John R. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics, emeritus, at Stanford University. He received his BA with highest honors in Sociolinguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. He is an expert in the relation between language and ethnicity, social class and style, language variation and change, pidgin and creole languages, Caribbean and African American Vernacular English, and the application of linguistics to educational and social problems. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books, including his most recent book, Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language, which is the honest story of his 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 lifetime of work championing Black Talk and its speakers.
