Norma Mendoza-Denton

Norma Catalina Mendoza-Denton is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, formerly of the University of Arizona. She worked previously as an assistant professor at Ohio State University. She specializes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, including work in sociophonetics, language and identity, ethnography and visual anthropology.

Mendoza-Denton has served as president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, since 2011.

Mendoza-Denton earned a doctorate in linguistics from Stanford University in 1997 with the completion of her dissertation, Chicana/Mexicana Identity and Linguistic Variation: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Gang Affiliation in an Urban High School. Her ethnographic and sociolinguistic analyses of Latina gang members in California are presented in her book Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice Among Latina Youth Gangs.

Mendoza-Denton was a consultant for the Do You Speak American? television program. In 2011 she received a National Institute for Civil Discourse grant for her work analyzing the ways in which politicians handle disagreements with their constituents.

• Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2008. Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice Among Latina Youth Gangs. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2007. Sociolinguistic extensions of exemplar theory. In J. Cole and J. Hualde (eds.) Laboratory Phonology 9. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
• Jannedy, Stefanie and Norma Mendoza-Denton. 2006. Structuring information through gesture and intonation. Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 3, 199-244.
• Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2004. The anguish of normative gender. In M. Bucholtz (ed.), Language and Woman's Place II: Text and Commentaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2001. Style. In A. Duranti (ed.), Key Terms in Language and Culture. London: Blackwell.
• Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1996. "Muy macha": Gender and ideology in gang girls' discourse about makeup. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 6, 47-63.