Hello! I’m Anna Bax.

I'm an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at California State University, Long Beach. I recently received my PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. I use she/her pronouns.

As a sociocultural linguist, I believe that the linguistic is always political.

My work has multiple strands, which tie together sociocultural, structural, applied and theoretical approaches:

I study language and identity with Tu’un Savi (Mixtec)-speaking communities in California, with a particular focus on youth’s multilingual identity and language socialization practices in the face of first-generation language shift. I also work on community-led language reclamation, documentation, and maintenance projects.
I do collaborative linguistics outreach and education — with speech-language pathologists, public high school students, and Indigenous youth — and search for ways that linguists can apply our research findings to intervene in incorrect or oppressive ideologies about marginalized languages and groups of speakers.
I use linguistic theories and methodologies to analyze acts of discursive world-building, particularly among powerful groups in American society.

All of these strands are linked by a focus on the intersection between language and social justice.

In March 2022, I gave a virtual talk entitled “The ideological dimensions of language naming practices in the multidialectal California Mixtec diaspora” at the Georgetown University Round Table conference on dialect contact.
In February 2022, my coauthor Inî G. Mendoza (University of Chicago) and I gave a virtual talk entitled “Linguistic brownface and raciolinguistic ideologies: Mestizo voicings of ‘Indio Spanish’ in Mexican popular media” at the 21st meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society.
In January 2022, I gave a virtual talk entitled “Linguistic differentiation and language naming practices in the California Mixtec diaspora” at the annual meeting of the American Name Society.
In November 2021, I gave a presentation entitled “Teaching linguistics for social transformation” at the Towards A Better Linguistics Environment (TABLE) colloquium series in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley.

In April 2022, my coauthor Inî G. Mendoza (University of Chicago) and I will give an in-person talk entitled “Linguistic brownface and raciolinguistic ideologies: Mestizo voicings of ‘Indio Spanish’ in Mexican popular media” at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology 2022 Spring Conference in Boulder, Colorado.