My guest today, John McWhorter, likes to stir things up.

Somehow I seem not to be a stranger to controversy and so I have to speak what I think of as the truth.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levin.

He's a linguistics professor at Columbia University, author of more than a dozen books,

and has emerged as one of America's most prominent public intellectuals.

He's an opinionated centrist and chances are whatever your politics,

your love is views on some issues and despises the stance on others.

In your day job, you are a linguistics at Columbia University and you also moonlight

as a commentator on American society, especially around issues of race.

But I'd like to talk first about linguistics because I suspect if we start on race,

we'll never make our way back to linguistics.

That is probably true, yes.

So one of your specialties within linguistics is Creole languages.

What's the definition of a Creole language?

A Creole language is just one language is mixed together.

But the thing is that every one of the world's 7,000 languages is mixed with other

ones to some degree because languages coexist.

Creoles are what happens when adults who are past the age,

when they're likely to learn a new language completely are exposed to some language

and learn it partially.

You've got maybe hundreds of words.

You've got about half of how the words are put together, the grammar.

...