John Gordon Baugh V (born December 10, 1949) is an American academic and linguist. His main areas of study are sociolinguistics, forensic linguistics, education, and African American language studies. He is currently the Barbara Jordan Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Rice University, Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis, professor emeritus at Stanford University, and a former President of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2020 Baugh was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the section on Linguistics and Language Sciences, and in 2021 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Baugh was previously a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and of the Rockefeller Foundation. He served as president of the American Dialect Society from 1992 to 1994 and as the Edward Sapir Professor during the 2019 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute. Baugh is best known for developing the theory of linguistic profiling, which occurs when someone's speech triggers discriminatory bias against them, such as when they are seeking employment or housing. As a result of this work, Baugh has served as an expert witness and consultant in various legal cases, frequently working with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Fair Housing Alliance, and the United States Department of Justice, among other organizations. Baugh is the author or co-editor of twelve books, including Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival; Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice; Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice; and Linguistics in Pursuit of Justice. He has advised and appeared in several linguistic documentaries such as Do You Speak American? and Talking Black in America, and he has been featured in publications including Business Insider, The Washington Post, The Economist, and The Atlantic.
Education Baugh began his undergraduate studies at Taft College before transferring to Temple University, where he completed his B.A. in Speech, Rhetoric, and Communication. He then earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, under the doctoral supervision of sociologist William Labov. In addition to Labov, Baugh studied extensively under anthropological linguist Dell Hymes and sociologist Erving Goffman.
Professional career Baugh's first academic appointment was as lecturer in Black Studies and Linguistics at Swarthmore College in 1975. In 1978, he was appointed assistant professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Black Studies, and Linguistics at Swarthmore. The following year, he began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor of Linguistics and Foreign Language Education. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1984. In 1990, Baugh became a professor of Education and Linguistics at Stanford University, where he remained until 2005. During this time, Baugh served as director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. He became professor emeritus at Stanford upon his departure in 2005. Baugh joined the teaching faculty of Washington University in St. Louis in 2005 as the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts and Sciences. He served a term as director of African and African American Studies from 2005 to 2010, and held appointments in the departments of Anthropology, Education, English, Linguistics, Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology, Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Urban Studies. In 2024, Baugh joined the faculty of Rice University as the Barbara Jordan Distinguished Professor of Linguistics.
Research
African American language studies Baugh's early research focused on the language and culture of African Americans, employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic methods. Baugh conducted the first longitudinal linguistic study of African American adults, described in his first book, Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Its title was chosen in consultation with those whom Baugh interviewed for the project; they often described their vernacular, or most informal manner of speech, as "street speech". In 1999, while at Stanford University, Baugh wrote Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice. The book contains a combination of linguistic and educational research, including specific ideas about ways to increase literacy among African Americans, who often fall victim to various forms of educational malpractice. In response to an educational and legal controversy that resulted from a 1996 resolution by the Oakland Unified School District in California that declared Ebonics to be the indigenous language of its 27,000 African American students, Baugh wrote Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice. Baugh debunked many of the misconceptions about the concept of Ebonics (a portmanteau of "ebony" and "phonics", for "black sounds", a term coined by social psychologist Robert Williams) as well as some of the educational policies that emerged in the wake of the controversy. In 2022, Baugh was named to the advisory board of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English.
Sociolinguistics Baugh and Joel Sherzer edited Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics, a volume of sociolinguistic studies that includes a combination of qualitative and quantitative studies of language usage in diverse speech communities. His next editorial collaboration in sociolinguistics was a festschrift in honor of his mentor William Labov that was produced under the editorial leadership of Gregory Guy of New York University. This work, Towards a Social Science of Language, was published in two volumes: Variation and Change in Language and Society and Social Interaction and Discourse Structures. The studies in both volumes pay tribute to Labov's influence on the field of sociolinguistics.
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