John Joseph Gumperz

Presented by:
Ghazoua Ben Ghorbel
Kaouthar Handoura
Ichrak Saadi
BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN JOSEPH GUMPERZ
(1922– 2013)
• He was born “Hans-Josef Gumperz” on January 9,
1922, in Hattingen in Germany and died on
March 29, 2013, at 91 in Santa Barbara, California

• He is survived by his second wife and long-time

collaborator, Jenny Cook-Gumperz, Professor of
Education at the University of California in Santa
Barbara; a sister, Lore; two children from his first
marriage, Andrew and Jenny Gumperz; and two
grandchildren.
 When the Nazi party came to power, he was barred
from high school so his family sent him to Italy for
schooling in 1935
 John enrolled for a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry at
the University of Cincinnati in Italy
 His studies were interrupted in 1943 when he was sent
back to Germany as a translator for the occupying U.S.
forces.
 So He finished his degree in 1947, then moved to the
University of Michigan for graduate studies in
chemistry, where he became interested in attending
lectures at the Linguistic Institute.
switched over to full-time graduate program in linguistic
studies
 After two years as a research associate and instructor
in linguistics at Cornell University, he was awarded a
Ph.D. degree in German linguistics by the University
of Michigan in 1954.
 His doctoral dissertation based on a study of the
Swabian dialect spoken by a community of farmers in
Michigan
 The discovery that the linguistic leveling processes
observable among these people could be accounted
for by the linguistic and social groupings formed after
settlement in the United States, became the basis for
his subsequent research on the relationship of speech
alternation to social groups.
 he found that dialects cannot be explained
mechanically; instead, they require studying of the
relationship between language/speech culture and
social motivations
 After he was awarded his PhD Gumperz was invited
At Cornell University to set up a Hindi-Urdu language
training program.
 He served as a member of a Cornell University team
of social scientists carrying out a community study
project in a North Indian village
 There followed two years of field work in India and
an appointment at the University of California,
Berkeley, where he became Professor of
Anthropology in 1965
 Language

Fieldwork
Culture The Interest methods

Society

His two years experience in India convinced him of

the essential part that EMPIRICAL FIELD WORK and
CULTURAL BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE play
in the development of good theory.
 He also did significant research on CODE-
SWITCHING
 He published at this time the first of a series of
insightful essays on the relationships of social
differences to linguistic differences Linguistic Diversity
in South Asia (1960)
 The Ethnography of Communication (1964), edited
by Hymes and Gumperz, is another landmark in the
field. founded the subfield of sociolinguistics, the
Ethnography of Communication and later founded
interactional sociolinguistics
 Gumperz spent part of 1963 at the Institute of
Sociology at Oslo University
 His work there bore out his earlier findings on
the importance of social relationships in
determining speech behavior in social groups.
 He extended his field work to Central India,
Austria, and Yugoslavia, collecting data that have
further refined his understanding of bilingualism in
relation to social boundaries and overall
sociolinguistic structure.
He is interested less in language per se than in language as it
is used by people belonging to different social groups and
above all with how these relationships are reflected in
verbal behavior.
 CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS FIELD

 Interactional sociolinguistics

 Code-switching

 Contextual cues
Code-switching
 ”It is the tendency in a speech community to
use different languages or language
varieties in different social situations, or
to switch varieties in order to mark a change
in situation.”
SOCIAL MEANING IN LINGUISTICS STRUCTURES : CODE –
SWITCHING IN NORWAY (1963)
 Dialect is learned in homes, used in friendships
and family relations at home and in public places.
It is influenced by local values

 Standard Norwegian is used in schools and at

church and in business transactions where citizens
are introduced to Norwegian values.

 Code-switching was seen to depend partly on

subjects of discourse , partly on relationship
between participants and in some cases on their
role relationships
Language and dialect diversity
Khalapur, a small, highly stratified North Indian village
community
 Khalapur
( khari Boli )
Understood

Misunderstood
Regional dialect

Standard Hindi
We code They code
Minority Majority
language language

Informal Formal
situations situations
Situational code-switching
 « Where alternation between varieties redifines
a situation , being in change in governing
norms »

 A change of the participant constellation could

lead from the use of a WE CODE to speaking
a THEY CODE.
Conversational or Methaphorical switching
 « Where alternation enriches a situation ,
allowing for allusion to more than one social
relationship within the situation »

A switch of a speaker with the intention to achieve

a special communicative effect .
Contextualization cues
 They are any linguistic or paralinguistic
signals that give meaning to an utterance and
help its interpretation. They are present in
the surface structure of messages so they
empirically detectable (Gumperz 1982,
1992).
 Prosody : intonation , stress , pitch ..

 Paralinguistic signs : pausing , hesitation ..

 Choice of lexical forms

 Code choice
GUMPERZ BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Professor Gumperz trained a large number of
current scholars, and was widely known for his
openness and support of junior scholars.
 He wrote or edited numerous articles and books:
“Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of
Communication” (ed. w/Dell Hymes)
“Discourse Strategies” (Cambridge U. Press)
“Language and Social Identity” (Cambridge U.
Press)
“Rethinking Linguistic Relativity” (ed. w/Stephen C.
Levinson, Cambridge U. Press)
Crosstalk, Communication Documentary
Series Broadcast on the BBC