John McWhorter

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John H. McWhorter (1965- ), was associate professor of linguistics at University of California, Berkeley until 2003, and is now a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank and a columnist for the New York Sun. He is the author of several books on language and race relations.

McWhorter attended Friends Select School (a Quaker high school in Philadelphia) and was accepted to Simon's Rock College after tenth grade. Later, he attended Rutgers University and achieved a B.A. degree in French. He received a master's degree in American studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University.

He specializes in language change and language contact, including creole languages and has studied the Saramaccan language for a forthcoming grammar. Outside his chosen field of linguistics, he has carved a niche for himself as a media commentator who has criticized what he calls a "self-sabotaging" black culture. He has published a number of successful books and made public and television appearances on the subject.

[edit] Bibliography

1997 Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis
1998 Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English
2000 The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages
2000 Spreading the Word : Language and Dialect in America
2000 Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
2001 The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
2003 Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority
2003 Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care
2005 Defining Creole
2005 Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America