Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High

by Penelope Eckert

This volume provides an ethnographically rich account of sociolinguistic variation in an adolescent population.

Genres: Language, Linguistics

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University in Stanford, California, where she holds the position of "Albert Ray Lang Professor of Linguistics". She is a prominent scholar of 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.

Reviews

[Isabel Pie · Rating 5 out of 5]

sociolinguística variacionista com qualidade literária 👌🏼👌🏼

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penelope Eckert combined methodologies from anthropology and linguistics to create an influential study of the social meaning of language use among students at a suburban high school near Detroit in the '80s, which she has written up in several variations over quite a few years. Her earlier book about it (Jocks and Burnouts) is shorter, I think less dry/theoretical/data-intensive, and more widely read. This volume is pretty slow-going and maybe not the best introduction - she has article-length treatments as well as Jocks & Burnouts. But I found her painstaking theoretical positioning and use of Lave & Wenger worthwhile. Communities of practice, which I had previously encountered as above-average organizational jargon/theory, made a powerful concept for going beyond class, gender, race, etc, which always carry some air of determinism. The result is a view of teenagers that emphasizes how kids find agency in situations where they have very little. Also I liked retrospectively recognizing people & things I found alienating in high school as (literally) "corporate."