Education
John R. Rickford earned his Bachelor of Arts at University of California, Santa Cruz and his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.
John R. Rickford earned his Bachelor of Arts at University of California, Santa Cruz and his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.
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 research focuses primarily on language variation, a type of quantitative sociolinguistics. His specialty is African American Vernacular English, which garnered national attention in the United States. when the Oakland, California school board recognized the variety as an official dialect of English and educated teachers in its use.
Rickford has researched and written extensively on the topic and was an outspoken supporter of the decision.
In 2008, he served as the President of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics. He is the 2015 President of the Linguistic Society of America.