Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival

Abstract

Preface 1. Introduction: Street Speech as a Social Dialect 2. The Birth of Black Street Speech 3. Street Speech and Formal Speech: Linguistic Survival in Black and White Societies 4. The Scholar and the Street: Collecting the Data 5. Specialized Lexical Marking and Alternation Code Switching versus Style Shifting Topic-Related Shifting Syllable Contraction and Expansion Variable Forestressing of Bisyllabic Words Hypercorrection Lexical Summary 6. Unique Grammatical Usage Locating Suitable Examples Syntactic Constructions and Their Functions Grammatical Summary 7. Phonological Variation Suffix /-s/ Variation Consonant Cluster Reduction Is and Are Variation Postvocalic /r/ Variation Summary of Phonological and Morphological Variation 8. Educational Insights 9. Impediments to Employability 10. Dynamic Black Speech: A Nonideal Linguistic State Bibliography Index