Phillip M. Carter, Ph.D. is professor of English and linguistics in the Department of English and director of the Center for Humanities in an Urban Environment at Florida International University.
Dr. Carter is a sociolinguist and scholar of language and culture in U.S. Latino communities. He works interdisciplinarily, moving between quantitative and qualitative approaches to sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, critical discourse analysis, ethnography, and critical theory. His scholarship addresses a range of issues of contemporary concern, including the relationship between social formations and linguistic variation, Spanish language change in the U.S., maintenance and shift of Spanish in the U.S., new dialect formation, and popular discourses about language.
Professor Carter's current research projects interrogate the dialectic between national narratives about immigration and the circumstanced individual. A recent paper in the journal Language in Society examined this dialectic in the context of identity formation among Mexican immigrant children in North Carolina. In collaboration with Andrew Lynch (University of Miami), Dr. Carter's most recent work has studied the implicit and explicit perceptions of Spanish and English among Latino and non-Latino residents of Miami in the context of competing national narratives about the value of Spanish in the U.S.
Dr. Carter has authored and coauthored numerous chapters in books and papers in leading international journals, such as Journal of Sociolinguistics, English World Wide, Language in Society, and Language and Linguistics Compass. Dr. Carter's book, Languages of the World: How History, Culture, History, and Politics Shape Culture (with Julie Tetel Andresen, 2016) provides a broad look at the non-linguistic conditions affecting human language. He is also the sociolinguistics editor for the journal Language and Linguistics Compass.
Professor Carter holds a Ph.D. in English linguistics from Duke University, an M.A. in English from North Carolina State University, and a B.A. in Spanish language and literature from North Carolina State University.