Living Language: Faculty Q&A With Linguist John McWhorter

John McWhorter may be best known for his magazine and newspaper writing about race, but the Philadelphia native is at heart a dyed-in-the-wool academic whose first inkling that he would spend his life studying languages came when he was still a preschooler and heard someone speaking a foreign language. "The idea that anybody could talk in more than one way was just mesmerizing," he said. McWhorter started working at Columbia in 2008 as an adjunct professor teaching Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum. By then, he had become known for his essays and commentary on race-related issues in media outlets such as The New Republic , The Root.com , The New York Daily News and NPR. In no time McWhorter, who had left a tenured job on the linguistics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley to move to New York to join the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, was knee-deep in his first love, linguistics, teaching courses, advising students and supervising undergraduate theses. Last fall, he was appointed associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, an "administrative convenience," as he says, because Columbia does not have a linguistics department. A prolific writer who is equally comfortable appearing on The Colbert Report as he is publishing scholarly works on plantation Creoles, McWhorter is thrilled to be back in academia full time. He compares the sensation of writing for the popular press to that of eating "candy or hot dogs"—something pleasurable but also ephemeral. "The academic stuff is more like Scotch or brussels sprouts because it's eternal," he reflected. "Which one do I wake up thinking about?