John J. Gumperz, Linguist of Cultural Interchange, Dies at 91

University of California Berkeley

John J. Gumperz, right, crossing a river while doing fieldwork in India.

The conflict hinged on a single word: “gravy.”

The place was Heathrow Airport, the time the mid-1970s. The airport had recently hired a group of Indian and Pakistani women to work in its employee cafeteria, and trouble had arisen between them and the British baggage handlers they served.

The baggage handlers complained that the servers were rude, and the servers complained that the baggage handlers were discriminating against them. Neither group knew why the other felt the way it did.

Enter John J. Gumperz. Professor Gumperz, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, who died on Friday at 91, was one of the leading authorities on discourse analysis, which studies not only who says what to whom, but also how it is said and in what context.

At the time of the Heathrow incident, he was on sabbatical in England and was called in to help.

Professor Gumperz, who at his death was an emeritus professor in Berkeley’s anthropology department, was a sociolinguist, whose field stands at the nexus of linguistics, anthropology and sociology. But though sociolinguistics as a whole embraces spoken language and the printed word, he concentrated on face-to-face verbal exchanges.

The subfield he created, known as interactional sociolinguistics, studies such exchanges in a range of social situations. It is especially concerned with discourse as it occurs across cultures, seeking to pinpoint the sources of the misunderstandings that can arise.

“He was one of the first people to look at how language is used by people in their everyday lives,” Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of popular books on language, said in a recent interview. “Gumperz was paying attention to the details of how language is used: your intonation, where you pause, the specific expressions that people from one culture or another might use.”

It was just these details, Professor Gumperz found, that lay at the heart of the Heathrow conflict. For behind the seemingly innocuous culprit he fingered â€" “gravy” â€" lay a world of social and cultural implication.

Hans-Josef Gumperz was born on Jan. 9, 1922, in Hattingen, Germany. (His surname is pronounced GUM-perts in German, though after settling in the United States he was inclined to pronounced it GUM-purrs.)

As a youth, Mr. Gumperz, who was Jewish, was barred by Nazi racial laws from attending high school in Germany. He studied in Italy and later spent time in a Dutch refugee camp before moving to the United States with his family in 1939. He Americanized his name to John Joseph Gumperz not long afterward.

Mr. Gumperz earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Cincinnati in 1947 and embarked on graduate work in that field at the University of Michigan. But he soon became fascinated by the idea that language itself could be an object of scientific scrutiny, and switched course.

After receiving a Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics from Michigan in 1954, he spent two years doing fieldwork in India.

Professor Gumperz, who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1956, also did significant research on code-switching, as a speaker’s use of more than one language within a single conversation is known. This work, like his analysis of the Heathrow impasse, centered on the idea of using linguistics in the service of social justice.

Though earlier accounts of code-switching had suggested that it was largely a random phenomenon â€" a speaker, the thinking went, might use a smattering of English followed by a smattering of Spanish in an amorphous linguistic soup â€" Professor Gumperz showed that this switching, however unconscious, had specific triggers, including the need to encode information about the social relationships underpinning the discourse.

“Say you’re trying to get something done in an office, and you realize that the person with the power to do it comes from the same background as you,” said Professor Tannen, who studied with Professor Gumperz at Berkeley. “You might switch to Spanish or throw in a Yiddish expression to indicate, ‘We share a cultural background.’ ”

Professor Gumperz’ first wife, the former Ellen McDonald, died in 1972. He is survived by his second wife and frequent collaborator, Jenny Cook-Gumperz, who confirmed his death, in Santa Barbara, Calif.; a sister, Lore; two children from his first marriage, Andrew and Jenny Gumperz; and two grandchildren.

Professor Gumperz, who since his retirement from Berkeley in the early 1990s had lived in Santa Barbara, was also an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California campus there.

Summoned to Heathrow that mid-’70s day, tape recorder in hand, Professor Gumperz discovered the following: when diners ordered meat, they were asked if they wanted gravy. The English women who had previously worked behind the counter had posed the question with a single word â€" “Gravy” â€" uttered, per cultural convention, with rising intonation.

When the Indian and Pakistani women joined the staff, they too asked the question with a single word. But in keeping with their cultural conventions, they uttered it with falling intonation: “Gravy.”

Professor Gumperz played the recorded exchanges for diners and staff members. His explanation of the subtle yet powerful difference in intonation, and the cultural meaning it carried, helped the groups achieve a mutual understanding.

“He pointed out that the rising intonation versus falling intonation made it a very different statement, even though the word was the same,” Professor Tannen said. “So rising intonation sounded like, ‘Would you like gravy’ And falling intonation sounded like: ‘This is gravy. Take it or leave it.’ ”