Bambi B. Schieffelin

Bambi B. Schieffelin is an American linguistic anthropologist and professor at New York University known for her research on language socialization, the study of how children acquire language while simultaneously being socialized into the norms and practices of their culture. Her long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, documented in her book The Give and Take of Everyday Life, examined how Kaluli caregivers use language to teach children cultural competence. Schieffelin co-developed the language socialization paradigm with Elinor Ochs, shaping how linguists, anthropologists, and educators understand the relationship between language learning and cultural transmission in childhood development.