PERSON: John McWhorter

Associate Professor of Linguistics

John Hamilton McWhorter V (born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist. He is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. He has authored a number of books on race relations and African-American culture, acting as political commentator especially in his New York Times newsletter.

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.

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 currently housed in the Department of Slavic Languages.

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” in the series The Great Courses, produced by The Teaching Company.

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 and, after writing op-eds for The New York Times for several years, became an Opinion columnist there in 2021.

He hosts the Lexicon Valley podcast for Slate from 2016 to 2021, and currently for Booksmart Studios.

McWhorter has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, 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 Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.

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