John Joseph Gumperz is an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 in Berkeley

Berkeley, California

Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

. He is currently affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara

University of California, Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...

. His research on the languages of India

Languages of India

The languages of India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages—Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian languages...

, on code-switching

Code-switching

In linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals—people who speak more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...

 in Norway, and on conversation

Conversation

Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people who are following rules of etiquette.Conversation analysis is a branch of sociology which studies the structure and organization of human interaction, with a more specific focus on conversational...

al interaction, has benefitted the study of sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...

, discourse analysis

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....

, linguistic anthropology

Linguistic anthropology

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 100 years to encompass almost any aspect of language structure and...

, and urban anthropology

Urban anthropology

Urban anthropology is a subset of anthropology concerned with issues of urbanization, poverty, and neoliberalism. It is a relatively new and developing field, which became consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s....

.

Works

John Gumperz developed a new way of looking at sociolinguistics with Dell Hymes

Dell Hymes

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics"...

, also a scholar of sociolinguistics. Their contribution was a new method called the "ethnography of communication

Ethnography of communication

The Ethnography of communication is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive. In their book Qualitative Communication...

." Gumperz' own approach has been called Interactional sociolinguistics

Interactional sociolinguistics

Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz...

.

Sociolinguistics analyzes variation in discourse, within a particular speech community

Speech community

Speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language. Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans , or even tight-knit groups like families and...

, and studies how that variation affects the unfolding of meaning in interaction and correlates with the social order of the community.

The universe is the speech community: Any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language use. (J.J. Gumperz)

Gumperz was interested in how the order of situations and the culture of the speaker affect the way in which they make conversational inference

Inference

Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. The conclusion drawn is also called an idiomatic. The laws of valid inference are studied in the field of logic.Human inference Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions...

s and interpret verbal or non-verbal sign

Sign

A sign is something that implies a connection between itself and its object. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm. A conventional sign signifies by agreement, as a full stop signifies the end of a sentence...

s known as contextualization

Contextualization

Contextualization may refer to:* Contextualization , the process of contextualising the biblical message as perceived in the missionary mandate originated by Jesus...

 cues.
His publications and courses given include work in the emerging field of sociolinguistics research in India

Sociolinguistics research in India

Sociolinguistic research in India is the study of how the Indian society affects and is affected by the languages of the country.India is a highly multilingual nation, where many languages are spoken and also studied, both as part of linguistics and with the aim of aiding community development...

.

External links

• A list of Gumperz's publications
• Gumperz, John J. (1982): Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.