约翰·麦克沃特

John Hamilton McWhorter V (born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist. He is 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, and is a political commentator especially in his New York Times newsletter.

Early life and education

McWhorter was born in Philadelphia, and raised in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia and in Lawnside, New Jersey. 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. McWhorter attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia, and after tenth grade he was accepted to Simon's Rock College, where he earned an AA degree. McWhorter 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.

McWhorter later attended Rutgers University and received a B.A. degree in French in 1985. He obtained an M.A. degree in American Studies from New York University. In 1993, he earned his Ph.D. degree in linguistics from Stanford University. His dissertation focused on Saramaccan, a creole language spoken by approximately 58,000 people of West African descent in Suriname.

Career

Academia

McWhorter taught linguistics at Cornell University from 1993 to 1995. He 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.

Since 2008, McWhorter has taught linguistics, American studies, and classes in the core curriculum program at Columbia University. As Columbia's Department of Linguistics had been dissolved in 1989, he was initially assigned to the Department of English and Comparative Literature. The Program of Linguistics (including a revived undergraduate major as of 2021) is housed in the Department of Slavic Languages.

McWhorter is the instructor 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"; "Ancient Writing and the History of the Alphabet"; and "Language From A to Z", as part of The Great Courses, a series produced by The Teaching Company.

Writing and commentary

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, Books & Culture, and CNN.

McWhorter was contributing editor at The New Republic from 2001 to 2014. He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. After writing op-eds for The New York Times for several years, he became an Opinion columnist there in 2021. He hosts the Lexicon Valley podcast, previously for Slate from 2016 to 2021 and since then for Booksmart Studios.

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

Linguistics

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.

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.

Theory of creole

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, Swahili, Indonesian, and modern colloquial varieties of Arabic. 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.

Austronesian languages

The Austronesian family of languages makes abundant use of prefixes and suffixes (which form new words by adding extensions either before or after root-words, such as [per-]form or child[-hood]), but the languages from the center of Flores Island, which belong to that family, are curiously devoid of prefixes or suffixes and are not tonal either (tones may make up for the loss or absence of affixes): Kéo, Lio, Ngadha, Rongga, Ende. McWhorter extends to those the hypothesis of language simplification by acquisition during adulthood. He links this with Homo floresiensis, the most recent individuals known dated from 12,000 years ago. Austronesians came to Flores from Taiwan in the west only a few thousand years ago. Current legends exist that tell of "little people" or ebo gogo who lived among the ancestors of present Floresians, until as late as the 1500s, and possibly only 200 years ago, when the "little people" were exterminated "because they kept stealing". These legends are most vivid in the middle of Flores island, their vividness decreasing as the distance from the center increases towards the west and they are entirely absent in the east.