Penelope Eckert

Penelope "Penny" Eckert (born 1942) 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 attended Oberlin College in 1963 as an undergraduate.

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.

The two started working together in 1990, have given talks together, and worked on one of her most well known works, Language and Gender.

Her early work focused on phonological variation in Gascon.

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.

Eckert served as the president of the International Gender and Language Association from 2000 until 2003.

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".

She does this through the use of "in-depth ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the relation between variation, linguistic style, social identity and social practice."

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.

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.

Eckert's work highlighted social categories as cultures that structured the use of phonological variables within the high school setting.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

She was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.

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 to 1991.

In 2016, she was elected president of the LSA.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.