| 1974 | "The Insights of the Mesolect." In Pidgins and Creoles: Current Trends and Prospects, ed. D. DeCamp and I. Hancock, 92-117. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown U. Press. |
| 1975 | "Carrying the New Wave into Syntax: the Case of Black English BIN." In Analyzing Variation in Language, ed. R. Fasold and R. Shuy, 162-83. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown U. Press. |
| 1976a | "Communicating in a Creole Continuum." In New Directions in Creole Studies. Papers from the first annual colloquium, Society for Caribbean Linguistics, ed. G. Cave. Georgetown: Society for Caribbean Linguistics. |
| 1976b | (With Angela E. Rickford). "Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise." Journal of American Folklore, 89 (353): 194-309. Reprinted 1978 in Readings in American Folklore, ed. J. H. Brunvand, 355-73. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., Also reprinted 1980 in Perspectives on American English, ed. J. Dillard, 347-66. The Hague: Mouton. |
| 1976c | (With Barbara Greaves). "Non-Standard Words and Expressions in the Writing of Guyanese School-Children." In A Festival of Guyanese Words, ed. J. R. Rickford, 25-45. Georgetown: University of Guyana. Reprinted in second edition, 1978: 40-56. |
| 1977 | "The Question of Prior Creolization in Black English." In Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, ed. A. Valdman, 126-46. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana U. Press. |
| 1980a | "How Does DOZ Disappear?" In Issues in English Creoles: Papers from the 1975 Hawaii Conference, ed. R. Day, 77-96. Heidelberg: Julius Groos. |
| 1980b | "Analyzing Variation in Creole Languages." In Theoretical Orientations in Creole Studies, ed. A. Valdman and A. Highfield, 165-84. New York: Academic Press. |
| 1981 | "A Variable Rule for a Creole Continuum." In Variation Omnibus, ed. D. Sankoff and H. Cedergren, 201-8. Carbondale and Edmonton: Linguistic Research, Inc. |
| 1983a | "What Happens in Decreolization." In Pidginization and Creolization as Language Acquisition, ed. R. Andersen, 298-319. Rowley, Ma.: Newbury House. |
| 1983b | "Standard and Non-Standard Language Attitudes in a Creole Continuum." Society for Caribbean Linguistics Occasional Paper 16. Mona, Jamaica: U. of the West Indies. Reprinted 1985 in Language of Inequality, ed. N. Wolfson and J. Manes, 145-60. The Hague: Mouton. |
| 1985a | (With Elizabeth Closs Traugott.) "Symbol of Powerlessness and Degeneracy, or Symbol of Solidarity and Truth? Paradoxical Attitudes towards Pidgins and Creoles." In The English Language Today, ed. S. Greenbaum. Oxford: Pergamon, 252-61. |
| 1985b | "Ethnicity as a Sociolinguistic Boundary." American Speech 60 (3): 90-125. |
| 1985c | "Some Principles for the Study of Black and White Speech in the South." In Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White, ed. M. Montgomery and G. Bailey. Tuscaloosa: U. of Alabama Press, 38-62. |
| 1986a | "Social Contact and Linguistic Diffusion: Hiberno English and New World Black English" Language 62.2: 245-89. |
| 1986b | "Me Tarzan, You Jane: Cognition, Expression and the Creole Speaker." Journal of Linguistics 22.2:281-310. |
| 1986c | "The Need for New Approaches to Social Class Analysis in Sociolinguistics." Language and Communication 6.3:215-21. |
| 1986d | "Riddling and Lying: Participation and Performance." In The Fergusonian Impact, vol. 2, ed. J. A. Fishman. The Hague: Mouton, 89-106. |
| 1986e | "Note (On the Significance and Use of Documentary Pidgin-Creole Texts)." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 1.1:159-63. |
| 1986f | "Concord and Contrast in the Characterization of the Speech Community." In Sheffield Working Papers in Language and Linguistics 3:87-119. Also to appear in Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation, ed. R. W. Fasold, John Benjamins. |
| 1987a | "The Haves and Have Nots: Sociolinguistic Surveys and the Assessment of Speaker Competence." Language in Society 16.2: 149-77. |
| 1987b | "Decreolization Paths for Guyanese Singular Pronouns." In Pidgin and Creole Languages: Essays in Honor of John E. Reinecke, ed. G. Gilbert. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 130-38. |
| 1987c | "Are Black and White Vernaculars Diverging?" (Contribution to NWAV-XIV panel discussion of topic.) American Speech 62.1: 55-62. |
| 1987d | "Past Marking in the Mesolect: A Close Look at Bonnette." In Variation in Language, ed. K. Denning, S. Inkelas, F. McNair-Knox and J. R. Rickford. Stanford: Department of Linguistics, 379-94. |
| 1987e | "Social Class Groupings in Sociolinguistic Research." (Response to recent paper by L. Davis.) American Speech 62.3: 281-85. |
| 1988a | "Language Contact, Variation and Diffusion: Microlevel Community Perspectives." In Language Spread and Public Policy: Issues, Implications, and Case Studies, ed. P. Lowenberg. Washington, DC: Georgetown U. Press, 25-44. |
| 1988b | "Sociolinguistic Research on the Caribbean." In Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook Q the Science of Language and Society, vol. 2, ed. U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. J. Mattheier. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1313-1324. |
| 1988c | "The Evolution of Creole Languages: Real and Apparent Time Evidence." In Linguistic Change and Contact: NWAV-XVI, ed. K. Ferrara, B. Brown, K. Walters and J. Baugh. Austin: University of Texas, 298-309. |
| 1990a | "Number Delimitation in Gullah: A Response to Mufwene." American Speech 65.2:148-163. |
| 1990b | "Contraction and Deletion of the Copula in Barbadian English." (With R. Blake.) In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (=BLS 16). Berkeley, CA; Berkeley Linguistics Society, 257-268.. |
| 1991a | "Contemporary Source Comparison as a Critical Window on the Afro-American Linguistic Past." In Verb Phrase Patterns in Black English and Creole, ed. W. Edwards and D. Winford. Detroit: Wayne State U Press, 302-322. |
| 1991b | "Sociolinguistic Variation in Cane Walk: A Quantitative Case Study." In English Around The World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, ed. J. Cheshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 609-616. |
| 1991c | "Representativeness and Reliability of the Ex-Slave Narrative Materials, with Special Reference to Wallace Quarterman's Tape and Transcript." In The Emergence of Black English: Texts & Commentary, ed. G. Bailey, N. Maynor and P. Cukor-Avila. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 191-212. |
| 1991d | "Pidgins, Creoles and Language Change." In the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ed. Henry Hoenigswald. Oxford: Oxford U Press. |
| 1991e | "Implicational Scaling and Critical Age Limits in Models of Linguistic Variation, Acquisition and Change." In Cross Currents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories, ed. C. A. Ferguson and T. Huebner. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 225-246. |
| 1991f | "Rappin on the Copula Coffin: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in the Analysis of Copula Variation in African American Vernacular English." (With A. Ball, R. Blake, R. Jackson and N. Martin.) Language Variation and Change 3.1:103-132. |
| 1992a | "Grammatical Variation and Divergence in Vernacular Black English." In Internal and External Factors in Syntactic Change, ed. Marinel Gerritsen and Dieter Stein. Berlin and New York: Mouton, 175-200. |
| 1992b | "The Creole Residue in Barbados." In Old English and New: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honor of Frederic G. Cassidy, ed. by Joan Hall, Nick Doane, and Dick Ringler. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 183-201. |
| 1993a | "Phonological Features in Afro-American Pidgins and Creoles and their Diachronic Significance: Comments on the Papers by Holm and Carter." In Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, ed. S. Mufwene. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 346-63. |
| 1993b | "Comments on 'Ethics, Advocacy and Empowerment'." Language and Communication |
| 1993c | "Language, Education and Cultural Diversity." In Migration in Europe: Challenges and Opportunities, ed. by Heike Donenbacher, Karen Kramer, and Steve Baughman, 70-84. Berlin: Stanford Program in Berlin. |
| 1994 | "Addressee- and Topic-Influenced Style Shift: A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Study." (With Faye McNair-Knox.) In Perspectives on Register: Situating Register Variation within Sociolinguistics, ed. by Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 235-76. |
| 1995a | "Syntactic Variation and Change in Progress: Loss of the Verbal Coda in Topic-Restricting As far As Constructions." Language 71.1:102-131. |
| 1995b | "Textual Evidence on the Nature of Early Barbadian English, 1676-1870." (With Jerome S. Handler.) Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 9.2:221-55. |
| 1995c | "Dialect Readers Revisited.' (With Angela E. Rickford.) Linguistics and Education 7:107-128. |
| 1996a | "Regional and Social Variation in Language." In Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching ed. by Sandra McKay and Nancy Hornberger, 151-194. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. |
| 1996b | "Negative Inversion in African American Vernacular English." (With Peter Sells and Thomas A. Wasow.) Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14.3:591-627. |
| 1996c | "Foreword" to Sociolinguistic Variation: Data, Theory and Analysis: Selected Papers from NWAV23 at Stanford. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, ix-xiii. |
| 1996d | "Copula Variability in Jamaican Creole and African American Vernacular English: A Reanalysis of DeCamp's Texts." In Towards a Social Science of Language: A Festschrift for William Labov, ed. by Gregory R. Guy, John G. Baugh, Deborah Schiffrin and Crawford Feagin, 357-372. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. |
| 1996e | "Language Contact and Language Generation: Pidgins and Creoles." (With John McWhorter.) In The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 238-256. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. |
| 1996f | "Ebonics Succeeds where Traditional Methods do not." San Jose Mercury News, December 26, 1996, page 8B. |
| 1997a | "Preterit had in the Narratives of African American Adolescents." (With Christine Theberge Rafal.) American Speech. 71:227-254. |
| 1997b | "Unequal Partnership: Sociolinguistics and the African American Speech Community." Language in Society. 26:161-197. |
| 1997c | "Prior Creolization of AAVE? Sociohistorical and Textual Evidence from the 17th and 18th Centuries." Journal of Sociolinguistics 1.3:315-336. |
| 1997d | "Commentary: Suite for Ebony and Phonics." Discover 18.12 (December):82-87. |
| 1998 | "The Creole Origins of African American Vernacular English: Evidence from Copula Absence." In African American English, ed. by Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey and John Baugh, 154-200. London: Routledge. |
| 1999a | "Using the Vernacular to Teach the Standard." In Ebonics in the Urban Education Debate, ed. by David Ramirez, Terrence Wiley, Gerda de Klerk, and Enid Lee. Long Beach: Center for Language Minority Education and Research, California State University, Long Beach. |
| 1999b | The Ebonics Controversy in my Backyard: A Sociolinguist's Experiences and Reflections. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3. |
| 1999c | "Language Diversity and Academic Achievement in the Education of African American Students: An Overview of the Issues." In Language Diversity and Academic Achievement in the Education of African American Students, ed. by Carolyn Adger, Donna Christian, and Orlando Taylor. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, in conjunction with Delta. |
| 1999d | "Variation in the JC copula: New Data and Analysis." In "Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse: Studies Celebrating Charlene Sato, ed. by John R. Rickford and Suzanne Romaine, 143-156. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. |
| 2000a | "The Living Language." Introductory essay, in the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. |
| 2001b | "Sociolinguistics and the public: Digging and being dug in return." American Speech 75.3:273-275. |
| 2001c | "Ebonics and Education: Lessons from the Caribbean, Europe and the USA." In Ebonics and Language Education, ed. by Clinton Crawford, 263-284. New York and London: Sankofa World Publishers. |
| 2001d | "The Ubiquity of Ebonics. American Language Review 5.2: 20-23. (With Russell J. Rickford.) |
| 2001e | "Style and Stylizing from the Perspective of a Non-Autonomous Sociolinguistics." In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. by Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford, 220-231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
| 2001f | "Introduction." (With Penelope Eckert.) In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. by Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford, 1-18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
| 2002a | "Implicational Scales." In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. by James K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes, 142-67. Oxford: Blackwell. |
| 2002b | "Linguistics, Education, and the Ebonics Firestorm." In Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, 2000: Linguistics, Language and the Professions, ed. by James E. Alatis, Heidi E. Hamilton & Ai-Hui Tan, 25-45. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. |
| 2002c | "Language Mastery, Cultural Affirmation, and the Success of African American and Other Students." In Proceedings of the Los Angeles Unified School District Conference on Developing a Culturally Relevant Education Program that Benefits African American and All Other Students, ed. by Floraline I. Stevens. |
| In press a | "African American Vernacular English." In the Oxford Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press. |
| In press b | "Pidgins and Creoles." In the Oxford Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press. |
| In prep. a | "Ebonics." For Linguistic Society of America's Frequently Asked Questions series, on line. |
| In prep. b | "Annotated Bibliography on African American Vernacular English." (With Julie Sweetland and Angela E. Rickford.) For a linguistic festschrift. |
| In prep. c | "Prosodic Conditioning of the Copula." With Julie Sweetland. For submission to Journal of Sociolinguistics. |
| In prep. d | "Creole/AAVE copula patterning as evidence of second language learning effects?" (With Devyani Sharma). For submission to Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. |
| In prep. e | Concord and Conflict in the Speech Community." For submission to Language in Society. |
| In prep. f | Dynamic Models of Language Variation. (With Ewart Thomas.) For submission to Language Variation and Change. |