Janet Connor

I am a sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist. My research takes a sociolinguistic approach to community formation, asking how linguistic and cultural differences become significant, and how people use language to create forms of belonging across difference. In my most recent research in urban Norway, I examine how large-scale processes like urbanization, transnational migration, and climate change are reshaping the Norwegian welfare state and understandings of the bonds that hold Norwegian society together. I have also conducted research on the politics of regional languages in France, specifically Occitan. My work contributes to studies of language variation and change, language ideologies, language and scale, and the social significance of semiotic systems more generally.

I am currently an Assistant Professor at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). I recently completed a joint PhD in the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Chicago. My dissertation, Making Welfare “Sustainable”: The Language, Politics, and Ethics of Scale-Making in a Norwegian Neighborhood, explored how people make sense of and talk about the entanglement of climate change, migration, and community across scales in the Norwegian welfare state.