John McWhorter Audio & Video

"I never met a person who is not interested in language," wrote the bestselling author and psychologist Steven Pinker.

Linguistics, the study of language, has a reputation for being complex and inaccessible.

Language, in its seemingly infinite varieties, tells us who we are and where we come from.

A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar....

A best-selling linguist takes us on a lively tour of how the English language is evolving before our eyes - and why we should embrace this transformation and not fight it.

Linguists have been studying Black English as a speech variety for years, arguing to the public that it is different from Standard English, not a degradation of it.

Acclaimed linguist and award-winning writer John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric.

One of the preeminent linguists of our time examines the realms of language that are considered shocking and taboo in order to understand what imbues curse words with such power - and why we love them so much.

Many features of English sound normal to a native speaker, but linguists find them puzzling as well as revealing....

The ubiquity of the written word in our everyday lives can make it easy to forget how recent the development of writing and literacy are in the span of human history.