Language & Dialect: A Conversation with Sociolinguist Walt Wolfram

In this episode, which originally aired in radio format on December 23rd, 2021, I share my  conversation with the oh-so-delightful award-winning sociolinguist Walt Wolfram. A long-time professor at NCSU (where I took one of his classes some years ago), Walt was one of the early pioneers in the study of urban African American English through his work in Detroit in 1969. Since the 1960s he has authored or co-authored 20 books and more than 300 articles on variation in American English. He's also produced a ton of documentaries. This guy loves dialects, and North Carolina has more dialect diversity than any other state in the country. Language is the coolest!