Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T10:46:20.402Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The regional context of earlier African American speech: Evidence for reconstructing the development of AAVE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2000

WALT WOLFRAM
Affiliation:
Department of English, Box 8105, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8105, [email protected]
ERIK R. THOMAS
Affiliation:
Department of English, Box 8105, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8105
ELAINE W. GREEN
Affiliation:
Department of English, Box 8105, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8105

Abstract

Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historical and current development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) remain unresolved. This study utilizes a unique sociolinguistic situation – a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina – to address questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for a sample of four different generations of African Americans and a baseline European American group shows that considerable accommodation of the localized dialect occurred in earlier African American speech. Nonetheless, certain dialect features – e.g., copula absence and 3rd person verbal s marking – were distinctively maintained by African Americans in the face of localized dialect accommodation; and this suggests long-term ethnolinguistic distinctiveness. Cross-generational change among African Americans indicates that younger speakers are moving away from the localized Pamlico Sound dialect toward a more generalized AAVE norm. Contact-based and identity-based explanations are offered for the current trend of localized dialect displacement.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)