Penelope "Penny" Eckert (born 1942) is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University.
[10] Eckert is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University where she is an active affiliate of the feminist, gender, and sexuality studies program, and is a member of various committees.
The first wave focuses on how linguistic variations relate to different demographic communities in highly populated American cities.
[17] Eckert's focus on language in adolescence and preadolescence began in the early eighties with Jocks and Burnouts, an ethnographic project set in suburban Detroit high schools.
[18] Eckert's work highlighted social categories as cultures that structured the use of phonological variables within the high school setting.
"[19][20] Eckert examined the extreme backing and lowering of (uh), a step in the Northern Cities Chain Shift, among jocks, in-betweens, and burnouts, as well as the effect of parents' socioeconomic status on the backing and lowering (uh), finding no correlation; this would indicate that parents' socioeconomic status had no substantial effect.
Rather, it was students' jock/burnout identities and social network clusters that showed the stronger correlation, wherein burnouts exhibited the highest frequency of (uh) backing and lowering.
[18] Adopting a communities of practice approach, Eckert studied the stylistic development of a heterosexual marketplace or field of gender difference among fifth and sixth graders.
The pre-conceived notion that California speech is based solely on Hollywood is false and the cultural and linguistic diversity throughout the state is sizable.
[1] Eckert's work employs ethnographic research and follows preadolescents' linguistic development throughout elementary and middle school years.
Californians view their dialect as similar and identifiable to most states, excluding locations with distinct accents such as Chicago and New York.
The notion of community of practice was formulated by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger both of whom Eckert met in 1989 while working at the Institute for Research on Learning in Palo Alto.
While originally based on sociological research on 'newcomers' and 'old-timers' in a place of employment,[30] communities of practice, according to Eckert, have a legitimate role in shaping identity through language.
Eckert is cautious of many sociolinguistic studies that draw conclusions about language and gender without taking multiple contextual factors and the variety of community of practices into consideration.
Eckert points out that gender is not solitary, but socially constructed through multi-modal factors such as class, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and sex.
Profanity could be used as an affront to authority, a marker of style to establish a rougher identity, as dissociating from communities of practice of the 'goodies' social groups, or as associating with a profanity-using mother.