The Development of African American English

This book focuses on one of the most persistent and controversial questions in modern sociolinguistics: the past and present development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Despite intense scrutiny of the historical and current development of AAVE, a number of issues remain unresolved. Most prominent among these is the development of African American English during the antebellum period and the trajectory of change in twentieth-century AAVE. This book addresses both of these issues by examining an unparalleled sociolinguistic situation involving a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina. This unique environment provides a venue for dealing with questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. The conclusions drawn challenge the Creolist, Anglicist, and neo-Anglicist positions with respect to the history of AAVE and offer insights into the development of African American speech in the twentieth century.

Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University. He has pioneered research on a wide range of American vernacular dialects and authored or co-authored 15 books, including American English (Blackwell 1998, with Natalie Schilling-Estes) and over 200 articles.

Erik R. Thomas is Associate Professor of Linguistics at North Carolina State University. He is author of An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English (2001), and has published widely in journals such as Language Variation and Change, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, and Journal of Phonetics.

List of Figures

ix

List of Tables

xi

Series Editor's Preface

xii

Preface

xiii

Introduction

1

(11)

The Status of African American English

1

(1)

A Unique Database

2

(3)

The Hyde County Corpus

5

(1)

Data Analysis

6

(4)

Beyond Hyde County

10

(2)

Issues in the Development of African American English

12

(20)

Hypotheses on Earlier African American English

12

(2)

Issues in Reconstructing Earlier AAVE

14

(13)

The nature of earlier written texts

15

(3)

Spoken language data representing earlier AAVE

18

(2)

The sociohistorical context of earlier African Americans

20

(3)

Variation in earlier AAVE

23

(1)

Donor source attribution

24

(3)

African American English in the Twentieth Century

27

(5)

Defining the Enclave Dialect Community

32

(15)

Introduction

32

(1)

Historically Isolated Speech Communities

33

(7)

Geography

34

(1)

Economy

35

(1)

Historical continuity

35

(1)

Social relations

36

(1)

Group identity

37

(1)

The social construction of enclave status

38

(2)

Language Change in Enclave Communities

40

(4)

Sociolinguistic Principles in the Configuration of Isolated Dialects

44

(3)

The Social History of Mainland Hyde County

47

(19)

Chesapeake Bay Origins

47

(2)

The Settlement of Hyde County

49

(5)

Hyde County from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War

54

(5)

Reconstruction to the Great Depression

59

(3)

Hyde County since 1940

62

(2)

Sociohistorical Effects on Language

64

(2)

Morphosyntactic Alignment in Hyde County English

66

(29)

Issues in Attribution

67

(2)

Past Tense be Regularization

69

(8)

The historical development of leveling to weren't

71

(2)

Was/weren't leveling in Hyde County

73

(4)

Copula/Auxiliary Is and Are Absence

77

(6)

The historical development of copula absence

78

(2)

Copula absence in Hyde County

80

(3)

Third Person -s Marking

83

(6)

The historical development of verbal -s marking

83

(2)

Verbal -s marking in Hyde County

85

(4)

Conclusion

89

(6)

Vocalic Alignment in Hyde County English

95

(30)

An Overview of Hyde County Vowels

96

(8)

The Historical Background of Hyde County Vowels

104

(7)

Quantitative Analysis of Hyde County Vowels

111

(10)

Conclusions

121

(4)

Consonantal Alignment in Hyde County English

125

(26)

Earlier Hyde County Consonants

126

(6)

The Case of Consonant Cluster Reduction

132

(8)

The patterning of cluster reduction

135

(3)

Explaining consonant cluster reduction patterns in 1-Hyde County

138

(2)

The Case of Postvocalic r Vocalization

140

(8)

The patterning of postvocalic r-lessness

141

(5)

Post-/∂/ r vocalization

146

(2)

Conclusion

148

(3)

Intonational Alignment in Hyde County English

151

(9)

African American and European American Intonation

151

(4)

Analytical Methods

155

(1)

Results and Implications

156

(3)

Conclusions

159

(1)

The Individual and Group in Earlier African American English

160

(24)

The Individual and Group in Variation Studies

161

(4)

The Sample of Elderly African American Speakers

165

(1)

Some Diagnostic Variables

166

(9)

Rhoticity

167

(2)

Syllable-coda consonant cluster reduction

169

(1)

The vowel system

169

(2)

Verbal -s concord

171

(1)

Copula absence

172

(2)

Past tense be leveling

174

(1)

Patterns of Correlation and Individuation

175

(4)

Variation in Earlier AAVE

179

(5)

Beyond Hyde County: The Past and Present Development of AAVE

184

(29)

The Origin of African American English

184

(4)

The Regional Context of Earlier African American English

188

(6)

Levels of Linguistic Alignment

194

(3)

The Trajectory of Language Change

197

(5)

The Norming of AAVE

202

(7)

Issues in vernacular dialect norming

202

(3)

Vernacular language norming in Hyde County

205

(2)

Explaining the supraregional norms of contemporary AAVE

207

(2)

Conclusion

209

(4)

References

213

(19)

Index

232

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The Development of African American English

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials