gave
early sociolinguistics much of its agenda. The linguistic dimensions of such
questions were widely pursued by linguists in the United States; in Britain,
they were explored primarily in the work of Basil Bernstein, who alone among
sociologists recognized the important role of language in cultural transmission,
and thus in the reproduction of social ordering and its class divisions (Bernstein
1972).
These developments suggest that in response to the question we posed in
the beginning, it may be said that sociolinguistics became separated from
anthropology not because it lacked a social theory but because of its early
engagement with specific problems of Western industrialized societies at a time
when anthropologists still tended to focus their concerns on small-scale groups in
non-Western societies. Sociolinguistics took over existing sociological theories in
order to apply linguistic analyses to solve contemporary societal problems, such
as those of increasing equity and access to U. S. education (Cazden, John and
Hymes 1972). While the methods of sociolinguistics were innovative, the socialtheoretical assumptions of sociology went largely unchallenged in sociolinguistic
work that took established social theories and their categorizations as a given.
In this issue, Monica Heller explores this question in her critique of the use of
received sociological categories and concepts within sociolinguistics (see also
Woolard 1985).
Despite this divergence in approaches and goals, the multiple strands of
sociolinguistics remained interwoven, as seen in several of the collections that
were published at this time (Fishman 1970; Giglioli 1972; Gumperz and Hymes
1972; Pride and Holmes 1972). The history of sociolinguistics is therefore one
characterized by ongoing cross-disciplinary interaction and influence. Having
built on our own perspective to explore the methodological and theoretical
issues that mark the past several decades of research in the field, we now
consider new developments in sociolinguistics and its relationship to linguistic
anthropology.

THE REALIGNMENT OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND LINGUISTIC

ANTHROPOLOGY
The emerging agendas of contemporary sociolinguistics show a shift towards
a new linguistic anthropology, a shift illustrated by the papers in this special
issue. It took new reflexive social theorizing in anthropology and sociology as
well as a change of emphasis in the study of language and culture to bring
sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology back into alignment. The making of
recent linguistic anthropology marks a turn away from taking the community as
a given bounded unit toward a more constructivist approach. At the same time,

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linguistic anthropology has engaged with the critical theory that has helped
reshape sociology and its involvement with contemporary societal and political
issues. From the wide range of these new studies, we briefly mention two themes:
the emphasis on identity rather than community as the focus of sociolinguistic
analysis and the concern with the political dimension of language in social
life.

From the sociology of groups and communities to individuals and identities

Within the new approach to language, culture, and society, both macrosocietal analysis as found in early sociological studies of language and
linguistic geography as found in dialectology give way to discourse analysis
and interactional analysis. These methods allow researchers to uncover
speakers mechanisms for coping with a changing social field. Contemporary
societies are increasingly shaped by the mediation of bureaucratic institutions,
which affect many areas of daily life and create their own communicative
requirements. The increased mobility and diversity of urban life requires more
interpersonal negotiation and verbal persuasion; however, the primary issue
is not intercultural communication between groups but the identities and
style shifting of individuals. In contemporary societies, individuals are seen
as separate entities, responsible for their own demeanor, and are no longer
protected (or limited) by ascription to a single community-defined category. Given
this situation, we now recognize that identity involves the need for continuous
validation of the self as a bureaucratically sanctioned entity as well as the ongoing
reinvention of the self as a person. Bureaucracy presents specific challenges
for individuals in this regard. On the one hand, individuals need to construct
coherence through explanations about their own fit or lack of fit to the expected
categories. At the same time, they must present a social self that in any single
context seems continuous with a history that either precedes or extends beyond
the present. On the other hand, late modern societies provide many possibilities
for individual change and for the progressive development of the self. In the
risk society that characterizes contemporary life, individuals recognize their
positions within a number of overlapping social arenas, positions that are both
under frequent threat and yet subject to ongoing possibilities for reinvention
(Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994).
There are risks in change and, in late modern society, also new obligations
to make the self a socially acceptable and attractive being as seen in the new
growth industry of self-awareness. As Giddens (1991: 209) puts it, new lifestyle
movements in late-modern society represent an era beyond the emancipation
from want and from hierarchical domination into a politics of choice. Life
politics is centered on lifestyle choices and issues of self-actualization from which
political consequences flow. From our own perspective, as we have argued
elsewhere (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 2007), these are also sociolinguistic
choices. Moreover, as papers in this special issue show, such choices are not

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between a finite set of options or variables. Speech styles, as Irvine (2001)

points out, have some of the characteristics of clothing styles in that they can
be put on to suit an occasion and a situation. However, speech styles also
gain durability as they come to index an identity: though open to frequent
revision they remain part of an individuals self-presentation. To quote Giddens
again:
in the post-traditional order of modernity and against the backdrop of new forms
of mediated experience self identity becomes a reflexively organized endeavor.
The reflexive product of the self which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet
continuously revised biographical narrative takes place in the context of multiple
choices as filtered through abstract systems . . . . The more tradition looses its hold,
and the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical interplay of the
local and global the more individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among
a diversity of options. (1991: 5)

From this perspective, speech styles become aspects of the social in which ways
of talking can represent an individuals self-presentation (Gumperz and CookGumperz 2007). Stemming from such insights, the analysis of speech styles
has recently again become central to sociolinguistic investigation (Eckert and
Rickford 2001). This issue first arose in the post-war era when sociolinguists
became attuned to the role of social-class hierarchies in shaping linguistic
prestige and power (Labov 1972), but in the current context, style is viewed
not as a sign of structural constraint on the speaker but as a resource for
self-positioning.

Postcolonial experiences: Language mobilization, politics, and conflicts

The threads from which sociolinguistics was woven were not completely created
by the Anglo-American and European experience of the hot and cold wars;
they were also motivated by earlier concerns with what constitutes a society
and a language in the first place. This question has returned in the present
day as language enters into new sociopolitical processes of postcolonialism and
globalization.
In the 1960s and 1970s sociolinguists, faced with the growing diversity
of ethnic communities within a class-stratified urban society, saw their task
to be to describe a linguistic situation in terms of a collection of speech
varieties, of which the most prestigious was the standard variety. More recently,
however, sociolinguists have questioned the descriptive validity of categorizing
speech varieties into languages and dialects as they were then recognized.
James Milroy (2000: 11) raises an issue that is becoming important received
knowledge for sociolinguists in the postcolonial age: standard varieties appear
as idealizations . . . [that] do not conform exactly to the usage of any particular
speaker. Moreover, issues of what constitutes a standard can now be seen to
be repeating the ideological misperceptions of the nineteenth century in a new

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guise. Susan Gal and Judith Irvine (2000) make this point in commenting on the
nineteenth-century linguistic descriptions that determined language boundaries
in West Africa and Central Europe. They argue that linguistic ideology, not
language practice as such, was the major factor in the original descriptions by
which the colonial administrators and European linguists understood regional
distinctions:
Each language . . . was represented in an impoverished way to differentiate it from
the other and to accord with an ideology about its essence. At the same time, regional
varieties that seemed to overlap were ignored. . . . The same notions of language purity
that led nineteenth-century linguists to ignore mixed varieties, multilingualism, and
expressions they could attribute to linguistic borrowing also discouraged research
on African regional dialectology. Once a variety had been declared to belong to
the same language as another already-described variety, there was no reason to
investigate it, unless its speakers stubbornly refused to speak anything else. (Gal and
Irvine 2000: 5657)

In short, once the ideological principle emerged that a standard language was
spoken by a people living and speaking within a territorial area which was
viewed as a single nation this principle became entrenched within Western
(colonial) language history. And the story is one that was repeated around
the global from Africa to the South Asian and East Asian subcontinents,
and that continues to be an important factor in language policies and
politics.
Early sociolinguistic researchers addressed the question of linguistic diversity
in a rather different but no less problematic way. As we noted above, these
scholars had advanced the notion of linguistic repertoires to explain the
pervasive plurilingualism they discovered in their empirical research and to
account for the totality of verbal resources available to members of speech
communities (Gumperz 1971). Repertoires are usually defined as systems of
functionally differentiated, partially overlapping speech varieties, such as social
and geographical dialects, registers and styles, and trade and professional
languages, each with its own grammatical characteristics; the assumption was
that speakers choose among these. However, as Gal and Irvine suggest, the
very concept of speech community reflects the 1960s sociological thinking that
highlighted a view of social order as integrative. The notion of repertoire simply
subdivided a larger bounded unit into smaller ones, without challenging the
thinking on which this division rests; speech communities continued to be seen
as bounded, internally integrated units. In this way, any difference could be
treated as positive and nondivisive.
All of this rethinking of traditional sociolinguistic concepts and assumptions
has led to a radical change in how to understand the internal diversification of
todays nation-states and the competing forces in urban environments. Social,
political, and technological changes have resulted in a new alignment between
sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists exploring language ideologies.

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Kathryn Woolards article in this issue, for example, argues for the necessity of
using the linguistic-anthropological concept of language ideologies to account for
fundamental processes of language change within variationist sociolinguistics.
Such connections and there are many others in the papers in this special issue
point to the value of collaborative work in shedding light on the complex
phenomena of late modern societies.

CONCLUSION
In this commentary, we have argued that the fields of linguistic anthropology and
sociolinguistics have come together again thanks to a new critical awareness of
the possibilities that research on language and culture can offer for contemporary
issues, much as in early sociolinguistics a new approach grew out of an
urgency necessitated by social changes. Such a critical stance is especially
appropriate in reconsidering the new issues of language politics and postcolonial
language, now seen as part of a changing urban sense of personal identity
and belonging. However, this viewpoint does not always assure an alignment
between researchers, their publics, and governmental policymakers and funding
sources. In todays political and administrative climate, governmental and
private funding and channeling of research interests is more likely to be directed
to immediate solutions of pressing problems, not to the shaping or directing of
long-term intellectual agendas. The concerned public now forms a vocal and
critical part of any research on language issues. Researchers are no longer the
experts courted by non-specialist outsiders but can easily be seen as just another
interested party.
Issues like these are vividly illustrated by Charles Briggs and Clara MantiniBriggs (2000) in their study of the cholera epidemic in Venezuela and the
repercussions of the governments response for local populations, from which
both political and sociolinguistic insights can be gained. Similarly, Diana Eades
(1992) shows how a sociolinguistic understanding of communicative practices
makes aboriginal populations both more aware of how to make their political
case and yet more open to manipulation and persuasion by others. These ethical
dilemmas arise as sociolinguists begin to ask questions about whose language
and whose concerns are really being addressed in sociolinguistic research. Nor
are these issues easy to resolve, as Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren (1998)
point out, noting that the researcher, by reflexively becoming part of the research,
is also implicated in any debates and disagreements that follow. In other words,
sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists who seek to engage in the complex
politics of language in social life, willing or not, are likely to find themselves either
in the role of public intellectuals or public scapegoats.
Nevertheless, these positions of intellectual responsibility are an important
consequence of the theoretical shift that has brought sociolinguistics and
linguistic anthropology back into alignment. As the fields continue to
develop in tandem, their continued confrontation of such challenges is an

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indication of their ongoing engagement in important real-world issues of

language, culture, and society and the role of the researcher in addressing
them.

NOTE
1. Our thanks to Mary Bucholtz for helpful editorial suggestions.

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Address correspondence to:

John J. Gumperz
Department of Anthropology
232 Kroeber Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3710
U.S.A.
gumperz@education.ucsb.edu


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Journal compilation