John McWhorter

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John Hamilton McWhorter V (1965- ) is an American linguist and political commentator. He held the position of American associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley from 1995 until 2003. He took a leave from the position in 2002 to become a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and a columnist for the New York Sun. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His linguistic specialty is creole and the process through which it forms.

[edit] Biography

McWhorter was born and raised in Philadelphia, PA. His father, John McWhorter IV (d. 1996), held an M.A. in education and was a college administrator at Temple University; his mother holds a Ph.D. in child development and taught social work at Temple University until she retired. McWhorter himself attended Friends Select School (a Quaker high 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 achieved a B.A. degree 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.

After graduation he was an associate professor of linguistics at Cornell University, and then in 1995 he took a position at University of California, Berkeley.

He has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations (see bibliography) and makes regular public radio and television appearances on related subjects. He has spoken many times on National Public Radio and is an occasional contributer on Bloggingheads.tv . He has appeared twice on Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, in the profanity episode in his capacity as a linguistics professor, and in the slavery reparations episode for his political views and knowledge of race relations. He is also the author of a course on "The Story of Human Language" for The Teaching Company.

He married in September 2006 and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

According to an interview in Booknotes (March 2, 2003) McWhorter can read 12 languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, Russian, Swahili, Japanese, and Esperanto.

[edit] Bibliography

  • 1997 Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis ISBN 0820433128
  • 1998 Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English ISBN 0738204463
  • 2000 The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages ISBN 0520219996
  • 2000 Spreading the Word : Language and Dialect in America ISBN 0325001987
  • 2000 Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
  • 2001 The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language ISBN 006052085X
  • 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 ISBN 1592400167
  • 2005 Defining Creole ISBN 0195166698
  • 2005 Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America
  • 2007 Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars

[edit] External links