John Russell Rickford is an American academic

Academia

Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...

 and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. His book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, which he wrote together with his son, Russell J. Rickford

Russell J. Rickford

Russell John Rickford is an American scholar and author. An assistant professor in the History Department at Dartmouth College, he has written the only in-depth biography on Betty Shabazz...

, won the American Book Award

American Book Award

The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre...

 in 2000. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and the Humanities at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford University School of Education

Stanford University School of Education

The Stanford University School of Education , is one of the seven schools of Stanford University. It is the second-oldest school of education in the United States, after NYU...

, where he has taught since 1980.

Life and work

John R. Rickford earned his BA at UC Santa Cruz and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses primarily on language variation, a type of quantitative sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...

. His specialty is African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English —also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular , or Black Vernacular English —is an African American variety of American English...

, also known as Ebonics, which garnered national attention in the U.S. when the Oakland, California

Oakland, California

Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724...

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. He is also the President of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics.

Selected Publications

• 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