14 Facts About Walt Wolfram

Walt Wolfram is an American sociolinguist specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English.

Walt Wolfram was one of the early pioneers in the study of urban African American English through his work in Detroit in 1969.

Walt Wolfram is the William C Friday Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University.

Since the 1960s, Wolfram has authored or co-authored more than 20 books and more than 300 articles on variation in American English.

Walt Wolfram was an active participant in the 1996 debate surrounding the Oakland Ebonics controversy, supporting the legitimacy of African American English as a systematic language system.

Walt Wolfram attended and graduated from Olney High School, where he played baseball, basketball, and football.

Walt Wolfram has been on the faculty at Georgetown University and the University of the District of Columbia, was the Director of Research at the Center for Applied Linguistics from 1980 to 1992, and in 1992 he was named the first William C Friday Distinguished University Professor of English Linguistics at North Carolina State University.

Walt Wolfram is a former president of the Linguistic Society of America as well as of the American Dialect Society.

In 1993, Walt Wolfram formulated the principle of linguistic gratuity, which states that "investigators who have obtained linguistic data from members of a speech community should actively pursue ways in which they can return linguistic favors to the community".

Walt Wolfram directs the Language and Life Project, a nonprofit at North Carolina State University dedicated to documenting and celebrating language diversity through public means.

Walt Wolfram established the Language and Life Project in 1993.

Walt Wolfram was executive producer for the Language and Life Project documentary film First Language: The Race to Save Cherokee, produced and directed by Danica Cullinan and Neal Hutcheson.

Also in conjunction with the Language and Life Project, Walt Wolfram was executive producer for the documentary films Talking Black in America: The Story of African American Language and Signing Black in America: The Story of Black ASL, both produced and directed by Danica Cullinan and Neal Hutcheson; as well as the Talking Black in American Project, a five-part documentary television series.

In 2008, Walt Wolfram was honored with the prestigious John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.