AAE & Creole scholarship?

[Mary Bucholtz]

Samy Alim's work should definitely be included. See, among many others:

Alim, H. Samy (2004). You know my steez: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. Publication of the American Dialect Society 89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Alim, H. Samy (2006). Roc the mic right: The language of hip hop culture. New York: Routledge.

Best,

Mary

On Sep 19, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Leila Monaghan wrote:

> 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

***************************************************
Mary Bucholtz, Professor
Department of Linguistics
3607 South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3100

http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/bucholtz/
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