Luke Fleming is a linguistic anthropologist who teaches and writes about the social and cultural aspects of language with a special focus on small-scale and “indigenous” societies. He teaches courses on the post-colonial construction of indigeneity, anthropological dimensions of performativity (that is, the various ways in which language use counts as social action), and the linguistic mediation of gender, among other subjects. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation entitled “From Patrilects to Performatives: Linguistic Exogamy and Language Shift in the Northwest Amazon”, which documented the dynamics of language shift from indigenous native American languages to Portuguese in the Brazilian Amazon. His scholarship focuses on sociolinguistic phenomena (e.g. language shift, gendered speech, honorifics, taboo and avoidance speech) from cross-cultural and comparative perspectives. He has publications in the journals Anthropological Quarterly and Language in Society , and is currently working on two related book manuscripts: “Mother-in-Law Speech: Essays on Aboriginal Australian Ethnolinguistics” and “Avoidance Registers: A Typology of Taboo Performativity.”
