Penelope Eckert

Who is Penelope Eckert?

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University in Stanford, California. She is a prominent scholar of variationist sociolinguistics, and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender.

Eckert received her PhD in linguistics in 1978 from Columbia University, where she was a student of William Labov. Her early work was on phonological variation in Gascon. Her more recent work focuses on the social meaning of linguistic variables, particularly in English. She is the author or co-author of three books on sociolinguistics, the co-editor of three collections, and author of numerous scholarly papers in the field.