Walt Wolfram

Walt Wolfram is an American sociolinguist born February 15, 1941, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who holds the William C. Friday Distinguished University Professorship at North Carolina State University. He pioneered research into urban African American English through fieldwork in Detroit beginning in 1969 and was an active participant in the 1996 Oakland Ebonics debate, defending African American English as a systematic language system; he has also documented Appalachian English, Puerto Rican English, Lumbee English and dialects of isolated North Carolina communities such as Ocracoke Island, authoring or co-authoring more than twenty books and three hundred articles on American English variation. A former president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society, he established the Language and Life Project in 1993, a nonprofit producing documentaries, museum exhibits and educational materials on dialect awareness, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.