He was among the first scholars to note that linguistic diversity correlates with social stratification, so that highly stratified systems (such as the caste system in India) develop highly diversified communicative styles to mark the social identity of group members as well as the exclusion of non-members. Gumperz’s development of the ethnography of communication evolved through his studies of the way language is used by people in different social networks, and the way these networks are produced and reproduced in communication. Through in-depth fieldwork in Norway, northern and central India, Austria, Slovenia, the United States, and England, he collected ethnographic data that furthered his understanding of communication in the context of social boundaries and sociolinguistic structures.

Exemplary of this is his volume of essays, entitled Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (1991), co-edited with his former student Stephen C. For the next thirty years, Gumperz would combine teaching at Berkeley with numerous research projects in the United States and abroad. A decade later, Gumperz published two more foundational works that defined the field known as interactional sociolinguistics, Discourse Strategies and Language and Social Identity. Gumperz collaborated with these and others in cross-disciplinary research and teaching that helped shape a generation of students and a new paradigm for integrative social science bearing on speech practices.Īmong his most intensive collaborations was his work with Dell Hymes in founding the ethnography of speaking, and publishing the classic work Directions in Sociolinguistics (1972). Grice and John Searle), linguists (Charles Fillmore, Robin and George Lakoff), anthropologists (Brent Berlin, Dell Hymes and Paul Kay) and psychologists (Susan Ervin-Tripp and Dan Slobin). In the mid-1960s and 1970’s, Berkeley counted among its faculty an extraordinary group of scholars whose research interests were convergent, and who shared Gumperz’s interest in the relationship between linguistic meaning and the inferential processes of communication. In 1964, he became a member of Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology and a leader in the university’s new Language Behaviour Research Laboratory. Upon returning from India, Gumperz was invited to establish a Hindi-Urdu program at the University of California, Berkeley. The only linguist in a team of anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and other social scientists, he broadened his interests to include fieldwork methods and the relationship between language, culture, and society. This correlation between speech and social groups would form the investigative backbone of his subsequent research, and would be the primary focus of his second fieldwork: a collaborative community study in northern India (1954-56). He argued that the linguistic convergence he had observed in this community could be attributed to social formations that resulted after settlement in the United States. Gumperz became interested in sociolinguistic problems while working on his doctoral dissertation, a study of the Swabian dialect spoken by a community of farmers in Washtenaw County, Michigan, who had descended from two groups of German immigrants originally speaking different dialects. But he soon became fascinated by the idea that language itself could be an object of scientific scrutiny, and switched to a graduate program in linguistics. John Gumperz earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Cincinnati in 1947 and embarked on graduate work in that field at the University of Michigan. He Americanized his name to John Joseph Gumperz shortly thereafter, and went on to serve in the United States Army. He later spent time in a Dutch refugee camp before moving to the United States with his family in 1939. As a Jewish youth he was barred by Nazi racial laws from attending high school and his parents sent him to Italy to study. Hans-Josef Gumperz was born on January 9, 1922, in Hattingen, Germany. Within this paradigm, he developed such fundamental concepts as code-switching and contextualization cues, through which he integrated field study of linguistic processes with sociological concerns about social networks, social identity, and fair access to institutional resources. A pioneer in the fields of ethnography of communication and sociolinguistics, John Gumperz was one of the best known linguistic anthropologists of his generation.

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