About

John R. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has been a faculty member since 1980. He holds the title of professor by courtesy in Education and is a Pritzker University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. His academic background includes a BA with highest honors in Sociolinguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, obtained in 1971, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. Rickford's primary research and teaching focus on sociolinguistics, specifically the relationship between linguistic variation and social structure. His interests encompass the connection between language and ethnicity, social class, and style, as well as language variation and change, pidgin and creole languages, African American Vernacular English, and the application of linguistics to educational issues. He has authored numerous scholarly articles and several influential books, including 'Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English,' which won an American Book Award, and has edited or co-edited works on creole languages, language and identity, and sociolinguistic variation. Throughout his career, Rickford has held various academic and administrative roles, including president of the Linguistic Society of America (2015-2016), and has received multiple awards for distinguished teaching and contributions to linguistics and cultural life. His extensive service includes leadership positions in professional organizations, editorial roles in prominent linguistics journals, and participation in numerous committees and initiatives aimed at advancing sociolinguistics and language education.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• History
• Natural Language Processing
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• How I Fell in Love with Language, Linguistics, and “Activist Sociolinguistics”: An Autobiographical Essay

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2025-02-03 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  My autobiographical essay begins with a brief section on my high school experience, then goes into more substantive detail about my research and publications over the past 55 years at the universities I attended (University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Pennsylvania) or at which I worked (University of Guyana, Stanford University) and since I retired in 2019. I mention my key mentors and influencers, including Roger Keesing, J. Herman Blake, Robert Le Page, and William Labov. And I identify some of the foci of my research over the years, including vowel laxing in Guyanese personal pronouns, prior creolization in the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the Ebonics controversy, stylistic variation in sociolinguistics, quotative all , and racial disparities in automated speech recognition. Finally, I focus on “Activist Sociolinguistics,” including fighting for increased success for AAVE and other vernacular speakers in schools and for increased justice for them in the courtroom.

  PublisherDOI

• Language on Trial

  Daedalus · 2023-01-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This essay draws on the case study we conducted of Rachel Jeantel's testimony in the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman v. The State of Florida.1 Although Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon Martin, was an ear-witness (by cell phone) to all but the final minutes of Zimmerman's interaction with Trayvon, and testified for nearly six hours about it, her testimony was disregarded in jury deliberations. Through a linguistic analysis of Jeantel's speech, comments from a juror, and a broader contextualization of stigmatized speech forms and linguistic styles, we argue that the lack of acknowledgment of dialectal variation has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers of stigmatized dialects. Such consequences include limits on criminal justice, employment, and fair access to housing, as well as accessible and culturally sensitive education. We propose new calls to action, which include the ongoing work the coauthors are doing to address such harms, while also moving to inspire concerned citizens to act.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Speaking my Soul

  2021-11-04 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Speaking My Soul is the honest story of linguist John R. Rickford’s life from his early years as the youngest of ten children in Guyana to his status as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, of the transformation of his identity from colored or mixed race in Guyana to black in the USA, and of his work championing Black Talk and its speakers. This is an inspiring story of the personal and professional growth of a black scholar, from his life as an immigrant to the USA to a world-renowned expert who has made a leading contribution to the study of African American life, history, language and culture. In this engaging memoir, Rickford recalls landmark events for his racial identity like being elected president of the Black Student Association at the University of California, Santa Cruz; learning from black expeditions to the South Carolina Sea Islands, Jamaica, Belize and Ghana; and meeting or interviewing civil rights icons like Huey P. Newton, Rosa Parks and South African Dennis Brutus. He worked with Rachel Jeantel, Trayvon Martin’s good friend, and key witness in the trial of George Zimmerman for his murder—Zimmerman’s exoneration sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. With a foreword by poet John Agard, this is the account of a former Director of African and African American Studies whose work has increased our understanding of the richness of African American language and our awareness of the education and criminal justice challenges facing African Americans. It is key reading for students and faculty in linguistics, mixed race studies, African American studies and social justice.

  PublisherDOI

• Queen's College (my high school)

  2021-11-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Forebears and cousins

  2021-11-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• African-American English

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 17 citations

  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Johnny and Johnny (Agard) and the police

  2021-11-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Stylistic Variation in Panel Studies of Language Change

  2021-02-22 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Many panel and trend studies of language change, like much of modern sociolinguistics, ignore stylistic variation (Rickford 2014a), even though ignoring such variation limits the reliability and validity of our work. The challenge is to see stylistic variation as a source of insight rather than a problem and to set up systematic strategies for considering it. As Labov noted, progress is “best reached with convergence of several kinds of data with complementary sources of error” (Labov 1972: 97). In attempting to incorporate stylistic variation more systematically in longitudinal studies of change, this chapter reviews different combinations of these style stylistic distinctions, drawing on early classics like Fischer (1958), as well as on new multi-situational corpus studies like Ghyselen (2016). Special focus is placed on panel studies that demonstrate the empirical significance of considering stylistic variation in longitudinal studies of specific communities and propose strategies for doing so more generally, e.g., using multiple linguistic variables, evaluating at least three comparison points in time, attending to the embodying function of quoted speech (Rickford and Price 2013), controlling for speech event, activity type, and other dimensions of discourse context (Gregersen et al. 2018a,b). New approaches to stylistic variation that emphasise speaker agency rather than response (Eckert 2018) and involve microstudy of lectal focusing in interaction (Sharma and Rampton 2015) are also considered.

  PublisherDOI

• Baby Wade, my Mom

  2021-11-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Stanford in Oxford—David Dabydeen and Dennis Brutus

  2021-11-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Neighborhood moves and sociolinguistic mobility

  NSF · $384k · 2011–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Malcah Yaeger‐Dror

  Center for Applied Linguistics

  11 shared

• Walt Wolfram

  10 shared

• Penny Eckert

  Center for Applied Linguistics

  9 shared

• Arnie Eisen

  University of Southern California

  9 shared

• Steven M. Cohen

  9 shared

• Jill Jacobs

  University of Southern California

  9 shared

• Joseph Kanofsky

  University of Southern California

  9 shared

• Joshua Holo

  9 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Education

• B.A., Sociolinguistics

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1971

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  University of Pennsylvania

  1979

Awards & honors

• Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford…
• Alumni Achievement Award, University of California, Santa Cr…
• Endowed chair: J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humani…
• Nominated and elected a Fellow, Linguistic Society of Americ…
• Pritzker University Fellowship in Undergraduate Education, S…