One more movie question

[Rachel Shuttlesworth]

Bringing Down The House might be a good one to look at; I've used it
with success in intro classes. Queen Latifah uses African American
English and offers some imitations of stereotypical ideas of AAE. She
also switches to MUSE (maybe "honky-speak" is a better term for what she
does ;-}}). Steve Martin tries to speak AAE, once facetiously and once
in a more serious attempt to infiltrate an African American club. Also,
you may already know about this, but Lisa Green's chapter on African
American English in "Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first
Century" (Eds. John Rickford and Edward Finegan) is an excellent (and
short) article on AAE, including info on AAE in films. The film she
claims doesn't get AAE right (mostly verb forms) is "Fresh" (1994),
which I've never seen.
Rachel

Patti J. Kurtz wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Patti J. Kurtz" <kurtpatt4 at NETSCAPE.NET>
> Subject:      One more movie question
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This may sound odd, but can anyone think of examples of "bad" AAVE
> dialect in recent films?  I'm trying to show my dialect students how the
> media sometimes gets it wrong.  (I will show any good examples, too, of
> course, but I thought we'd start with the bad ones as wer begin to study
> AAVE.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Patti
> --
>
> Dr. Patti J. Kurtz
>
> Assistant Professor, English
>
> Director of the Writing Center
>
> Minot State University
>
> Minot, ND 58707
>
>
>
> Foster: What about our evidence? They've got to take notice of that.
>
>
>
> Straker: Evidence. What's it going to look like when Henderson claims
> that we manufactured it, just to get a space clearance program?
>
>
>
> Foster: But we are RIGHT!
>
>
>
> Straker: Sometimes, Colonel, that's not quite enough.

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Dr. Rachel E. Shuttlesworth
CLIR Post-Doctoral Fellow
University of Alabama Libraries
Box 870266, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0266
Office: 205.348.4655/ Fax:205.348.8833
rachel.e.shuttlesworth at ua.edu