John McWhorter

John McWhorter
Born	John Hamilton McWhorter V (1965-10-06) October 6, 1965 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Fields	Linguistics
Institutions	Cornell University UC Berkeley Columbia University
Education	Friends Select School
Alma mater	Simon's Rock College (AA) Rutgers University (BA) New York University (MA) Stanford University (PhD)

John Hamilton McWhorter V (born October 6, 1965) is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, English, American studies, comparative literature, philosophy, and music history.^[1] He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.

McWhorter is a popular writer and has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others.

Early life

McWhorter was born and raised in Philadelphia. He attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia, and after tenth grade was accepted to Simon's Rock College, where he earned an A.A. degree. Later, he attended Rutgers University and received a B.A. in French in 1985. He received a master's degree in American Studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1993 from Stanford University.

Career

Since 2008, he has taught linguistics, American Studies, and in the Core Curriculum program at Columbia University and is currently an Associate Professor in the English and Comparative Literature department there. After graduation McWhorter was an associate professor of linguistics at Cornell University from 1993 to 1995 before taking up a position as associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1995 until 2003. He left that position to become a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. He was Contributing Editor at The New Republic from 2001 to 2014. From 2006 to 2008 he was a columnist for the New York Sun and he has written columns regularly for The Root, The New York Daily News, The Daily Beast and Time Ideas.

McWhorter has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations, of which the better known are Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why You Should, Like, Care, and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. He makes regular public radio and television appearances on related subjects. He is interviewed frequently on National Public Radio and is a frequent contributor on Bloggingheads.tv. He has appeared twice on Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, once in the profanity episode in his capacity as a linguistics professor, and again in the slavery reparations episode for his political views and knowledge of race relations. He has spoken at TED (2013), has appeared on The Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Maher, and appeared regularly on MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes.

McWhorter is the author of the courses entitled "The Story of Human Language, "Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language," "Myths, Lies and Half-Truths About English Usage," and "Language From A to Z" for The Teaching Company. His 2003 Authentically Black has been interview-reviewed on booknotes.org, and he has also been interviewed on CSPAN's Book Notes In Depth series.^[2]

Linguistics

Much of McWhorter's academic work has concerned creoles and their relationship to other languages, often focusing on the Surinam creole language Saramaccan. His work has expanded to a general investigation of the effect of second-language acquisition on a language. He argues that languages naturally tend towards complexity and irregularity, and that this tendency is only reversed by adults acquiring the language, of which creole formation is simply an extreme example.^[3] As examples, he cites English, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, the modern colloquial varieties of Arabic, Swahili, and Indonesian. He has outlined these ideas in academic format in Language Interrupted and Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity, and for the general public in What Language Is and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. Some other linguists suggest that his notions of simplicity and complexity are impressionistic and grounded on comparisons with European languages, and point to exceptions to the correlation he proposes.^[4][5]

McWhorter has also been a proponent of a theory that various languages on the island of Flores underwent transformation due to aggressive migrations from the nearby island of Sulawesi, and has joined scholars who document that English was profoundly influenced by the Celtic languages spoken by peoples encountered by Germanic invaders of Britain. He has also written various pieces for the media arguing that colloquial constructions such as the modern uses of "like" and "totally," and nonstandard speech in general, be considered alternate renditions of English rather than degraded ones.

Social and political views

McWhorter characterizes himself as "a cranky liberal Democrat". In support of this description, he states that while he "disagree[s] sustainedly with many of the tenets of the Civil Rights orthodoxy," he also "supports Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, never voted for George Bush and writes of Black English as coherent speech". McWhorter additionally notes that the conservative Manhattan Institute, for which he worked, "has always been hospitable to Democrats".^[6] McWhorter has criticized left-wing and activist educators in particular, such as Paulo Freire and Jonathan Kozol.^[7] He believes that affirmative action should be based on class rather than race.^[8] One author identifies McWhorter as a radical centrist thinker.^[9]

In April 2015, McWhorter appeared on NPR and claimed that the use of the word "thug" was becoming code for "the N-word" or "black people ruining things" when used by whites in reference to criminal activity.^[10][11] He added that recent use by President Obama and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (for which she later apologized) could not be interpreted in the same way, given that the black community's use of "thug" may positively connote admiration for black self-direction and survival. McWhorter clarified his views in an article in the Washington Post.^[11]

Bibliography

• 1997: Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis ISBN 0-820-43312-8
• 1998: Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a "Pure" Standard English ISBN 0-738-20446-3
• 2000: Spreading the Word: Language and Dialect in America ISBN 0-325-00198-7
• 2000: The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages ISBN 0-520-21999-6
• 2000: Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America ISBN 0-684-83669-6
• 2001: The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language ISBN 0-06-052085-X
• 2003: Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority ISBN 1-592-40001-9
• 2003: Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care ISBN 1-592-40016-7
• 2005: Defining Creole ISBN 0-195-16669-8
• 2005: Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America ISBN 1-592-40188-0
• 2007: Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars ISBN 0-195-30980-4
• 2008: All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America ISBN 1-592-40374-3
• 2008: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English ISBN 1-592-40395-6
• 2011: Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages Undress? ISBN 978-1-934-07837-2
• 2011: What Language Is: (And What It Isn't and What It Could Be) ISBN 978-1-592-40625-8
• 2014: The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language ISBN 978-0-199-36158-8
• 2016: Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally) ISBN 978-1-627-79471-8
• 2017 (forthcoming): Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths about America's Lingua Franca ISBN 978-1-942-65820-7

References

External links

• New York Sun columns
• McWhorter's blog at The New Republic
• Video interviews and discussions with McWhorter on bloggingheads.tv
• Appearances on C-SPAN