Sociolinguistics in Practice: Interview With Penelope Eckert

ABSTRACT In this interview, Penelope Eckert discusses her life experiences and career as a linguist. Eckert describes a lifelong fascination with language, from her earliest observations of stylistic variation, to her PhD fieldwork in the Pyrenees, to her ethnographic work in US schools in Michigan and Northern California, to her engagement with social theory, which led her to investigate social meaning from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Eckert reflects on her personal motivations and challenges in graduate school, the significance of mentorship, and her evolving views on confidence and authority in scholarship. In the interview, she discusses her “ground up” approach to research, while simultaneously offering a forward‐thinking view of sociolinguistics and its context in a broader intellectual landscape.