Re: John Gumperz died (29-3-2013)

Born Germany, 1922. Jewish. Left Germany 1930s, eventually reached the USA. Here his interests swung from chemistry to linguistics.
PhD, University of Michigan, 1954. Thesis on the dialect of a Swabian-German community in Michigan.
At University of California, Berkeley, from 1956.
What exactly was his field?
Sociolinguistics? (Crystal), but quite a different tradition from the Labovian variationists
specifically, Interactional Sociolinguistics? (Crystal)
Ethnography of Communication? (Crystal)...he was a close associate of Dell Hymes.
I haven't read much of Gumperz.
 Crystal mentions a "famous example", a case arising at Heathrow Airport.
Fortunately I don't have to retell it since it's here,

 in much the same terms:
 https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/education/john-j-gumperz-linguist-of-cultural-interchange-dies-at-91.html   One thing that I have read, and made students read, is the 1971 paper co-authored with Robert Wilson about the town of Kupwar in Maharashtra, where close (yet caste-divided) contact between Marathi (Indo-Aryan) and Kannada (Dravidian) has led to striking convergence of structure, while vocabularies remain distinct. A classic example of "metatypy" (though the word hadn't been coined then).
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatypy
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Gumperz