John McWhorter

John McWhorter

Columbia University
J. McWhorter

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He specializes in language change and language contact, and is the author of The Missing Spanish Creoles, Language Simplicity and Complexity, and The Creole Debate. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, The New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The
Atlantic. For the general public he is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move, Talking Back, and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, has authored six audiovisual sets on language for the Great Courses company, and has written a weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

Talk Information:

The Afrogenesis Hypothesis of Creole Language Origins
December 6, 2024 | 9:00 AM

It has traditionally been supposed that plantation creoles have emerged in the colonies in which they are currently spoken. However, longstanding questions suggest another approach. For one, the substrate language contributions in plantation creoles almost never correspond meaningfully to the languages spoken by the enslaved people who were imported to the colony. Second, historical evidence shows plantation creoles already existing in many colonies where Black people did not yet outnumber whites, generally considered a necessary precondition to the emergence of a creole language. Third, creoles failed to emerge in one colony after another under the Spanish, in conditions that supposedly created creoles under other nations. This presentation will revisit a hypothesis I originally presented in the 1990s, which solves all of these conundrums by placing the origin of plantation creoles at slave castles on the West African coast. The evidence includes documentation from the slave castles themselves. I will also refer to support for the argument that has emerged over the past two decades. 

Play Video