African American English
Wolfram & Schilling-Estes
Chapter 7
“the paradigm case of ethnicitybased language diversity”
• “Ebonics,” African American English,
African American Vernacular English,
African American Language, Black English,
Negro English
• Scholarly analysis
• Media attention: 1960s, late 1970s, 1990s,
early 21st century (linguistic profiling)
No genetic basis for language
differentiation
• “There is no foundation for maintaining that
•
there is a genetic basis for the kind of language
differentiation evidenced by some African
Americans.” (p. 212)
“…labels such as African American English and
European American English refer to socially
constructed ethnolinguistic entities rather than
genetically determined language varieties.” (p.
212)
The Three Main Issues re AAE
• (1) the relation of AAE to comparable
Anglo American vernacular varieties
• (2) the origin and early development of
AAVE
• (3) the nature of language change
currently taking place in this variety,
including its development into a widely
recognized symbol of cultural identity
7.1 The Status of European American and
African American Vernaculars
• There is a restricted subset of features unique to
•
•
•
AAVE (all others are shared)
Frequency of occurrence of common features is
important in differentiating varieties
“The uniqueness of AAVE lies more in the
particular array of structures that comprise the
dialect than it does in the restricted set of
potentially unique structures.”
Regional variation within AAVE, but common
core of features shared across regions = strong
ethnic association of this variety
“camouflaged forms”
• She came running
• She come acting like she was real mad
• He calls himself a cook
• He calls himself dancing
7.2 The Origin and Early Development
of AAE
• The Anglicist Hypothesis
• The Creolist Hypothesis
• The Neo-Anglicist Hypothesis
• The Substrate Hypothesis
The Anglicist Hypothesis
• the roots of AAVE can be traced to the
same source as Anglo American dialects:
British dialects
The Creolist Hypothesis
• AAVE developed from a “creole” language,
similar to other English-based creoles in
African and the Caribbean, vestige found
in “Gullah,” went through “decreolization”
• Developed during 1970s and 1980s:
“Black on White” in the Story of English
New data to challenge the Creolist
Hypothesis:
• WPA ex-slave narratives, letters, etc.
(earlier AAVE not as distinct from Anglo
varieties as the Creolist Hypothesis would
predict)
• Black expatriate insular varieties of English
• Examination of the sociohistorical situation
and the demographics of the antebellum
South
The Neo-Anglicist Hypothesis
• Earlier postcolonial African American
speech was directly linked to the early
British dialects brought to North America,
but AAE has since diverged so that it is
now quite distinct from contemporary
European American vernacular speech
The Substrate Hypothesis
• Even though earlier AAE may have incorporated
•
many features from regional varieties of English
in America, its durable substrate effects have
always distinguished it from other varieties of
American English (whereas Neo-Anglicist claims
that earlier form was identical)
Examples of features from language contact:
– Inflectional –s absence: She go
– Copula absence: He ugly
– Word-final consonant cluster reduction: Lif’ up
7.3 The Contemporary Development of AAE
• Labov claims divergence based on a few
features
• Wolfram challenges that claim, although
he points out that young African
Americans are apparently not participating
in the Northern Cities Shift and the
Southern Shift as identified by Labov
7.3 The Contemporary Development of
AAE
• The emergence of an increasingly
coherent nationwide African American
culture (“supraregional norm”)
• “oppositional identity”
• Hip Hop
7.4 Conclusion
• AAE is a distinct, robust, and stable
socioethnic dialect of English
• More research is needed into the
relationship to identity
• More research is needed into possible
characteristics at other levels of dialect