Paul V. Kroskrity

Biography

I am a linguistic anthropologist who explores how various people use language ideologies in a variety of cultural contexts.

My research focuses on both key sites of language usage as well as on everyday practices of communication in Native American societies.  The key sites I work with include the performance and reception of verbal art, the production of political and religious discourse, and the contexts of language endangerment and linguistic revitalization. The languages I have worked with are indigenous languages of the Western Pueblo region as well as those of Central California.  Though my research emphasizes Native American languages and cultures, I advise students working on language ideologies, verbal art, and language revitalization who research these topics elsewhere in North America, the Americas, and more globally.

My recent and ongoing research and writing include :

1) Theorizing “Language Ideological Assemblages (LIA)” as a more effective strategy for understanding the dynamics of linguistic and cultural contact. This approach emphasizes the multiplicity of language ideologies both within and across social groups and views multilingualism and political economic structures as essential components of the LIA.

2) Developing an analytic conceptualization of covert linguistic racism directed at Native Americans and their languages and cultures, by the dominant settler-colonial society, through the marginalization and trivialization of indigenous verbal art forms.

3) Producing language revitalization products (a practical dictionary and video documentation and analysis of indigenous language verbal art performances). These products are recipient-designed in accord with community protocols.

4) Understanding the impact of language ideologies and ethnopragmatic contexts in processes of language contact and linguistic change including grammaticalization.

5) Arguing for more attention in documentary linguistics to be directed at indigenous verbal art.

6) Exploring the changing nature of language reclamation and revitalization products and practices as Indigenous language communities not only become a major audience, or public, for these mediated products (on-line dictionaries, grammar textbooks, language apps) but also assume new forms of agency in their very production.

In addition to being a Professor of Anthropology, I am also a Professor of American Indian Studies, and a past Chair of the AIS IDP and the interim Chair of Department of American Indian Studies (through 2022-23).  I have also served as the elected President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (2013-15).