The language of class and nation

Abstract

T he duality of the black experience both within and without the American national experience, and the contribution of different classes and strata of the black community to that duality, appeared in the kind of English spoken on the farms and plantations and in the towns and cities. The slave, Kelly Miller remarks, had to be ear-minded, whereas the master could be eye-minded) Up to a point the ear-mindedness of AfroAmerican slaves did not differ essentially from that of, say, Eastern European slaves in the cities of Renaissance Italy) Even today in the black urban ghettos verbal ability contributes at least as much as physical strength to individual prestige. Thomas Kochman writes: "The prestige norms which influence black speech behavior are those which have been successful in manipulating and controlling people: and situations. ''3 But the slaves did more than set the pace for a certain verbal style; they created, or at least elaborated, their own version of the English language. 4 Although the slave traders wanted to reduce communication within their human cargoes, they never wholly succeeded. The two great West African language families, the Bantu and the Sudanese, did not exclude passage from one variant to another within each nor even between them. s More important, the slaves often had to be held for reshipment at various points on the coast, where pidgin English (or pidgin French or especially pidgin Portuguese) served as a lingua franca. Based on English vocabulary but perhaps with some West African grammatical influence and tonal characteristics, it provided these Africans with the first English they were to learn, and by its very nature it could be learned quickly. When on the New World plantations these slaves taught those who came after them. Gerald W. Mullin has estimated that slaves in Virginia were speaking an adequate amount of English within six months and that they were speaking well in about two and a half years. 6 From those days forward, blacks, not whites, took primary responsibility for teaching other blacks on the plantation. 7 The English they taught was based on the pidgin that had arisen in the slave trade. The principal need of the slaves was communication with the other slaves, not with whites. The terms "pidgin" and "creole" (the development of pidgin into a first language for a new generation) evoke peculiar reactions, for they are for some reason regarded as pejorative. They are, however, technical linguistic terms that imply no value judgment. Pidgin English, which became common in the New World, probably arose, in the manifestation relevant to Afro-Americans, on the slave-trading coast of West Africa. It appeared wherever British slave traders appeared) Linguists have variously interpreted the special qualities of southern speech, in its wide variety of forms, and until recently have denied much of an African contribution, mush less the existence of a separate black dialect. Clement Eaton has admirably summed up and applied the views of such linguists as Cleanth Brooks and G.P. Krapp: