John R. Rickford

John Russell Rickford (born September 16, 1949 in Georgetown, Guyana) is an American academic and author. His book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, which he wrote together with his son, Russell J. Rickford, won the American Book Award in 2000. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he has taught since 1980.

Life and work

John R. Rickford earned his B.A. at University of California, Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses primarily on language variation, a type of quantitative sociolinguistics. His specialty is African American Vernacular English, which garnered national attention in the U.S. when the Oakland, California school board recognized the variety as an official dialect of English and educated teachers in its use. Rickford has researched and written extensively on the topic and was an outspoken supporter of the decision. In 2008, he served as the President of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics. He is the 2015 President of the Linguistic Society of America.

Selected publications

• "The Creole Origins Hypothesis." in Lanehart, Sonja (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. (2015): Oxford University Press.
• Dimensions of a Creole Continuum, Stanford (1987): Stanford University Press.
• African American Vernacular English: Features and Use, Evolution, and Educational Implications, Oxford (1999): Blackwell.
• Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (with Russell J. Rickford), New York (2000): John Wiley.

External links

• Profile at Stanford University
• Writings on the "Ebonics" issue