Nick Enfield is an award-winning author, speaker, and researcher working on the ecology of language power, and its role in mind, culture, and society. His books include What is Truth For? (2025), Language vs. Reality (2022), and How We Talk (2017), along with more than twenty other books with academic publishers including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and MIT Press. His wide-ranging work appears in outlets from scholarly journals including Psychological Review and Current Anthropology to media including The Wall Street Journal and The Time Literary Supplement. Nick is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research on language, culture, cognition and social life is based on long term field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos.
My research addresses the intersection of language, cognition, social interaction, and culture, from three angles:
1. Semiotic structure and process
– Grammatical and semantic structure in language
– Structure of conversation and context-situated understanding
– Multimodal nature of utterances (speech plus ‘gesture’)
2. Micro-macro relations in semiotic systems
– The interplay between individual cognitive representations (and processes), actual communicative interactions, and higher-level systems such as ‘languages’
3. Social cognition and social action
– How language constitutes a primary resource for carrying out (joint) action in the social realm, and what these properties of language and its use tell us about human social intelligence (or ‘Theory of Mind’)
My empirical specialization is in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia, especially Lao and Kri. Lao is the national language of Laos, spoken by over 20 million people in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and elsewhere. Kri (Vietic sub-branch of Austroasiatic) is spoken near the Laos-Vietnam border in Khammouane Province by an isolated community of around 300 people.
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