Summary
Sandhya Krittika Narayanan is a linguistic anthropologist, interested in researching the maintenance of multilingual communities in zones of long-standing language contact, and how these processes shape hierarchies of inequality along racialized and gendered axes. She is interested in understanding the management of multilingual practices and how such processes also shape racialization, social belonging, legitimacy, and recognition in Indigenous and diasporic communities across various social contexts. She also investigates how these processes intersect with projects around language maintenance, revitalization, and reclamation.
Her book, Mother Tongues of the High Andes: Gender, Language, and Indigenous Difference in Peru (University of Arizona Press, 2025), focuses on the social and linguistic consequences of long-term Indigenous language contact between Quechua and Aymara speakers in the Andean altiplano, highlighting the ways in which speakers' shifting attitudes towards speaking their Indigenous languages and understanding inter-Indigenous multilingualism and contact take gendered dimensions.
She is currently working on a new project on language reclamation projects in the eastern United States and investigates how language reclamation and revitalization efforts are influenced by concurrent projects around Indigenous sovereignty and recognition, and inter-Tribal relationships in the region.
Research interests
Sandhya Krittika Narayanan welcomes inquiries from prospective M.A. and Ph.D. students in these related areas:
- Linguistic anthropology
- Language contact and multilingualism
- Language, gender and sexuality
- Language endangerment and revitalization
- Language ideologies
- Andes/Latin America
- Eastern United States
Selected publications
Books:
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2025. Mother Tongues of the High Andes: Gender, Language, and Indigenous Difference in Peru. University of Arizona Press.
Peer-reviewed articles and chapter contributions:
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2025. “.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2023. “’” Gender and Language 17 (2): 125–47.
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2023. “Language and the Emplacement of Indigenous Citizenship in Peru.” In Ethnographic Insights on Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Melanie A. Medeiros and Jennifer R. Guzmán, 111–22. University of Toronto Press.
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2023. “.” Journal of Material Culture 28 (1): 155–71.
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2022. “‘Ni Paisana, Ni Jacinta’: Language and the Scaling of Indigenous Femininity in Peru.” Signs and Society 10 (3): 314–33.
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2022. “Contact.” Feminist Anthropology 3 (2)"" 220-26.
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2018. “Are We One?: Quechua-Aymara Contact and the Challenges of Boundary Maintenance in Puno, Peru.” Language & Communication, 62 (September): 145–55.
Courses taught
- ANTH 106: Introduction to Anthropological Linguistics
- ANTH 401/601: Contemporary Latin American Societies
- ANTH 405/605: Language, Religion and Politics
- ANTH 484/684: Language Endangerment and Revitalization
- ANTH 485/685: Language and Culture
- ANTH 709: Graduate Seminar in Linguistic Anthropology
Education
- Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2020
- M.A., University of Michigan, 2015
- B.A., Brandeis University, 2010