Issues in Reconstructing Earlier African‐American English

Abstract

Despite intense scrutiny over the past several decades, there remain a number of unresolved issues in the reconstruction of the historical development of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). These issues concern the reliability of written texts representing earlier AAVE, the representativeness of the spoken data from ex-slave recordings and remnant transplant communities, the delimitation of the sociohistorical context of earlier AAVE development, the nature of inter-and intra-community variation in earlier AAVE, and the principles for identifying donor sources for AAVE structures. Evidence from representative written sources is compared, along with spoken language data from a long-term, biracial remnant community in coastal North Carolina. The spoken language data demonstrate that earlier AAVE was affected both by its original contact history and the localized varieties spoken by European American cohort communities. Furthermore, data indicate that there was considerable intra-community as well as inter-community language variation among earlier African Americans. The analysis shows that sociolinguists need to reconstruct the historical development of AAVE in a way that is consistent with the sociohistorical and demographic circumstances of early African Americans; faithful to an understanding of contact linguistics, independent language development, and dialect diffusion; and sensitive to the local sociolinguistic situations that have contextualized different groups of individual African Americans within these communities.Singler's assessment of the situation does not seem exaggerated, despite the fact that the field has now endured several`consensus' positions on the genesis and historical development of AAVE. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Anglicist hypothesis ± that the speech of African Americans essentially was derived directly from British-based dialects ± was commonly accepted by dialectologists (McDavid and McDavid, 1951), only to be replaced in the 1970s by the widespread acceptance of the creolist hypothesis which posited AAVE to be rooted historically in an expansive creole found in the African diaspora (Bailey, 1965;Stewart, 1967;Dillard, 1972). However, since then, new corpora have emerged to challenge

Samaná and Sinoe, Part II

“…The comparatively privileged situation of African Americans in the northeastern United States, especially Philadelphia, has led some scholars (e.g., Singler 1998, Wolfram 2000 to reject the English they would have spoken, and by extension, Samaná English, as evidence about an earlier stage of contemporary AAVE. This rejection is based on the assumption that African Americans sailing from these areas were likely to have been northern free Blacks, better-educated and more integrated than their southern brethren.…”

Appalachian English in southern Indiana? The evidence from verbal -s

“…More often, though, the goal is to describe and analyze the variation attested in a particular dialect, be it in England (Anderwald, 2001; Britain, 2002; Cheshire, 1982; Schendl, 1996; Tagliamonte, 1998), in America (Ellis, 1994; Schilling-Estes & Wolfram, 1994; Trüb, 2006; Wolfram, Hazen, & Schilling-Estes, 1999), or elsewhere, such as Australia (Eisikovits, 1991), Ireland (McCafferty, 2003; 2004), New Zealand (Hay & Schreier, 2004), Scotland (Smith & Tagliamonte, 1998), or Tristan da Cunha (Schreier, 2002). In the specific context of America, subject–verb agreement has also been scrutinized in ethnic dialects other than AAE, including Cajun Vernacular English (Dubois & Horvath, 2003), Lumbee Vernacular English (Dannenberg & Wolfram, 1998; Wolfram & Sellers, 1999), and nonstandard white vernaculars (Blanton, 1974; Feagin, 1979; Montgomery, 1989; Wolfram & Christian, 1976). In some cases, two or more ethnic varieties have been compared simultaneously (Hazen, 1998; 2000b; Mallinson & Wolfram, 2002; Montgomery & Fuller, 1996; Sommer, 1986).…”

“… A-prefixing (cf. Christian et al, 1988:51–84; Montgomery, 1989:242–243; Wolfram, 1980; 1988; Wolfram & Christian, 1976:69–76; etc. ):They was just roof tops a-stickin' out [of the water], I'm tellin' ya!…”

“…(Spkr 207) They (and, much less frequently, it 1 ) as an alternate form of the existential pronoun there (cf. Blanton, 1974:44; Christian et al, 1988:120, 133–134; Feagin, 1979:205, 207, 238; Montgomery, 2004:278; 2006; Tortora, 2006; Wolfram & Christian, 1976:124–126; Wolfram et al, 1999:63): They wasn't but maybe 3 or 4 kids in one grade. (Spkr 103) They 's days that I can't do it and there 's other days that I can.…”

“…(Spkr 401)Null relative subject pronouns (cf. Montgomery, 1989:243–244; Montgomery, 2004:265–266; Montgomery & Hall, 2004:xli; Wolfram & Christian, 1976:120–121, but cf. Henry, 1995:§6 for a different analysis):There's some people __ does [i.e., hunt turkeys from a tree stand].…”