People

Marianna Di Paolo
Ph.D. (Director)

Dr. Marianna Di Paolo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, and a Research Associate at the National Museum of Natural History (the Smithsonian).  She was the founding Chair of the University of Utah’s Department of Linguistics, and is currently an Emeritus in that department.  She is the Director of the Shoshoni Language Project at the University of Utah, a project that begin in collaboration with Mauricio Mixco.  

Dr. Di Paolo’s first language is a dialect of Italian, having been raised in a small, immigrant town in Colorado.  She began to learn English before starting elementary school.  Her love of languages and linguistic diversity, and her appreciation of the importance of language to her own identity began in her childhood home.  She received a B.A. with honors at the University of Colorado Boulder, and trained as a teacher of Spanish and English as a Second Language.  Her Ph.D. is in Linguistics from The University of Texas at Austin

As a sociolinguist her research focuses on sociophonetics; variation and change in Western American English and Shoshoni; and on the documentation and revitalization of the Shoshoni language.  Her recent publications include “The Peripatetic History of ME *ɛ:” (with A. Faber & C.T. Best, 2010), Sociophonetics: a Student’s Guide (co-edited with M. Yaeger-Dror, 2011 Routledge), and Languages and Dialects in the U.S.: Focus on Diversity and Linguistics (co-edited with A.K. Spears, 2014 Routledge).  

In addition to serving on and chairing a number of committees at the University of Utah, she has been a member of the Advisory Board of LinguistList, the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), and since 2003 has served on the Utah State Supreme Court Committee on Model Utah Jury Instructions-Civil. In 2003 she chaired the LSA’s Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics.  She launched the Best Practices in Sociophonetics Workshops in 2004, typically offered each year at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference or at the LSA Linguistics Institute.