Kacey Cooper
Dr. Walt Wolfram
ENG 525
12 October 2022
The Power of African American English
Introduction
As part of the NCSU English Honors program, I had the privilege to take two graduate English courses on sociolinguistics and archive theory. In these courses, I found that there is a widespread apprehension of the English language among the Black population due to colonial enforcement of linguistic displacement-from the ship and plantations to an integrated society. The power of language dates back to ancient civilizations where recordkeeping accounted for its citizens' essential needs on clay tablets and envelopes. The pre-Civil War United States saw the passage of anti-literacy and Black assembly legislation to subdue uprisings of enslaved people because slavery institutions realized how unifying forces of Black language could fuel their desire to find freedom from bondage. Thus, post-slavery, discrimination against African American language is used to deflect Black institutional achievements on the bases of their English “deficiencies.” In my interview with Anne Harding, a witness to Langston Hughes’ 1949 visit to rural Wilson, NC, she states, “the African American voice was not heard too often early on,” referring to Hughes and her experiences with Black literature in grade school and as an educator.
Photo of St. Alphonsus students graduating in 1949.
It was the separation of Africans on the coast of Africa and in ships during chattel slavery practices that caused them to become isolated from others who spoke their language, resulting in the loss of indigenous African languages who crossed the Atlantic (Talking Black In America). This displacement of African linguistic communities lays the foundation of linguistic discrimination employed by the hands of standard English speakers. In their raciolingusitic perspective, Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores saw the development of the concept of race and the othering of non-European people as a way to establish European superiority over them, essentially reasoning that their ways of living, especially their speech, is the correct way. They write, “This positioning of Europeanness as superior to non-Europeanness was part of a broader process of national-state/colonial governmentality” (Rosa and Flores 3). This anti-Black education governmentality attempted to deny the Black race the ability to read and write to learn English literacy. However, the Black race prevailed and was able to create their own English variation, such as Gullah or Geechee, a Creole variety that some linguists theorize is where the beginnings of African American English comes from through the contact of speakers with no common language (Talking Black In America). Wolfram and Schilling’s American English gives the features of copula absence as in “He smart” and -s absence as in “When she come_” as popular linguistic traits of the Creole language also seen in African American English. They also detail how the Anglicist Hypothesis states that enslaved Africans brought their language over, but lost it to their exposure to British Dialect. The Neo-Anglicist Hypothesis believes that these varieties from African-European contact started to differ at great lengths from European dialects, which eventually varied into modern African American English. Wolfram and Schilling’s hypothesis is the substrate hypothesis that focuses on earlier African-to-European language contact that may have taken on Anglicists regional varieties or Creole varieties, but ultimately has its distinguishable characteristics separate from other English varieties (Wolfram & Schilling 226-230). These hypotheses relate to the power of Black linguistic practices because they show possible outlets for African language learning used to inspire their journey from a racially linguistically traumatized people to a community of Black people seeking liberation through the disobedience of anti-literacy and assembly laws and maintaining oral traditions of Negro spirituals, which ultimately proves that linguistic liberty carries significance in the survival of the Black race in their fight for freedom from racial oppression.
Printed Ephemera Collection Dlc. Stowage of the British slave ship "Brookes" under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of. [N. P., ?] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/98504459/>.
African American Linguistic Discrimination
Despite its complex history, theories, and grammatical set of rules, African American English is thought to be incorrect and a deficiency of standardized English-despite the variation due to the anti-literacy laws enforced on the enslaved population. A form of discrimination includes African American mock language where historically, such as in minstrelsy shows, their dialect is ridiculed for its “inaccuracies.” The minstrel character Jim Crow developed by Thomas Dartmouth Rice features a White man covered in black facepaint with red lips that attempt to exaggerate African American physical features. During his racialized performance, Dartmouth would mock Black gestures and African American language, which led to the popularity of his popular minstrel show. His 1836 performance of a song called “Jump Jim Crow,” states:
Come listen all you galls and boys
I'se jist from Tuckyhoe,
I'm goin to sing a little song,
My name is Jim Crow
Fist on de heel tap,
Den on the toe
Ebry time I weel about
I jump Jim Crow.
Jim Crow. [London, new york & philadelphia: pub. by hodgson, 111 fleet street & turner & fisher ; between 1835 and 1845?] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2004669584/>.
In the song, Dartmouth is introducing himself as Jim Crow from Tuckahoe, telling his audience that he is going to perform a song while he dances through jumps and turns. The back-and-forth movement he explains he will do with his foot suggests that he is going to tap dance, likely ridiculing the ring shout African American dances done through the performance of Negro spirituals. Mockery of the Black language such as this demonstrates the threat to African American language being devalued, which leads to the disrespect of Black culture. In literature, mock language is often used to “poke fun at a character portrayed as culturally unsophisticated or uneducated” (Wolfram and Schilling 343). Often these minstrel characters and characters in literature are depicted as uneducated, poor, and through a comedic lens that promotes the disregard for the African American English variety.
Eye dialect is another misrepresentation of African American English that shows the lack of awareness of its language system by standard English systems. Wolfram and Schilling state that eye dialect is not based on “phonological differences of real dialects,” but through how it is illustrated to the eye. They write, “The spellings of was as wuz, does as duz, excusable as exkusable, or wunce for once do not represent any known aspect of phonological variation…” (Wolfram and Schilling 345). Writers who spell them as dem try to convey the stopped /th/ sound, and sometimes they may add sounds in words like fellow to feller or lose them in words like first to fust (Wolfram and Schilling 345). Furthermore, writers may use the correct ee spellings in fleece vowels and substitute traditional vowels for a central one, such as the u in tuck for the word took (Wolfram and Schilling 345). The implementation of eye dialect in respectable ways demonstrates that writers are acknowledging linguistic diversity in America, but that linguistic editing practices are needed to help convey the authenticity of African American English-passed down since African arrival in the United States-in literacy gatekeeping systems.
Importance of a Sociolinguistics Curriculum
Primary takeaways from sociolinguistics show that inclusion-seeking within institutions means accounting for educational diversity and attending to the educational differences of linguistically marginalized students. African American English’s grammar has been developed and evolved throughout centuries for the universal communication of a subjugated race. For example, the habitual be occurs after a subject and describes a habitual action, such as “She be riding her bike to church on Sundays.” The importance of sociolinguistics in school curriculums is to recognize that language-which is at the heart of human survival-differs for everyone and contains different cultural impacts. Its implementations in lesson plans will encourage students who speak different language varieties of English, ranging from Southern Speech, African American English, Jewish English, and Scots-Irish English, to be empowered by their linguistic diversity when interacting within short-sighted social institutions (Bloome 4).
Hubbard, Erastus, photographer. Group school children / photographed by E. Hubbard, Beaufort, S.C. [United States: Publisher not identified, between to 1864] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2015646736/>.
Conclusion
To understand the power of Black literacy is to understand early linguistic isolation practices against enslaved Africans that lead to their educational fight for a shared language through oral traditions. This discrimination is often done without regard to the complexities of the language, such as the different hypotheses of African and European interaction, that show how African Americans came to overcome anti-Black language oppression. Black linguistic discrimination is seen through literary mockery and attempts to highlight the variety can lead to misrepresentations of it. However, scholarly support for sociolinguistics in academia looks to teach its practices and correct representation to showcase its credibility in higher institutions. Essentially, the empowerment of African American English serves to empower a historically linguistically oppressed race that is constantly denied their right to language and literacy.
Sources Cited
Bloome, David. “Research Directions: Words and Power.” Language Arts, vol. 85, no. 2, 2007,
pp. 148–52.
Rosa, Jonathan, and Nelson Flores. “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a
Raciolinguistic Perspective.” Language in Society, vol. 46, no. 5, Nov. 2017, pp. 621–47. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000562.
Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. American English: Dialects and Variation. Third edition, Wiley Blackwell, 2016.