Summary
Sandhya Krittika Narayanan is a linguistic anthropologist and currently an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research is broadly focused on understanding the social and political processes that inform the maintenance of linguistic multiplicity and linguistic differentiation, which contribute to the reproduction of social structures of hierarchy and inequality along racialized, gendered and nationalist axes. Her work approaches these questions through situating changes in linguistic practice and social behavior and organization as the consequences of sociolinguistic contact, and analyzes these changes in relation to broader socio-cultural shifts and transformations.
Much of her published research to date has centered on analyzing these dynamics in the Southern Peruvian Andes (altiplano), highlighting the ways that long-term inter-Indigenous contact and multilingualism in the region inform changing ideologies around Indigenous language speakerhood, Indigenous multilingual praxis and the relationship between Indigenous linguistic knowledge and expertise, gender and Indigeneity.
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 how speakers' shifting attitudes towards speaking their Indigenous languages and understanding inter-Indigenous multilingualism and contact take gendered dimensions.
Her new project extends some of these findings as they apply to the social and linguistic structural and ideological transformations that emerge from language revitalization and language reclamation projects in New England in the eastern United States.
Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Program, National Geographic Society, American Philosophical Society and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She is also the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. In 2026, she was recognized with the Jason Geddes Rising Researcher Award by the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents.
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, thought and society
- Language ideologies
- Andes/Latin America
- Eastern United States
Selected publications
Books:
- Narayanan, S. K. (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, S. K. (n.d.). New Speakers for Established Listeners: Multilingual Regimentation for the Global Listening Subject in Peru. Journal of Sociolinguistics.
- Narayanan, S. K. (2026). “Shifting the Linguistic Geography: When Ideologies of Language Collide with Histories of Language Contact in the Altiplano. In H. C. Barrett, M. L. Cepek, P. Quintanilla, E. Fabiano, & E. Machery (Eds.), Southern Epistemologies: Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding in the Andes and Western Amazon (pp. 107–130). HAU.
- Narayanan, S. K. (2025). Language Contact. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
- Narayanan, S. K. (2023). The gender of language contact: Feminising inter-Indigenous relationships in the Peruvian “altiplano.” Gender and Language, 17(2), 125–147.
- 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. “Under One Roof: Material Changes and Familial Estrangement in Puno, Peru.” Journal of Material Culture 28 (1): 155–71.
- Narayanan, S. K. (2022). “Ni paisana, ni Jacinta”: Language and the Scaling of Indigenous Femininity in Peru. Signs and Society, 10(3), 314–333.
- Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. 2022. “Contact.” Feminist Anthropology 3 (2)"" 220-26.
- Narayanan, S. K. (2018). Are we one?: Quechua-Aymara contact and the challenges of boundary maintenance in Puno, Peru. Language & Communication, Indigenous Multilingualisms, 62, 145–155.
Courses taught
- ANTH 106: Introduction to Anthropological Linguistics
- ANTH 401A/601A: Contemporary Latin American Society
- ANTH 405/605: Language, Religion and Politics
- ANTH 438/638: Ethnographic Methods
- ANTH 484/684: Language Endangerment and Revitalization
- 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