User:DracoEssentialis/JohnRickford

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Early life and education
John Russell Rickford was born and raised in Georgetown, Guyana. The youngest of the ten children of homemaker Eula (née Wade) and Russell Howell Rickford, an accountant and auditor, he initially wanted to become a preacher. In 1968, Rickford won a scholarship to the University of California, Santa Cruz where he studied sociolinguistics under anthropologist and linguist Roger Keesing and sociologist J. Herman Blake and served as the president of the Black Students Association.

A three-month teaching internship on Daufuskie Island in early 1970, organised by Blake, proved a life-changing experience for Rickford and sparked his interest in the origins of African-American dialects. Working with Gullah children in the two-room schoolhouse on the then very much isolated Sea Island, Rickford became aware of the similarities between the Gullah language and his native Guyanese Creole. His 1971 senior honors thesis, ‘De Train Dey Ridin on is Full of Dead Man's Bones’: Language, Death and Damnation in the two-room schoolhouse on [D.] Island, South Carolina, was motivated by Rickford becoming aware of “how much further the bright children on the island had to go to fulfill their great potential” in light of the vast differences between the variety of English they grew up speaking and the Standard American English taught in the classroom. Determined to expand his knowledge about African American Vernacular English, Rickford went on to study linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under William Labov. He earned his MA in 1973 and his PhD in 1979.

Career
Between 1974 and 1979, Rickford taught linguistics at the University of Guyana. In 1977, he served as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

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Personal life
Rickford is married to Angela E. Rickford (née Marshall), a professor of Special Education at San Jose State University and the author of I Can Fly: Teaching Narratives and Reading Comprehension to African Americans and other Ethnic Minority Students. The couple have four children.