Intended Audience
A film screening of Professor Walt Wolfram's recent documentary which summarizes the vast array of African American Language use in performance styles and genres that include musical traditions, spoken genres and rituals. Interviews with performers and other experts illustrate ways in which the Black Experience and the use of African American Language are essential to these creative forms of expressions. Followed by Q & A.
Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina
State University, where he also directs the Language and Life Project. He has pioneered
research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s and published 23 books and more
than 300 articles. Over the last two decades, he and his students have conducted more
than 3,500 sociolinguistic interviews with residents of North Carolina and beyond. In
addition to his research interests, Professor Wolfram is particularly interested in the
application of sociolinguistic information to the public, including the production of
television documentaries, the construction of museum exhibits, and the development of
innovative formal and informal materials related to language diversity for different
institutions. He has received numerous awards, including the North Carolina Award (the
highest award given to a citizen of North Carolina), Caldwell Humanities Laureate from
the NC Humanities Council, the Holladay Medal at NC State, the Board of Governor’s
Holshouser Award for Excellence in Public Service, and the Linguistics, Language and
the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America. He has been inducted into the
American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and served as President of the Linguistic Society
of America, the American Dialect Society, and the Southeastern Conference on
Linguistics.