Renée Blake is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, USA.

Isabelle Buchstaller is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

Table of contents

1. Introduction

1. Introduction to the volume

Renée Blake and Isabelle Buchstaller

2. The makings of a linguist: John R. Rickford's education in his native Guyana

Ewart Thomas

1. Exploring language contact from a sociolinguistic and socio-historical point of view

1. Introduction

John Victor Singler

2. In the Fisherman's net: Language contact in a sociolinguistics context

Shelome Gooden

3. African- Indian- American South- and Caribbean worlds: connecting with John R. Rickford's language contact research

Rajend Mesthrie

4. Ideophones in Guyanese speech: An inventory of depictive lexemes and implications for (de)creolization

Walter Edwards and Onjel Williams

5. Systemic linguistic discrimination and disenfranchisement in the Creolophone Caribbean: The case of the St. Lucian legal system

Ian Robertson and Sandra Evans

6. The English words in Sranan: From where, from whom and how?

André Sherriah, Hubert Devonish, Ewart Thomas, and Nicole Creanza

7. Another look at the creolist hypothesis of AAVE origins

Don Winford

8. Rickford's list of African American English grammatical features: An update

Arthur Spears

9. The 'aks' of its day?: Revisiting invariant am in Early Black English

John McWhorter

10. Viewing ex-slave narratives from a different angle: Variation and discourse

Lisa Green and Ayana Whitmal

11. Race, class, and linguistic camouflage: Remote past BEEN and the divergence debate revisited

Tracey Weldon

12. The sociolinguistic ramifications of social injustice: The case of Black ASL

Robert Bayley, Ceil Lucas, Joseph Hill, and Carolyn McCaskill

13. Ethnolinguistic infusion at a Sephardic adventure camp

Sarah Bunin Benor

1. The political ramifications of linguistic heterogeneity

1. Introduction

Alicia Beckford Wassink

2. Giving voice to despair and defiance: Rickford in Guyana

William Labov

3. American mestizos in the Philippines: 'Mongrelization' and 'mixedness' in American colonial media discourse

Bonnie McElhinny

4. Family matters: Seminal Rickford contributions to Kinesics, Education, Linguistics, and Law

John Baugh

5. 'Are you Soul Folk, Baby?' Black English, struggle, and consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s

Russell J. Rickford

6. We should declare AAL a separate language, although there's no scientific reason (not) to

Ralph Fasold

7. Where sociolinguistics and speech science meet: The physiological and acoustic consequences of underbite in a multilectal speaker of African American English

Alicia Beckford Wassink

8. Credibility without intelligibility: Implications for hearing vernacular speakers

Lauren Hall-Lew, Inês Paiva Couceiro and Amie Fars

9. Using pharyngeals out of context: Linguistic stereotypes in parodic performances of Mizrahi Hebrew speakers

Roey Gafter

10. Sociolinguists trying to make a difference: race, research and linguistic activism

Mary Bucholtz

11. Linguistic justice: Evaluating the speech of asylum claimants

Peter Patrick

12. Linguistics on trial, under arrest, and in prison: On sharing sociolinguistic and forensic linguistic knowledge with attorneys, law enforcement practitioners, and incarcerated persons

Natalie Schilling

13. Implicit sociolinguistic bias and social justice

Walt Wolfram and Karen Eisenhauer

14. Forging new ways of hearing diversity: The politics of linguistic heterogeneity in the work of John R. Rickford

Sharese King and Jonathan Rosa

IV The stylistic implications of language variation and change

15. Introduction

Edward Finegan

16. Indexical obsolescence

Penelope Eckert

17. Age grading, style, and language change: A lifespan perspective

Gillian Sankoff

18. Style: The presentation of self in everyday life - to an empty theater?

Dennis Preston

19. Pidgin, pride and prejudice: Race, gender and stylistic codeswitching in Nigerian stand-up comedy

Rudolf Gaudio

20. 'I'd better schedule an MRI': The linguistic stylization of 'white' ethnicity in comedy Carmen Fought
21. The N word as an emblem of survival identity in African American comedy

Jacquelyn Rahman

22. Style in motion: Lectal focusing in an African American sermon

Devyani Sharma, Lars Hinrichs, Tracy Conner, and Andrea Kortenhoven

23. Topic-restricting as far as revisited

Robin Melnick and Thomas Wasow

24. Don't neglect the situation - but don't stop there either! On intra-individual variation

Frans Gregersen

V. The educational implications of linguistic heterogeneity and social injustice

25. Introduction

Julie Sweetland and Angela Rickford

26. The Effects of culturally relevant texts and questions on the reading comprehension of students of color

Angela E. Rickford

27. Vernaculars - Symbols of solidarity and truth in literature

Hazel Simmons-McDonald

28. Transnationalism, social networks, and heterogeneous language practices: A case study of a New York-based Jamaican student

Shondel Nero

29. Vetting the Versatility Approach

Julie Sweetland

30. John Rickford and social justice for speakers of Vernacular English

Jeff Siegel

31. I, too, am America': African American Language, #BlackLivesMatter, and Critical (Socio)Linguistics

Sonja Lanehart

32. A Pedagogy of Linguistic Justice: John Rickford in the classroom and the field

Django Paris

VI. Vignettes

John R. Rickford - back in the day

Gregory Guy

Tribute to a colleague

Tom Wasow

Putting the humanity into linguistics

Dan Jurafsky

Notes on mentorship

Isla Kristina Flores-Bayer

The Consummate Teacher

Sarah Roberts

Ode to John R. Rickford

Christine Théberge Rafal

Notes on crossdisciplinary mentorship

Janina Fenigsen

Tribute to a scholar

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Spoken Soul: Tribute to a seminal work

Geneva Smitherman and H. Samy Alim

John R. Rickford's influence on language and practice

Toya Wyatt

Tribute from an educator

Noma LeMoine

Black Lives Matter

Michel DeGraff

This comprehensive collection is the first full book-length volume to bring together writing focused around and inspired by the work of John Rickford and his role in sociolinguistic research over the last four decades. Featuring contributions from more than 40 leading scholars in the field, the volume integrates both historical and current perspectives on key topics in Rickford's body of work at the intersection of language and society, highlighting the influence of his work from diverse fields such as sociolinguistics, stylistics, creole studies, and language and education.
The volume is organized around four sections, each representing one of the fundamental strands in Rickford's scholarship over the course of his career, bookended by short vignettes that feature stories from the field to more broadly contextualize his intellectual legacy:
¿ Language contact from a sociolinguistic and sociohistorical point of view
¿ The political ramifications of linguistic heterogeneity
¿ The stylistic implications of language variation and change
¿ The educational implications of linguistic heterogeneity and social injustice
Taken together, The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford serves as a platform to showcase Rickford's pioneering contributions to the field and, in turn, to socially reflective linguistic research more generally, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, creole studies, language and style, and language and education.