Mary Bucholtz


Mary Bucholtz, is professor of linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. She is well known for her contributions to research on language and identity within sociocultural linguistics, and especially the tactics of intersubjectivity framework developed with Kira Hall. Bucholtz's work focuses largely on language use in the United States, and specifically on issues of language and youth; language, gender, and sexuality; African American English; and Mexican and Chicano Spanish.

Biography

Bucholtz received a B.A. in Classics from Grinnell College in 1990 and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1992 and 1997. She has held previous academic positions at Stanford and Texas A&M.
At UC Santa Barbara, where she has worked as an assistant professor, an associate professor and a full professor, Bucholtz is affiliated with several departments, including the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Feminist Studies, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program. Since 2011, she has also directed the Center for California Languages and Cultures within UC Santa Barbara's Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research. Through her work at the Center for California Languages and Cultures, Bucholtz has been the director and associate director of a community partnership program, School Kids Investigating Language in Life + Society, which provides linguistics research opportunities to students enrolled in Santa Barbara high schools.
Bucholtz has been an editorial board member for several journals. She served as series editor for Studies in Language and Gender from 1998-2013, editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology from 2002-2004, and an editorial board member of Language in Society, Gender and Language, Journal of Sociolinguistics, American Anthropologist, and Text and Talk. She still serves as an editorial board member of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Visual Communication, the International Journal on Research in Critical Discourse Analysis, Language and Linguistics Compass, American Speech, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Pragmatics and Society, and Discourse, Context, and Media. She has also been an advisory board member for Gender and Language since 2014.
From 2000-2001, Bucholtz was appointed as the chair of the Nominations Committee of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. She was also elected to serve as an advisory council member and co-chair for the International Gender and Language Association from 2000-2004.
Bucholtz was recognized in 2014 by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology with the Award for Public Outreach and Community Service.

Research & Work

As a sociocultural linguist, Bucholtz has focused on researching how language is used in interactional contexts to create identity and culture and contribute to issues of social power.

Language and youth

In the late 1990s, Bucholtz began ethnographic work on the ways adolescents and pre-adolescents construct identity. Her research extended the work of Penelope Eckert, who identified three adolescent social categories concerned with pursuing "coolness." From 1994-1996, Bucholtz studied another social category, "Nerds," using a California high school in the San Francisco Bay Area as her field site. She initially presented her work on Nerd girls at the 1997 International Conference on Language and Social Psychology. Bucholtz positions the "Nerd" as a separate and distinct community of practice set in opposition to the Burnouts, Jocks and In-betweens: Nerds purposely reject the Burnouts', Jocks', and In-betweens' pursuit of "coolness" and instead prioritize knowledge and individuality.
Bucholtz uses the concepts of positive identity practices and negative identity practices to show how Nerds construct their community of practice. Her research suggests that the Nerd identity is "hyperwhite", characterized linguistically by more infrequent use of Valley girl speech and slang than other social categories; by a preference for Greco-Latinate over Germanic words; by the use of the discourse practice of punning; and by adherence to conventions of "super-standard English," or excessively formal English. Additionally, Bucholtz found that the speech of Nerds often included consonant-cluster simplification, phonological reduction of unstressed vowels, careful and precise enunciation, and reading style speech. She proposes that these linguistic practices and features are used to establish the Nerd's intragroup identity marker of intelligence.

Selected bibliography

Books