Penelope Dorothy Eckert

Reshaped sociolinguistic study of language variation toward interpretative sociocultural anthropology of language-in-use, with an emphasis on gender studies. Discerned linguistic details common to pre-adolescent and adolescent student populations, and investigated their speech production. Modeled growth edges of linguistic change-in-progress in the cohort/generation coming of age at each ethnographic horizon-both heteronormative marriage markets and markets of educational and occupational trajectory. Books include Linguistic Variation as Social Practice (2000), Language and Gender (2003), and Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (2001) and Jocks and Burnouts (1989), an ethnography of a Midwestern high school. Co-authored Language and Gender (2003). Created Third Wave Variationist model of how local sociocultural meanings within different social formations drive the cumulative direction of linguistics and other cultural change.