J. Joseph Errington (Ph.D., University of Chicago 1981).

I am interested in language as part of both the fabric of shared everyday experience, and long term social changes that shape communities and societies. I have tried to develop several angles of vision on these very broad issues with several fine-grained research projects in Indonesia.

My first research focused on Javanese (90 million speakers), as spoken in the south-central region of the island of Java. Language and Social Change in Central Java (1985) describes the ways that language's elaborate system of linguistic etiquette changed during the rapid transition from the Dutch colonial to the Indonesian national era. In a related work, Structure and Style in Javanese (1988) I offer a more abstract semiotic account of linguistic politeness in that city that brings together issues of language structure, speaker awareness, and historical dynamics.

During two shorter stints of research (1986 and 1988) I studied Indonesia's linguistic project of nation-building under New Order rule, focusing on Indonesian's entry as a second language into upland villages of Central Java. Shifting Languages: Interaction and Identity in Javanese Indonesia (1998) deals with patterns of Javanese-Indonesian bilingualism I found there, and new patterns of usage as they emerged against the social backdrop of rapid modernization.

This work, along with broader readings in linguistic anthropology, led me think more broadly about questions of theory and interest in the work of linguistic description. To better understand how linguistics has been more than a science of language, I wrote an essay on the different roles that kind of work served in a wide range of colonial projects (Linguistics in a colonial world, 2007). This book foregrounds and sketches some of the ways linguists made ideas about language difference into means for naturalizing ideas about human "nature," and with them conditions of social inequality.

Most recently I have resumed research in Indonesia, this time studying forms and uses of Indonesian well away from Java. With a team of mostly Indonesian colleagues, I am comparing patterns of sociolinguistic change in three "outer island" cities, trying to show that coming to know Indonesian can help create membership in very different urban communities, but also in a single nation.