Department of Linguistics

Deborah Tannen is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics. She has published 20 books and over a hundred articles on a range of topics relating to language in everyday life. Her most recent book, You're Wearing THAT?: a New York Times bestseller, examines conversations between mothers and adult daughters.

Outside academia, she is best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nearly four years, including eight months as No. 1. It was also on bestseller lists in Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, and Hong Kong. This is the book that brought gender differences in communication style to the forefront of public awareness. Her book Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work, a New York Times Business Best Seller, does for the workplace what the earlier book did for women and men talking at home. Her book The Argument Culture received the Common Ground Book Award, and her book I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking to Your Parents, Partner, Sibs, and Kids When You're All Adults, received a Books for a Better Life award for 2001. Her books for academic audiences include Talking Voices (second edition recently published by Cambridge University Press) and Conversational Style (a new edition recently published by Oxford University Press).

Tannen is a frequent guest on television and radio news and information shows and has been featured in and written for most major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, People, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review. Her academic articles have appeared in all the major journals in her field. She is on the editorial boards of many of those journals as well. In addition to her linguistic research and writing, Dr. Tannen has published poetry, short stories, and personal essays. Her first play, "An Act of Devotion," is included in The Best American Short Plays: 1993-1994. It was produced, together with her play "Sisters," by Horizons Theater in Arlington, Virginia in 1995.

Deborah Tannen has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.