John Hamilton McWhorter V (;[McWhorter, John H. " Lexicon Valley". Slate. The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. (Listen to McWhorter's pronunciation of his own name at the beginning of each podcast.)] born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist.
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),
[John H. McWhorter V, Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a Pure Standard English, Perseus Publishing, 1998.] was a college administrator, and his mother, Schelysture Gordon McWhorter (1937–2011), taught social work at Temple University.
[Michael L. Ondaatje, Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, p. 174.] 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
Quakers he attended as a child.
McWhorter later attended Rutgers University and received a B.A. degree in French language in 1985.
Career
Academia
Early career
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.
Columbia University
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.
Other teaching
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
News organizations
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 for The New York Times for several years, he became an Opinion columnist there in 2021. He hosts the Lexicon Valley podcast,
Books
McWhorter has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations, including
, 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 .
Linguistics
Much of McWhorter's academic work is concerned with
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.
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,
Farsi language,
Swahili language, 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 language,
Ngadha language,
Rongga language, 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,
[
]He cites the languages devoid of affixes at 7'40 in the audio; at 10'15 he mentions that these languages are not tonal either.
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.
The Language Hoax
McWhorter is a vocal critic of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. 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.
Language proficiency
McWhorter is proficient in English, French and Spanish, and has some competence in Russian and several other languages.
Criticism of theories
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.
Political views
McWhorter has characterized himself as "a cranky liberal Democrat". In support of this description, he states that while he "disagrees 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 supported
Ralph Nader in his 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns.
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.
[Satin, Mark (2004). Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now. Westview Press and Basic Books, p. 10. .]
Views on rap music
In 2003, McWhorter criticized the influence of
hip-hop on young African-Americans. He blamed the subculture underlying the genre for promoting violence, misogyny, and lawlessness, reserving particular criticism for artists such as
Tupac Shakur, N.W.A,
Suge Knight, 50 Cent,
Jay-Z, and
Sean Combs.
In 2023, McWhorter wrote a contrasting piece presenting hip-hop in a more positive light, stating that it had become a form of American poetry.
Views on racism
In a 2001 article, McWhorter argued 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,
black 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".
Racism and language
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. McWhorter clarified his views in an article in
The Washington Post.
Racism and technology
McWhorter has argued that
algorithm by themselves cannot be racist since, unlike humans, they lack intention. Rather, unless the human engineers behind a
technology product intend for it to discriminate against people of a particular ethnicity, any unintentional bias should be seen as a
software bug that needs to be fixed ("an obstacle to achievement") rather than an issue of racism.
Race and education
McWhorter has criticized left-wing and activist educators in particular, such as
Paulo Freire and
Jonathan Kozol.
McWhorter has criticized both fearmongering and dismissal of concerns over the usage of critical race theory in education. McWhorter argued in a
New York Times op-ed that "if critical race theory isn’t being taught to children—and in a technical sense, it isn’t—then it’s hardly illogical to suppose that some other concern may be afoot." McWhorter argues instead for continued concern over critical race influenced teaching, which McWhorter worries would be simplistic if taught to children and ineffective to produce nuanced discussion.
McWhorter has argued that affirmative action should be based on class rather than race.
Views on anti-racism
McWhorter has posited that
anti-racism has become as harmful in the United States as
racism itself.
McWhorter has criticized the term "
microaggression",
as well as what he regards as the overly casual conflation of
racial bias with
white supremacy.
As early as December 2018, McWhorter described anti-racism as a "religious movement".
McWhorter criticized
Robin DiAngelo's 2018 book
White Fragility following its resurgence in sales during the George Floyd protests beginning in May 2020, arguing that it "openly infantilized Black people" and "simply dehumanized us", and "does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching for is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good."
Woke Racism
In his 2021 book
Woke Racism, McWhorter argues that the anti-racism ideology has been elevated into a religion: "I do not mean that these people’s ideology is 'like' a religion... I mean that it actually is a religion... An anthropologist would see no difference in type between
Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism."
McWhorter expands upon his previous views and argues that "third wave anti-racism" is a religion he terms "Electism" with
white privilege as
original sin. McWhorter likens the books
White Fragility,
How to Be an Antiracist and
Between the World and Me to sacred religious texts. He argues that this hypothesized status as a religion explains the behavior of its adherents, whom he calls "the Elect". He advises that since the faith (like all faith) is not open to discussion, arguments with its adherents should be avoided in favor of pragmatic action against racism. McWhorter advocates three programs: ending the war on drugs, teaching reading by
phonics to children lacking books at home, and free vocational education, promoting the idea that not everyone needs a four-year college education to succeed.
McWhorter has expressed qualified support for reparations for African Americans, particularly those descended from victims of
redlining.
Personal life
McWhorter separated from his wife in 2019. He has two daughters.
He plays the piano and has appeared in musical theater productions.
McWhorter is an
atheist.
Bibliography
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1997: Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis
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1998: Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a "Pure" Standard English
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2000: Spreading the Word: Language and Dialect in America
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2000: The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages
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2000:
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2001:
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2003: Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority
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2003: Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care
-
2005: Defining Creole
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2005: Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America
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2007: Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars
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2008: All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America
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2008: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English
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2011: Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages Undress?
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2011: What Language Is: (And What It Isn't and What It Could Be)
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2012: A Grammar of Saramaccan Creole (co-authored with Jeff Good)
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2014: The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language
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2016: Words on the Move: Why English Won't – and Can't – Sit Still (Like, Literally)
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2017: Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths about America's Lingua Franca
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2018: The Creole Debate
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2021: Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever
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2021: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
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2025: Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words
External links
