AAE & Creole scholarship?

[Steve Bialostok]

Well, McWhorter seems to have become the unofficial go-to for just about 
everything lately.

I am pretty sure that John Rickford (I believe that McWhorter was Rickford's 
student), in Spoken Soul, argues that there are at least grammatical aspects of 
AAE that can be traced to Africa. (I don't have the book in front of me.) 
Additionally, I believe that Geneva Smitherman connects certain aspects of AAE 
phonology to Africa. 

McWhorter has argued for a long time that virtually all linguists dismiss AAE as 
traceable to Western African communities. However, I suspect (and I'm sure 
someone will correct me) that it is probably more accurate to argue that 
virtually all linguists that McWhorter pays attention to dismiss it. 
Steve



________________________________
From: Leila Monaghan <leila.monaghan at GMAIL.COM>
To: LINGANTH at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Sent: Sun, September 19, 2010 10:19:32 PM
Subject: AAE & Creole scholarship?

Hi,

I am putting together a piece on African American English for the SLA blog.
Below is my starting point (taken from a forthcoming piece on the history
of Linguistic Anthropology and Pragmatics).   Is there other post 1996
material that I should be looking at?  What is the current thinking on the
Creole/Africanist contributions to AAE?  John McWhorter was dismissing the
West African contributions recently on the radio.  Do other people also
dismiss the African contributions as well or is there still another school
of thought?

all best,

Leila

While English literature scholar Lorenzo Dow Turner was the first to
systematically document the specifics of one form of African American
speech, Gullah of South Carolina and Georgia (Turner 1949, Wade-Lewis 2007),
much of the rest of early research on African American language issues was
done by white linguists (e.g. McDavid and McDavid 1950, Wolfram 1969, Fasold
1972).   By the late 1960s and 1970s, however, African American linguists
and linguistic anthropologists were beginning to study not only the
structures of African American language but also the contexts of language
use.  Claudia Michell Kernan looked at urban speech behaviors (1969) and
signifying, i.e. speech where “some of the implicit content or function…is
potentially obscured by the surface content or function” ([1972] 1999: 312).
Geneva Smitherman similarly looks at language in context in her book *Talkin
and Testifyin* ([1977] 1986) and at “the dozens” ([1995] 2006: 323) and
other forms of insults in African American English.   Marcyliena Morgan
(1994, [1994] 2009, 2002) has reviewed much of the scholarship on AAE and
compares and contrasts this scholarship to views of recognized leaders
within the African American community.

Education remains a key focus of AAE scholars.  In late 1996, the Oakland
School Board put out a statement arguing for teaching teachers the
fundamentals of AAE, which they called Ebonics (Oakland School Board 1996).
The statement was unclear in parts and often misinterpreted by various
segments of the general public who constructed the statement as meaning that
Ebonics/AAE should be taught in schools, which was seen as a great threat to
teaching Standard English. Jesse Jackson, for example, at first condemned
the teaching of Ebonics in the classroom but later reversed his position
after discussions with the Oakland School Board (CNN 1996). The school board
published a revised version in early 1997 (Oakland School Board 1997,
Nunberg 1997, Wikipedia 2010b).  The debate focused attention of linguistic
anthropologists on the issue of AAE and the stigma attached to it in some
parts of the US public.  Monaghan (1997b) is a short compilation of
responses to the 1996 Oakland Ebonics debates by scholars including Morgan,
Jack Sidnell, John Rickford, and John McWhorter, focusing on how African
American English is perceived and how to improve education for African
American students (see also Rickford 1999).  The edited volume *African
American English* (Bailey, Baugh, Mufwene and Rickford 1998) includes
studies of the structure, history and use of AAE by Rickford, Morgan, John
Baugh, Arthur Spears and others.  As with Deaf Studies, tracing roots of
linguistic features and community structures of African American provides
important counter-narratives to dominant and on-going hearing people’s
and/or white discourses.  This makes these fields pragmatic in a larger
sense. They have become a form of political action in themselves.
-- 
Leila Monaghan, PhD
Department of Anthropology
University of Wyoming
Laramie, Wyoming