John Joseph Gumperz (January 9, 1922[1] – March 29, 2013[2]) was an American linguist and academic.
[2] A Jew, he fled Nazi Germany and settled first in Italy, then the Netherlands, and finally in the United States in 1939.
Gumperz defines the speech community as "any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage.
"[5] Gumperz was interested in how the order of situations and the culture of the interlocutors both affect how interlocutors make conversational inferences and interpret verbal or non-verbal signs, which he called contextualization cues (overlapping terms by other scholars include paralanguage and kinesics).
His publications and courses given include work in the emerging field of sociolinguistics research in India.