AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

OBITUARY

dissertation work was on third-generation bilingual speakers

of Swabian dialects in Washtenaw County, Michigan, where
he discovered three distinct dialects that had evolved focused
on distinct Lutheran synods. His doctorate was awarded in
1954.
By this time, Gumperz had moved to a post in modern
languages at Cornell, where he soon joined a Ford Foun-
dation project fostering interdisciplinary development stud-
ies in India, combining anthropology, linguistics, sociology,
political science, and economics. The project had a base at
Deccan College, Pune, where in 1954–56 Gumperz came
into contact with Charles Ferguson and William Bright. He
focused on the dialects of Hindi in the village of Khalapur
in the far north of Uttar Pradesh. As in his PhD work,
he found that dialects cannot be explained mechanically in
terms of barriers to communication; instead, they require a
consideration of social motivations. His two years in India
convinced him of the importance of combining linguistics
with a study of social structure and process. He went on
to coedit a volume on linguistic diversity in South Asia
(Ferguson and Gumperz 1960), which in retrospect can
A studio portrait of John Gumperz. (Photo courtesy of public be viewed as the first major collection in the new field of
domain) sociolinguistics.1
By 1956, Gumperz had moved to the University of
John Joseph Gumperz (1922–2013) California at Berkeley, initially as a Hindi instructor. There
John Joseph Gumperz, one of the founding fathers of so- he was soon surrounded by many scholars interested in the
ciolinguistics and modern linguistic anthropology, died on social foundations of language, including Susan Ervin-Tripp,
March 29, 2013, in Santa Barbara, California. He was born Erving Goffman, John Searle, Dell Hymes, Dan Slobin, and
Hans-Josef Gumperz on January 9, 1922, in Hattingen in the Indianists Murray Emeneau, Gerald Berreman, and Frits
the Ruhr, Germany, where his Jewish family owned a soap Staal. Gumperz was an eclectic scholar who forged the-
factory. When the Nazi party came to power, he was barred ory from many ideas, and he benefited greatly from this
from high school, and his family sent him to Italy for school- rich milieu. In particular, he found his own training and
ing in 1935. After Kristallnacht in 1938, it was clear to the experiences nicely complemented by Dell Hymes’s back-
family that it was time to leave Europe, and so in 1939 ground in Amerindian linguistics and folklore and his wide
they left for Cincinnati. John enrolled for a bachelor’s de- knowledge of ethnographic linguistics. Together they edited
gree in chemistry at the University of Cincinnati, but his a special issue of the American Anthropologist (Gumperz and
studies were interrupted in 1943 when he was sent back Hymes 1964) on “The Ethnography of Communication,”
to Germany as a translator and interrogator for the occu- which essentially crystalized the ethnography of speaking.
pying U.S. forces. He finished his degree in 1947, then Influential to this and other early publications was the Soci-
moved to the University of Michigan for graduate studies in olinguistics Committee of the Social Science Research Coun-
chemistry. As it happened, the Linguistic Institutes (sum- cil, initiated in 1963, in which Gumperz played a key role,
mer schools) of the Linguistic Society of America were held forming small working “Gumperz groups.” The committee
annually in Michigan from 1945 to 1950, mostly under the at one time or another included most of the foundational
direction of Hans Kurath, the dialectologist who initiated figures in anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics; of
the Linguistic Atlas of the United States. Seeing the possibil- all of these, Gumperz was perhaps the most able to absorb
ity of exploiting his multilingual background and interests, new developments in many disciplines and explore their
Gumperz soon switched from chemistry to linguistics. His potential implications for sociolinguistics.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 000, No. 0, pp. 1–4, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.
C 2015 by the American Anthropological Association.

All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12185

2 American Anthropologist • Vol. 000, No. 0 • xxxx 2015

When Hymes left Berkeley in 1965, Gumperz inherited Gumperz showed this to be false: his Indian village with
his position in the Department of Anthropology. But their 31 castes had just four dialects. People of different castes
collaboration continued with the edited volume Directions who spent most of their lives working together might never
in Sociolinguistics (1972), which served as a textbook for acquire each other’s dialects. Gumperz distinguished pure
the new field. That same year Gumperz’s first wife, Ellen Bloomfieldian connectedness from network ties with specific
née McDonald, took her own life, leaving him with two affective properties: it was only friendship networks that
small children. He was fortunate to find a new partner in transmitted dialect forms. Gumperz can be credited with
Jenny Cook, a postdoc from Basil Bernstein’s department in introducing the promise of network analysis to sociolinguis-
London, who became a coauthor and coeditor of much of his tics and with pointing out that friendship ties are the dialect
later work, contributing her British sociological expertise to superconductors.
their joint analyses. The division between work ties, on the one hand, and
Gumperz’s work had taken a more fine-grained in- friendship–kinship ties, on the other hand, was developed
teractional focus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, start- further in a celebrated article that did much to spur later
ing with his investigation with Jan-Petter Blom of the work on language contact (Gumperz and Wilson 1971). It
contrastive uses of standard and local dialects in Norway explored the ways in which unrelated languages in daily
(Blom and Gumperz 1972). This interactional perspec- contact through work ties converge in their underlying
tive dovetailed with the evolving Berkeley environment, structure but retain distinct formal diacritics to mark so-
where an emphasis on inferential processes in language ciolinguistic distance. Work ties also played a crucial role
use was emerging in the work of Paul Grice, John Searle, in Gumperz’s later writing on bureaucracy in complex soci-
George and Robin Lakoff, Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, Brent eties, wherein gatekeepers control access to resources while
Berlin, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Dan Slobin, and others. The dialect differences undermine the rhetorical effectiveness of
establishment of the Language Behavior Research Lab at plaintiffs.
Berkeley provided a haven where Gumperz and a talented Gumperz was simultaneously exploring the other half
cohort of students and collaborators could explore these of the distinction—namely, friendship and kinship ties.
issues. These ideas gelled in the books Discourse Strategies Through such ties, there is transmission of the full linguistic
and Language and Social Identity, both appearing in 1982 repertoire—not only dialect properties but also languages
(Gumperz 1982a, 1982b). involved in code-switching and distinctive discourse styles.
A BBC film (Cross-Talk [Twitchin and Thompson 1979]) Gumperz was intrigued not so much by situational code
produced with an accompanying booklet (Gumperz et al. switching but by what he called metaphorical switching:
1979) illustrated the inadvertent misunderstandings due the rapid mid-sentence switching between fluent bilinguals
to dialect and accent differences and established a com- that serves to index subtle allusions or trigger complex
pelling case for the importance of subtle conversational inferences. Gumperz’s initial foray here (Blom and
inferences, thus promising a new advocacy role for so- Gumperz 1972) concerned switching between two dialects
ciolinguistics. The idea that possibly well-intentioned but or registers of the same language in Norway, a kind of
powerful gatekeepers could make life-changing decisions on language switching that has been the focus of much later
the basis of fleeting misunderstandings has proved one of work investigating the nature of the metasystem that makes
Gumperz’s most enduring contributions. He went on to it possible.
develop these themes in his last works, maintaining that The study of friendship networks prepared the way for
sociolinguistics led the way toward political engagement another phase of Gumperz’s investigation. He had found it
in modern anthropological linguistics (Gumperz and Cook- difficult to nail down exactly the fleeting meanings or infer-
Gumperz 2008). ences generated by code switching. Here, drawing on Harold
Gumperz retired from Berkeley in 1991 and moved to Garfinkel’s insight that breaches of social norms reveal them
UC Santa Barbara, where he joined the Language, Interac- (Gumperz 2001), Gumperz focused on where communica-
tion, and Social Organization unit. tion breaks down: inevitably, but without awareness, we
Gumperz is best known for his specific brand of “inter- deploy the same inferential triggers we use in our friendship
actional sociolinguistics,” but his work ranged over major networks to generate subtle allusions outside those net-
themes in the relation of language to social structure, and works, where our implied messages may be lost or misin-
it may be useful to sketch how the different strands fit to- terpreted. This line of work led to Crosstalk (Gumperz et al.
gether. The root of much of his thought can be found in his 1979; Twitchin and Thompson 1979) and to the discovery
early work in India. In an early article (Gumperz 1958), us- of “contextualization cues.” The underlying concept here
ing his new Indian data, he confronted the idea in traditional had already been introduced to anthropologists by Gregory
dialectology that dialects directly reflect frequency of com- Bateson’s (1956) notion of the “metamessage,” as when a
munication. Quoting Leonard Bloomfield (1933:46), who puppy snarls while simultaneously indicating with his body
had sketched a kind of proto-network analysis and held that that “this is play.” Gumperz’s specialization of the idea was
“the most important differences of speech within a commu- that an utterance could carry with it instructions about the
nity are due to differences in the density of communication,” context within which it should be understood. His work
Obituary 3

suggested that in English it is prosody in particular that car- Educational Research Association. He was honored with a
ries this metasignal (in other languages, particles or marked special session of the American Anthropological Association
constructions might do the same job). It is a powerful idea in his presence the December before his death and a
with a number of intriguing consequences (Levinson 1997), resulting special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
but Gumperz was particularly interested in the potential for (Jacquemet 2013).
miscommunication that occurs when these metasignals are Gumperz’s legacy also resides in his training of students
used outside the networks in which they are effortlessly de- and colleagues, many of whom went on to be major figures
coded. He focused on gatekeepers in bureaucratic societies in anthropological linguistics, the ethnography of commu-
because in such job or welfare interviews a brief meeting nication, and sociolinguistics. He never tried to found a
can affect individuals’ life chances in fundamental ways— school closely based on a particular method or theory. In-
hence the promise of a sociolinguistics that might better stead, he encouraged students to find their own way, giving
the world. them a tape recorder, encouraging exploratory fieldwork,
Gumperz had now, with this focus on contextual mean- showing them how to transcribe and analyze, and receiv-
ing in discourse, introduced a new hermeneutic turn in ing half-baked ideas with an enthusiasm that transformed
sociolinguistics, downplayed in the variationist sociolinguis- them. This open-ended, generous mode of instruction and
tics of William Labov and followers, wherein sociolinguistic collaboration means that his contribution is diffusely repre-
variables are mere associationist markers, not rich inferen- sented across a wide band of researchers both within and
tial triggers for the meta-analysis of communicative content. outside of academia (see, e.g., Auer and Roberts 2011).
This hermeneutic turn made it possible to think about a In addition, he was an important conduit of ideas between
relativity of interpretations, ideas explored in a Wenner- Europe and the United States. His projects with local col-
Gren conference, “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity,” and its laborators on both sides of the Atlantic led to a flourish-
resulting published volume (Gumperz and Levinson 1996). ing of work on language use, especially in the U.K. and
Gumperz’s overall approach was unique in that it combined Germany. Through the various aspects of his work, John
a dialectology compatible with standard variationist soci- Gumperz played a key role in establishing the study of
olinguistics with a much less familiar meaning-based form of language use in its social context over a period of half
sociolinguistic analysis, the two strands unified by the study a century.
of interaction in social networks.
Gumperz’s ideas thus describe a whole circle: profes-
sional network ties have specific kinds of sociolinguistic con- NOTE
sequences, linguistic convergence with superficial diacritics 1. See Paulston and Tucker 1997 for the history of the
of difference among them. However, friendship and kinship early foundation of sociolinguistics, wherein Gumperz’s
networks foster an exuberance of rich repertoires, with the central role is evident. Sources on Gumperz’s early career
development of subtle contextualization cues. When these include the following: Dil 1971; Gumperz 1997; Gumperz
cues are introduced into professional networks, they en- and Cook-Gumperz 2013; and Murray 1992. I am grateful
gender miscommunications, so generating the many minor for comments and corrections from Dan Slobin, Sue
tragedies of the interview situation, which can nevertheless Ervin-Tripp, Bill Hanks, and other colleagues
influence individuals’ life chances. and to Sydel Silverman for skillful editing. Fur-
Space precludes adequate treatment of other of ther biographical notes will be found on the
Gumperz’s notions that are now part of the standard vocabu- Berkeley website at http://www.lib.berkeley.
lary of linguistics and sociolinguistics. Suffice it to say that he edu/ANTH/emeritus/gumperz, along with a com-
introduced or redefined notions like the speech community, plete bibliography of Gumperz’s work.
repertoire, metaphorical switching, contextualization, lin-
guistic convergence, interactional sociolinguistics, and many
Stephen C. Levinson Language and Cognition Department,
others.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The
Gumperz’s role in establishing modern sociolinguistics
Netherlands; [email protected]
was recognized by many awards. He was fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences; distinguished
fellow of the American Anthropological Association; life
fellow of the Linguistic Society of America; a Guggenheim REFERENCES CITED
fellow; a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Auer, Peter, and Celia Roberts, eds.
Studies, Princeton; an overseas fellow at Churchill College, 2011 Special issue, “In Honor of John Gumperz,” Text and Talk
Cambridge University; and a fellow at the Center for 31(4).
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford Bateson, Gregory
University. He also served as the inaugural president of 1956 The Message “This Is Play.” In Group Processes: Transactions
the International Pragmatics Association (1986–90), and of the Second Conference. Bertram Schaffner, ed. Pp. 145–
an award was established in his name by the American 242. New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.
4 American Anthropologist • Vol. 000, No. 0 • xxxx 2015

Blom, Jan-Petter, and John J. Gumperz Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds.
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