Influences of Social and Style Variables on Adult Usage of African American English Features

Abstract

Purpose In this study, the authors examined the influences of selected social (gender, employment status, educational achievement level) and style variables (race of examiner, interview topic) on the production of African American English (AAE) by adults. Method Participants were 50 African American men and women, ages 20–30 years. The authors used Rapid and Anonymous Survey (RAS) methods to collect responses to questions on informal situational and formal message-oriented topics in a short interview with an unacquainted interlocutor. Results Results revealed strong systematic effects for academic achievement, but not gender or employment status. Most features were used less frequently by participants with higher educational levels, but sharp declines in the usage of 5 specific features distinguished the participants differing in educational achievement. Strong systematic style effects were found for the 2 types of questions, but not race of addressee. The features that were most commonly used across participants—copula absence, variable subject–verb agreement, and appositive pronouns—were also the features that showed the greatest style shifting. Conclusions The findings lay a foundation with mature speakers for rate-based and feature inventory methods recently shown to be informative for the study of child AAE and demonstrate the benefits of the RAS.

Developmental sociolinguistics: Children's acquisition of language variation

“…Glottal variants of /t/ and the reduced -in form are not only more likely in certain phonological contexts and in informal speech, they are also more common in certain dialects or socioeconomic groups (e.g., Trudgill, 1972Trudgill, , 1974Wolfram, 1969). Remarkably, many people possess the ability to speak in multiple different varieties of their native language, enabling them to adjust their perceived identity like a chameleon to fit into different social contexts (e.g., Craig & Grogger, 2012). In fact, how much a talker adjusts the way they talk can itself reflect that talker's social attitudes toward a conversational partner (e.g., Babel, 2010Babel, , 2012.…”

Examining the Use of Spoken Dialect Indices With African American Children in the Southern United States

“…LJTs and TKBMs such as the DDMu or DDMw have been highly correlated with one another (Oetting & McDonald, 2002). Each of these measures has proven to be useful across a number of investigations with a variety of age groups and for a variety of purposes (e.g., Craig & Grogger, 2012;Ivy & Masterson, 2012;Kohler et al, 2007). However, whether these new indices are similarly consistent and whether, collectively, their utility for characterizing NMAE does indeed vary by children's grade level, remains unknown.…”

What Mr. Simmons said: Stylization, pitch, and the voicing of others on the Gullah Geechee cultural heritage tour

“…She further observes deployment of African American Language (AAL) stylistic variation as personae-and topic-dependent beyond simple registers of formality, "not one in which interviewees are on a continuum from formal to informal or moving through different imagined audiences, but rather one in which the topics invite them to style different parts of themselves" (Grieser 2019). The relationship between AAE features, educational achievement, and language regard has been observed (Craig and Grogger 2012); however, this relationship is more complicated than depicted in Craig and Grogger's study when considered in the context of AAE as a source of covert prestige, self-identifying pride, and resistance to hegemonic assimilationist norms (Alim 2004;Weldon 2021).…”