Susan Gal

Dr. Susan Gal has conducted ethnographic and linguistic field research in Austria and Hungary, including both urban and rural settings. Her first book, Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria (Academic: 1979), examined the situation of a Hungarian minority in Austria and continues to be excerpted in standard textbooks of the field. Since then she has published widely on language ideology, linguistic variation, language change, multilingualism and its political economic sources and consequences, on political rhetoric and on the history of European linguistics. She has worked on gender and politics as well as semiotic and linguistic approaches to understanding public communication. Most recently, she published a book outlining a novel approach to language ideology as it constructs social and linguistic differentiation. Gal was the recipient of a Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2002, as well as an SSRC-ACLS International Fellowship. She has also received Fulbright, ACLS and NIMH Fellowships. Gal is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently engaged in a project on mass media and communication in the post-communist period in the east of Europe.

Signs of Difference, Gal’s most recent book, co-authored with Judith T. Irvine, is the winner of the 2021 Edward Sapir Prize of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. The Sapir Prize is awarded biennially to a book that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes. 

Books:

• Language Shift (1979) 
• The Politics of Gender After Socialism (2000, co-authored with Gail Kligman) 
• Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority (2014, co-edited with K. Woolard) 
• Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (2019, co-authored with Judith T. Irvine)

Articles/Chapters:

• "Sociolinguistic differentiation." 2016. IN N. Coupland (ed.) Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge University Press: New York.
• "Politics of translation." 2015. Annual Review of Anthropology. November #44:225-240.
• "John Gumperz’s Discourse Strategies." 2014. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23:1:115-126.
• "Tastes of Talk: Qualia and the Moral Flavor of Signs." 2013. Anthropological Theory 31:31-48.
• "Language and political space." 2008. IN Peter Auer and Jurgen Erich Schmidt (eds.) Language and Space Mouton deGruyter.
• "Contradictions of standard language in Europe: Implications for the study of publics and practices." 2006. Social Anthropology 14:2:163-181.