John McWhorter
John McWhorter
John Hamilton McWhorter Vis an American academic, political commentator, critic, and linguist, professor at Columbia University where he teaches linguistics, English, American studies, comparative literature, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specialties are how creole languages form and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
beyond command communication language level loving means vocabulary
Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.
adult african drops english gets learned simpler standard
Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.
capital letters loose thinks
Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?
crying feels good third victim
Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.
Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.
dialect difficult english men natural particular people raised running spoken system though understand
Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue.