Urban AAVE and Northern White dialects: convergence or divergence?

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

2009

Debate about the development of African American English (AAE) dominated sociolinguistic inquiry for the second half of the 20th century and continues to be a subject of investigation. All hypotheses about the development of AAE integrate ideas of shared linguistic features coupled with strong regional influences or founding effects. Most Southern evidence used in the development of these hypotheses, however, is from rural communities or somehow unique enclave communities. The early urban centers of African American life in the South that followed the abolition of slavery and disintegration of plantation life have seldom been investigated with respect to the development of AAE. This study examines precisely those sites looking at AAE in three Southern urban centers during the time of Jim Crow or institutionalized segregation: Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans. This analysis is based on a series of tape-recorded oral history interviews that were conducted as part of the Behind the Veil project at Duke University. The Behind the Veil project was launched in 1990 at Duke and the majority of the interviews were conducted between 1994 and 1997. Each speaker completed a survey regarding her/his life history, education, professional history, and family background. The speakers used for this study were chosen based on age (all born before 1942) and residency status in their respective communities-all speakers are lifelong residents of Birmingham, Memphis, or New Orleans. These criteria and others shape an inclusive corpus of 100 total tape-recorded interviews with 33 from Birmingham, 35 from Memphis, and 32 from New Orleans. v Quantitative analysis of five core diagnostic structures of AAE (i.e. copula absence, plurals , pre-vocalic consonant cluster reduction, rhoticity, and 3rd person singular verbal-s) was performed to provide a window for determining the shared and distinct patterns of early, urban AAE development. These data are used for intergenerational analyses, cross-gender analyses, analyses of socioeconomic factors and overall interpretation for each individual site and between different sites. These data contribute to the continuing study and scholarship on the historical development of African American English, providing the first multi-community overview of core African American English linguistic variables from the early urban South. The trans-regional similarities of linguistic variables in AAE speakers are often attributed to the influence of early Southern English varieties. These data confirm the early presence of these variables in African American urban centers in the South, but also suggest how language ideologies relate to dialect development.

The Handbook of the History of English, 2006

An abiding problem in the history of any language concerns the trajectories by which it developed into its descendant varieties. The ancestral forms of English are enviably well documented, at least those deriving from the written and/or standard registers. Yet there is relatively little useful information about ordinary spoken vernaculars of earlier times, which would offer the most pertinent direct evidence for the structure of contemporary offshoots. The dearth of information on the development of the spoken language is no doubt responsible for the widespread belief that many salient and stigmatized features of contemporary dialects are recent innovations. African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a variety with which a wide range of nonstandard forms have come to be identified, is a case in point.

The Development of African American English, 2002

The History of English: Varieties of English, 2017

This chapter reviews the differing positions concerning the history and development of African American Language (AAL), the impact of each position, and conclusions about the direction of these positions for future research in AAL and the communities involved. The positions discussed are: (1) Anglicist (aka Dialectologist), which purports that Africans in America learned regional varieties of British English dialects from British overseers with little to no influence from their own native African languages and cultures; (2) Creolist, which purports that AAL developed from a prior US creole developed by slaves that was widespread across the colonies and slave-holding areas (though Neo-Creolists acknowledge there likely was not a widespread creole but one that emerged in conditions favorable to creole development); (3) Substratist, which purports that distinctive patterns of AAL are those that occur in Niger-Congo languages such as Kikongo, Mande, and Kwa; (4) Ecological and Restructuralist, which is a perspective within the Anglicist position that acknowledges the difficulty of knowing the origins of AAL but proposes that we can say something useful about Earlier AAL (not nascent AAL) given settlement and migration patterns as well as socio-ecological issues; (5) Divergence/Convergence, which purports that AAL diverges and converges to White varieties over the course of its history with respect to changes in and degrees of racism, segregation, inequalities, and inequities that fluctuate across time and differ regionally; and (6) Deficit, which purports that AAL is based on the assumption that Africans in America and their culture are inferior to whites and their language learning as a result was imperfect and bastardized. Though the substance of and support for each position varies, ideological and epistemological perspectives of their originators and supporters cannot go unexamined.

This chapter shows how the English-origins hypothesis on the emergence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) seems to prevail against the creole-origins alternative. My arguments are embedded in the socioeconomic history of contacts between African slaves and European colonists (mostly farmers and indentured servants) on the tobacco and cotton plantations of the American Southeast, where Southern English emerged before the institutionalized race segregation in the late 19th century. I submit that Jim Crow fostered AAVE indirectly in triggering the Great Migration of African Americans to segregated northern and western cities, where they relocated in separate ethnic ghettos, and their otherwise regional vernacular was ethnicized. I make allowance for African and creole substrate influence, which I distinguish from the creole-origins hypothesis.