John McWhorter

His father, John Hamilton McWhorter IV (1927–1996), was a college administrator, and his mother, Schelysture Gordon McWhorter (1937–2011), taught social work at Temple University.

He attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia and, after tenth grade, was accepted to Simon's Rock College, where he earned an AA degree.

McWhorter, born to a bureaucrat and a professor, has described his upbringing as part of the Black middle class.

He has also attributed some of his views to the Quaker school he attended as a child.

John Hamilton McWhorter V (born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist with a specialty in creole languages, sociolects, and Black English.

He is currently an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history.

He has authored a number of books on race relations and African-American culture, acting as political commentator especially in his New York Times newsletter.

McWhorter was born and raised in Philadelphia.

Later, he attended Rutgers University and received a BA degree in French in 1985.

As Columbia's Department of Linguistics had been dissolved in 1989, McWhorter was initially assigned to the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

The Program of Linguistics (including a revived undergraduate major as of 2021) is currently housed in the Department of Slavic Languages.

McWhorter is the professor of the courses "The Story of Human Language"; "Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language"; "Myths, Lies and Half-Truths About English Usage"; "Language Families of the World"; and "Language From A to Z" in the series The Great Courses, produced by the Teaching Company.

McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New York Sun, The New Yorker, The Root, The Daily Beast, and CNN.

He obtained an MA degree in American Studies from New York University and a PhD degree in linguistics in 1993 from Stanford University.

McWhorter taught linguistics at Cornell University from 1993 to 1995, then became an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked from 1995 until 2003.

He left that position to become a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

McWhorter was contributing editor at The New Republic from 2001 to 2014.

He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and, after writing op-eds for The New York Times for several years, became an Opinion columnist there in 2021.

In a 2001 article, McWhorter's discourse was that the attitudes and general behavior of black people, rather than white racism, were what held African Americans back in the United States.

According to McWhorter, "victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community's response to all race-related issues", and "it's time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning as 'understandable' the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it".

Since 2008, he has taught linguistics, American studies, and classes in the core curriculum program at Columbia University.

In his 2014 book The Language Hoax, he argues that, although language influences thought in an "infinitesimal way" and culture is expressed through language, he believes that language itself does not create different ways of thinking or determine world views.

McWhorter is proficient in English, French and Spanish, and has some competence in Russian and several other languages.

Some of McWhorter's fellow linguists, such as Mauro Giuffré of the University of Palermo, suggest that his notions of simplicity and complexity are impressionistic and grounded on comparisons with European languages, and they point to exceptions to his proposed correlations.

McWhorter has characterized 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 W. Bush and writes of Black English as coherent speech".

McWhorter has stated that the conservative Manhattan Institute, for which he worked, "has always been hospitable to Democrats".

McWhorter is biweekly guest on The Glenn Show, a commentary podcast hosted by Glenn Loury, a member of the Manhattan Institute and professor of economics at Brown University.

Political theorist Mark Satin identifies McWhorter as a radical centrist thinker.

In April 2015, McWhorter appeared on NPR and said 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.

He added that use by President Barack Obama and former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (for which she later apologized) could not be interpreted in the same way, given that among blacks the use of "thug" often connotes admiration for black self-direction and survival.

He hosts the Lexicon Valley podcast for Slate from 2016 to 2021, and currently for Booksmart Studios.

McWhorter has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations, including 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.

Much of McWhorter's academic work is concerned with creole languages and their relationship to other languages, often focusing on the Suriname creole language Saramaccan.

His work has expanded to a general investigation of the effect of second-language acquisition on a language.

Regarding the various positions arising from the universal grammar debate, he describes himself as partial to the theoretical frameworks of Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff.

McWhorter has argued that languages naturally tend toward complexity and irregularity, a tendency that is reversed only by adults acquiring the language, and creole formation is simply an extreme example of the latter.

As examples, he cites English, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, the modern colloquial varieties of Arabic, Swahili, and Indonesian.

He has outlined his 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.

McWhorter is a vocal critic of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.