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"Speaking My Soul is the honest story of linguist John R. Rickford's 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 work championing Black Talk and its speakers. This is an inspiring story of the personal and professional growth of a black scholar, from his life as an immigrant to the USA to world-renowned expert who has made a leading contribution to the study of African American life, history, language and culture. In this engaging memoir, Rickford recalls landmark events for his racial identity like being elected president of the Black Student Association at the U. of California, Santa Cruz; learning from black expeditions to the South Carolina Sea Islands, Jamaica, Belize and Ghana; and meeting or interviewing civil rights icons like Huey P. Newton, Rosa Parks, and South African Dennis Brutus. He worked with Rachel Jeantel, Trayvon Martin's good friend, and key witness in the trial of George Zimmerman for his murder. Zimmerman's exoneration sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. With a foreword by poet John Agard, this is the account of a former Director of African and African American Studies whose work has increased our understanding of the richness of African American language and our awareness of the education and criminal justice challenges facing African-Americans. It is key reading for students and faculty in linguistics, mixed-race studies, African American studies, and social justice"--

By the award-winning former president of the Linguistic Society of America, this collection of some of John Russell Rickford's pioneering works shows how linguists in sociolinguistics and creole studies can benefit from utilizing data, theories and methods from each other, as they more frequently did in the 1960s and 1970s, when both subfields, in their modern forms at least, were getting started. The volume addresses fundamental sociolinguistic topics such as social class, style, fieldwork, speech community, sociolinguistic competence and language attitudes with data from Guyanese and other Caribbean creoles. Recurrent concepts are also considered including language versatility, variation and change, vernacular use, school success and criminal justice in African America and the Caribbean, using models, case studies and methodologies from sociolinguistics. Theoretical and applied scholars, students apprehensive about sociolinguistic fieldwork, and those considering dynamic methods like implicational scaling about which little is written in linguistics textbooks, will find this volume invaluable. Includes a Foreword by Gillian Sankoff

Cover; Half Title; Title; Copyright; CONTENTS; Acknowledgments; Contributors; John R. Rickford Publications; PART I Introduction; 1 Introduction to the Volume; 2 The Makings of a Linguist: John R. Rickford's Education in His Native Guyana; PART II Exploring Language Contact From a Sociolinguistic and Sociohistorical Point of View; 3 Introduction; 4 In the Fisherman's Net: Language Contact in a Sociolinguistics Context; 5 African-Indian-American South and Caribbean Worlds: Connecting With John R. Rickford's Language Contact Research