Table of Contents
Table of contents
Introduction
Introduction to the volume
Renée Blake and Isabelle Buchstaller
The makings of a linguist: John R. Rickford’s education in his
native Guyana
Ewart Thomas
Exploring language contact from a sociolinguistic and
socio-historical point of view
Introduction
John Victor Singler
In the Fisherman’s net: Language contact in a sociolinguistics
context
Shelome Gooden
African- Indian- American South- and Caribbean worlds:
connecting with John R. Rickford’s language contact research
Rajend Mesthrie
Ideophones in Guyanese speech: An inventory of depictive
lexemes and implications for (de)creolization
Walter Edwards and Onjel Williams
Systemic linguistic discrimination and disenfranchisement in
the Creolophone Caribbean: The case of the St. Lucian legal
system
Ian Robertson and Sandra Evans
The English words in Sranan: From where, from whom and
how?
André Sherriah, Hubert Devonish, Ewart Thomas, and Nicole
Creanza
Another look at the creolist hypothesis of AAVE origins
Don Winford
Rickford’s list of African American English grammatical
features: An update
Arthur Spears
The ‘aks’ of its day?: Revisiting invariant am in Early Black
English
John McWhorter
Viewing ex-slave narratives from a different angle: Variation
and discourse
Lisa Green and Ayana Whitmal
Race, class, and linguistic camouflage: Remote past BEEN and
the divergence debate revisited
Tracey Weldon
The sociolinguistic ramifications of social injustice: The case
of Black ASL
Robert Bayley, Ceil Lucas, Joseph Hill, and Carolyn
McCaskill
Ethnolinguistic infusion at a Sephardic adventure camp
Sarah Bunin Benor
The political ramifications of linguistic heterogeneity
Introduction
Alicia Beckford Wassink
Giving voice to despair and defiance: Rickford in Guyana
William Labov
American mestizos in the Philippines: ‘Mongrelization’ and
‘mixedness’ in American colonial media discourse
Bonnie McElhinny
Family matters: Seminal Rickford contributions to Kinesics,
Education, Linguistics, and Law
John Baugh
‘Are you Soul Folk, Baby?’ Black English, struggle, and
consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s
Russell J. Rickford
We should declare AAL a separate language, although there’s no
scientific reason (not) to
Ralph Fasold
Where sociolinguistics and speech science meet: The
physiological and acoustic consequences of underbite in a
multilectal speaker of African American English
Alicia Beckford Wassink
Credibility without intelligibility: Implications for hearing
vernacular speakers
Lauren Hall-Lew, Inês Paiva Couceiro and Amie Fars
Using pharyngeals out of context: Linguistic stereotypes in
parodic performances of Mizrahi Hebrew speakers
Roey Gafter
Sociolinguists trying to make a difference: race, research and
linguistic activism
Mary Bucholtz
Linguistic justice: Evaluating the speech of asylum
claimants
Peter Patrick
Linguistics on trial, under arrest, and in prison: On sharing
sociolinguistic and forensic linguistic knowledge with attorneys,
law enforcement practitioners, and incarcerated persons
Natalie Schilling
Implicit sociolinguistic bias and social justice
Walt Wolfram and Karen Eisenhauer
Forging new ways of hearing diversity: The politics of
linguistic heterogeneity in the work of John R. Rickford
Sharese King and Jonathan Rosa
IV The stylistic implications of language variation and
change
Introduction
Edward Finegan
Indexical obsolescence
Penelope Eckert
Age grading, style, and language change: A lifespan
perspective
Gillian Sankoff
Style: The presentation of self in everyday life – to an empty
theater?
Dennis Preston
Pidgin, pride and prejudice: Race, gender and stylistic
codeswitching in Nigerian stand-up comedy
Rudolf Gaudio
‘I’d better schedule an MRI’: The linguistic stylization of
‘white’ ethnicity in comedy Carmen Fought
The N word as an emblem of survival identity in African
American comedy
Jacquelyn Rahman
Style in motion: Lectal focusing in an African American
sermon
Devyani Sharma, Lars Hinrichs, Tracy Conner, and Andrea
Kortenhoven
Topic-restricting as far as revisited
Robin Melnick and Thomas Wasow
Don’t neglect the situation – but don’t stop there either! On
intra-individual variation
Frans Gregersen
V. The educational implications of linguistic heterogeneity and
social injustice
Introduction
Julie Sweetland and Angela Rickford
The Effects of culturally relevant texts and questions on the
reading comprehension of students of color
Angela E. Rickford
Vernaculars – Symbols of solidarity and truth in
literature
Hazel Simmons-McDonald
Transnationalism, social networks, and heterogeneous language
practices: A case study of a New York-based Jamaican student
Shondel Nero
Vetting the Versatility Approach
Julie Sweetland
John Rickford and social justice for speakers of Vernacular
English
Jeff Siegel
I, too, am America’: African American Language,
#BlackLivesMatter, and Critical (Socio)Linguistics
Sonja Lanehart
A Pedagogy of Linguistic Justice: John Rickford in the
classroom and the field
Django Paris
VI. Vignettes
John R. Rickford – back in the day
Gregory Guy
Tribute to a colleague
Tom Wasow
Putting the humanity into linguistics
Dan Jurafsky
Notes on mentorship
Isla Kristina Flores-Bayer
The Consummate Teacher
Sarah Roberts
Ode to John R. Rickford
Christine Théberge Rafal
Notes on crossdisciplinary mentorship
Janina Fenigsen
Tribute to a scholar
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Spoken Soul: Tribute to a seminal work
Geneva Smitherman and H. Samy Alim
John R. Rickford’s influence on language and
practice
Toya Wyatt
Tribute from an educator
Noma LeMoine
Black Lives Matter
Michel DeGraff
About the Author
Renée Blake is Associate Professor in the
Department of Linguistics and Department of Social and Cultural
Analysis at New York University, USA.
Isabelle Buchstaller is Professor of English Linguistics
at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
