Bambi Schieffelin facts for kids

Bambi B. Schieffelin (born April 26, 1945) is a well-known linguistic anthropologist. She is a professor emerita at New York University (NYU). This means she is a retired professor who still holds her title. Along with Elinor Ochs, she helped create a new field called language socialization. This field studies how children learn language and culture together.

Professor Schieffelin has also written a lot about how languages meet and change each other. She studies how people think about language, how reading and writing develop, and the Haitian Creole language. She also researched the work of missionaries.

Education and Early Research

Bambi Schieffelin earned her first degree from Bennington College in 1967. She then studied anthropology at Columbia University, where she received both her undergraduate and doctorate degrees. She also earned master's and postdoctorate degrees in developmental psychology.

Her PhD paper in 1979 was about how Kaluli children learn to speak, act, and feel in their culture. This was an ethnographic study, meaning she learned by living with the Kaluli people. It looked at how they developed their communicative competence.

She taught at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education for a while. Later, she moved to New York University (NYU), where she taught until she retired.

Fieldwork and Language Studies

Professor Schieffelin has done a lot of research in Papua New Guinea. She often worked with Steven Feld, who studies music and culture. Together, they created a dictionary for the Kaluli language. This language is part of the Bosavi languages group.

She has also studied how young people use language in instant messaging and text messaging. She looked closely at how the word like is used in these conversations. Her work also explores how children learn to talk about where they get their information. This is called evidentiality.

Selected Works

Bambi Schieffelin has written and edited several important books. These books share her research and ideas about language and culture. Some of her well-known works include:

• Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies (2007), which she edited with Miki Makihara.
• Language Ideologies (1998), which she edited with Kathryn A. Woolard and Paul V. Kroskrity.
• The Give and Take of Everyday Life (2005).

See also

In Spanish: Bambi Schieffelin para niños