Best-Selling Author John H. McWhorter Will Give Annual Friends of Skillman Library Lecture Wednesday

New York Times best-selling author John H. McWhorter, acclaimed as “one of America’s leading linguists and a recognized authority on issues of race and diversity,” will discuss his latest book for the Friends of Skillman Library annual lecture 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium.

The talk will be preceded by a reception and book signing in the Kirby Library at 4:30 p.m. For more information, contact Friends secretary Diane Shaw, college archivist, at x5401 or shawd.

McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, will discuss Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, in which he documents the decline of formal expression in American English and the rise of informal conversational forms of English in the public arena.

Using contemporary and historical examples, McWhorter argues that since the 1960s, there has been an unfortunate decline in the craft, honor, and intellectual challenge previously ascribed to public documents and performances such as music, poetry, and oratory. He contends that modern use of language has become increasingly oral and permanently casual, and through his book he looks at both the cultural benefits and drawbacks of this change.

McWhorter’s other publications include TheWord on the Street: Fact and Fable About American English (1998) and The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (2001), both of which discuss the natural evolution of language and reject the common conception of a pure, unchanging, standard English. Doing Our Own Thing draws attention to the loss of the distinction between the written and the oral, which McWhorter believes has ultimately led to the loss of a valuable form of expression.

The New York Times review of Doing Our Own Thing states, “McWhorter is no enemy of oral culture. He deplores the pedantry that would impose on spoken English bogus rules lifted from Latin, like the injunction against ending a sentence with a preposition,” but he understands that there are also “certain dire cultural consequences of a mounting distrust of written English. With its repertory of constructions and its bonanza of vocabulary, formal English is the natural idiom for conveying nuance, respect and logical argument. When it goes, they go.”

McWhorter received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993. At age 19, he completed his undergraduate study at Rutgers University with a B.A. in French and romance languages. He served as an assistant professor at Cornell University prior to joining Berkeley’s linguistics department in 1995. McWhorter is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. His articles have appeared in numerous periodicals such as City Journal, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and TheLos Angeles Times as well as in Journal of Pidginand Creole Languages and Studies in Language. He has also appeared on such television programs as Dateline NBC and Good Morning, America.

McWhorter has studied 12 languages and is recognized as an expert in Creole languages. He is working with graduate students to create a written grammar of the Creole language Saramaccan. He has written Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis (1997), a reevaluation of the origins of plantation Creole, and The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages (2000).

He is known not only for his advances in the field of linguistics, but also for his outspoken, conservative views on race in America. He is the author of two books dealing with race and ethnicity. Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000) was a best-selling and controversial criticism of the tendency of black culture to embrace a collective identity of victimhood, and Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority (2003) was a criticism of modern leadership in the black community.