About

Paul V. Kroskrity is a distinguished professor of Anthropology at UCLA, with additional appointments as a Professor of American Indian Studies. He is a linguistic anthropologist who explores how various people use language ideologies in different cultural contexts, with a focus on Native American societies. His research emphasizes key sites of language usage such as verbal art, political and religious discourse, and the contexts of language endangerment and revitalization. Kroskrity has worked with indigenous languages of the Western Pueblo region and Central California, and his work extends to language ideologies, verbal art, and language revitalization across North America and globally. His recent and ongoing research includes theorizing 'Language Ideological Assemblages' to understand linguistic and cultural contact, developing analytic approaches to covert linguistic racism directed at Native Americans, and producing language revitalization products in collaboration with communities. He also investigates the impact of language ideologies on linguistic change, the role of indigenous verbal art in documentary linguistics, and the evolving practices of language reclamation as indigenous communities gain new agency. Kroskrity has served as the President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and has contributed extensively to the fields of language and culture, language contact, identity, and ethnography of communication.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• Law
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• : <i>Piros and Prehistory: A Study in Tanoan</i>

  Journal of Anthropological Research · 2025-11-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• An Indigenous Language and Culture Board Game? Serious Play and Yo’eme Language Reclamation

  American Indian Culture and Research Journal · 2025-03-03 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article discusses the Yo’eme Language and Cultural Board Game, developed as a language revitalization product and activity for the Yo’eme language community. Aimed especially at youth and young adults, the game is designed to be a decolonizing intervention that fosters language ideological clarification. While it promotes knowledge of the heritage language and culture in a playful but active way by rewarding gamers for correct answers and for engaging in intergenerational communication, it encourages some community members to revise their perceptions of the language as “static”—limited to a traditional past and inappropriate for dynamic interaction in the present. The game is constructed in accord with a Yo’eme cultural logic that deemphasizes the achievement of a single “winner” in favor of the group progressing in knowledge and language acquisition at various levels. Evidence acquired from use of the game with Yo’eme learners suggests that playing the game not only provides linguistic and cultural knowledge but also develops critical Indigenous conciousness and contributes to the health and well-being of users.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Language Ideologies and Social Identities

  Elsevier eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The moral call for hopeful action: Language renewal in the Village of Tewa and generative hope

  Language in Society · 2024-11-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract While multiple threats to the language, culture, and existence of the 700 members of the Village of Tewa loom (Kroskrity 1993, 2021), this diasporic Pueblo society deploys sociolinguistic resources to generate hope ‘as a moral call’ (Mattingly 2010). Their heritage language is rhematized (Gal &amp; Irvine 2019) to their community identity but now that emblem, and their very existence, has been challenged by the encroachment of English and other crises (including climate change and the pandemic). For Tewa, repairing the situation requires a hopeful ‘reorientation of knowledge and action’ (Miyazaki 2004; Borba 2019) that recontextualizes traditional linguistic practices and language ideologies (Kroskrity 1998). Tewa linguistic and discursive expressions of ‘hope’ are more agentive and directed than their English language counterparts. These practices are examined as forms of what Tuck (2009:417) called generative hope ‘about a present that is enriched by the past and the future’. (Pragmatics, language ideologies, hope)*

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• On the Social Lives of Indigenous North American Languages

  2023-03-21

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In contemporary Native American communities of North America, Indigenous heritage languages continue to provide critical resources for many projects that are as various and wide-ranging as the communities themselves.The diversity of Native American cultural adaptations to the varied ecozones of North America has been magnified by vastly different histories of migration, colonization, economic development, religious practice, and language ideologies of those Native American communities.Whether diasporic or living in traditional territory, communities may differ in having few or no traditional speakers, such as those using Indigenous California languages like Wappo or Esselen, to having hundreds of thousands, such as Navajo or Inuktitut, or even millions-like Nahuatl.Some, like the Hopi of Northern Arizona, have lived for more than a millennium in the same location while others, like the Cherokee and Chickasaw, have experienced the dislocation of removal by the settler-colonial society of the United States.While some communities still engage in traditional subsistence activities like farming, all have been economically incorporated into the larger economies of nation states and many derive revenue streams from mining, oil and other fossil fuels, cultural tourism, and gaming.Some tribes thereby enjoy considerable economic wealth, while others experience economic marginalization and poverty.In some communities, the heritage language is openly used and appears on road signs and building signage within the linguistic landscape, while in others it is spoken only in brief traditional greetings if it is spoken at all.Communities, and individuals within them, also differ dramatically in how they approach the maintenance and continuity of their heritage languages.Some support robust programs of language revitalization and commit energy and resources with the goal of creating future generations of speakers, while others cannot prioritize those goals, nor do they view their heritage languages as performing active roles in the CHAPTER 1

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• Multilingual Language Ideological Assemblages: Language Contact, Documentation and Revitalization

  Journal of Language Contact · 2023-05-17 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Data from long-term research in two ideologically divergent Native American linguistic communities demonstrate the importance, first, of indigenous multilingualisms and, second, of distinctive ideologies of multilingualism in shaping the divergent language contact outcomes and practices of those communities as they adapted to such forces as economic incorporation, colonization, assimilationist policies, and later decolonization and attempted language revitalization. Indigenous ideological differences in these communities were key factors in producing divergent patterns of language shift as well as in community efforts to document and revitalize their respective heritage languages. The Village of Tewa (NE Arizona) still partially retains a multilingual adaptation in all generations except youth and young adults (Kroskrity, 1993; 2014). The Western Mono (Central California) were traditionally multilingual with neighboring languages of the Yokuts and Southern Sierra Miwok groups (Kroskrity, 2009a). Though both groups were historically multilingual, multilingual practices were differentially influenced by distinctive language ideologies such as those emphasizing purism/syncretism and the expressive/utilitarian functions of language. This observation suggests the importance of understanding indigenous multilingualisms and their consequences for language contact within their language ideological assemblages (Kroskrity, 2018).

  PublisherDOI

• Dell Hymes and communicative competence

  Handbook of pragmatics online/Handbook of pragmatics · 2023-09-18 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5 Language ideologies and social identities

  2022-08-08 · 12 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Articulating Lingual Life Histories and Language Ideological Assemblages: Indigenous Activists within the North Fork Mono and Village of Tewa Communities

  Journal of Anthropological Research · 2021-02-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article argues that a key value in focusing on linguistic life historical data is access to individual biographical details and how they inform the intellectual and affective significance speakers attribute to their heritage languages. Examining lingual life histories data from previous research—one from Western Mono in central California and the other from the Village of Tewa in northern Arizona, I explore how this research provides linguistic anthropologists with a means of understanding the interaction of imposed relevances and affect-laden significance experienced by individuals in their milieu—or “subjective worlds.” Understanding lingual life histories of influential speakers embedded in the language ideological assemblages of their language communities, this approach provides potentially valuable data for scholars attempting to understand processes of resistance, resilience, and adaptation that contribute to maintaining and revitalizing endangered heritage languages in Indigenous communities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chapter 10. Language ideological assemblages within linguistic anthropology

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2021 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Linguistics
  • Anthropology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer F. Reynolds

  University of South Carolina

  3 shared

• Ward Churchill

  3 shared

• Bambi B. Schieffelin

  2 shared

• Donald L. Fixico

  2 shared

• Yasuhide Kawashima

  The University of Texas at El Paso

  2 shared

• Kathryn A. Woolard

  2 shared

• R. W. Reising

  2 shared

• John S. Long

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  Indiana University Bloomington

• B.A., Oriental Studies/Comparative Literature

  Columbia University

Awards & honors

• President, Society for Linguistic Anthropology (2013-15)
• Faculty Recognition Award, Fiat Lux Freshman Seminar Program…