John H. McWhorter

Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, author McWhorter distills hundreds of years of lore i

The Untold History of English

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Challenges the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that the language people speak shapes the way they perceive the world, arguing against the use of language as a lens through which to better understand human nature.

Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language

The Language Hoax

Professor McWhorter delivers lectures tracing the origins and history of language.

The story of human language

A tour of the world's languages throughout history offers insight into human communications while challenging popular beliefs about grammar, discussing such topics as the ways linguists hear speech, the world's vanishing languages and the hodgepodge nature of English. 25,000 first printing.

And what it Isn't and what it Could be

What Language is

An authoritative, impassioned celebration of Black English, how it works, and why it matters

Truths about America's Lingua Franca

Talking Back, Talking Black

Ph.D., John McWhorter

Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English

Word on the Street

the science of language

Understanding linguistics

Explains why "victimhood" is exaggerated and enshrined in African-American families and discusses why these attitudes are destructive to future generations.

Self-sabotage in Black America

Losing the Race

This book collects a selection of fifteen papers presented at three meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in 1996 and 1997. The focus is on papers which approach issues in creole studies with novel perspectives, address understudied pidgin and creole varieties, or compellingly argue for controversial positions. The papers demonstrate how pidgins and creoles shed light on issues such as verb movement, contact-induced language change and its gradations, discourse management via tense-aspect particles, language genesis, substratal transfer, and Universal Grammar, and cover a wide range of contact languages, ranging from English- and French-based creoles through Portuguese creoles of Africa and Asia, Sango, Popular Brazilian Portuguese, West African Pidgin Englishes, and Hawaiian Creole English.

Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles

A conventional wisdom among creolists is that creole is a sociohistorical term only: that creole languages share a particular history entailing adults rapidly acquiring a language usually under conditions of subordination, but that structurally they are indistinguishable from other languages. The articles by John H. McWhorter collected in this volume demonstrate that this is in fact untrue. Creole languages, while complex and nuanced as all human languages are, are delineable from older languages as the result of their having come into existence only a few centuries ago. Then adults learn a language under untutored conditions, they abbreviate its structure, focusing upon features vital to communication and shaving away most of the features useless to communication that bedevil those acquiring the language non-natively. When they utilize their rendition of the language consistently enough to create a brand-new one, this new creation naturally evinces evidence of its youth: specifically, a much lower degree of the random accretions typical in older languages, which only develop over vast periods of time. The articles constitute a case for this thesis based on both broad, cross-creole ranges of data and focused expositions referring to single creole languages. The book presents a general case for a theory of language contact and creolization in which not only transfer from source languages but also structural reduction plays a central role, based on facts whose marginality of address in creole studies has arisen from issues sociopolitical as well as scientific. For several decades the very definition of the term creole has been elusive even among creole specialists. This book attempts to forge a path beyond the inter- and intra-disciplinary misunderstandings and stalemates that have resulted from this, and to demonstrate the place that creoles might occupy in other linguistic subfields, including typology, language contact, and syntactic theory.

Defining Creole

This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.

Why Do Languages Undress?

Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity

A controversial new analysis of the development of New World creole languages among slaves. Mc Whorter makes a vast amount of new data available in his book, and posits that New World creole languages developed in West Africa, not on the plantations in the New World.

Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages

The Missing Spanish Creoles

A compelling argument for why creoles are their own unique entity, which have developed independently of other processes of language development and change.

The Creole Debate

A professor of linguistics paints a controversial portrait of defeatism and pessimism in black America that threatens to hold young African Americans back.

In John McWhorter’s Defining Creole anthology of 2005, his collected articles conveyed the following theme: His hypothesis that creole languages are definable not just in the sociohistorical sense, but in the grammatical sense. His publications since the 1990s have argued that all languages of the world that lack a certain three traits together are creoles (i.e. born as pidgins a few hundred years ago and fleshed out into real languages). He also argued that in light of their pidgin birth, such languages are less grammatically complex than others, as the result of their recent birth as pidgins. These two claims have been highly controversial among creolists as well as other linguists. In this volume, Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity, McWhorter gathers articles he has written since then, in the wake of responses from a wide range of creolists and linguists. These articles represent a considerable divergence in direction from his earlier work.

John H. McWhorter

About

Books

Join the club