Top Quotes & Sayings by John R. Rickford

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American academic John R. Rickford.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
John R. Rickford

John Russell Rickford is a Guyanese-American academic and author. Rickford is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he has taught since 1980. His book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, which he wrote together with his son, Russell J. Rickford, won the American Book Award in 2000.

That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable . . . but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.
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