American Vernacular Research Articles

Learning to Talk Like the Test: Guiding Speakers of African American Vernacular English

AbstractIn this article, we focus on instructional support for 91 students who speak African American Vernacular English and who are at high risk for not passing the required state exams. We profile the instruction that was provided and the results from that instruction, providing examples of how students’ language was scaffolded such that they could code switch between test language (standard academic English) and the languages of their homes.

Language Deficits or Differences: What We Know about African American Vernacular English in the 21st Century

This focus of this paper is to present an overview of the current research which examines the language and literacy performance of African American children who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE), as presented from a deficit versus difference perspective. Language and literacy and assessment and remediation of AAVE speakers are discussed in sections one and two. Section three of the paper provides theoretical and methodological suggestions to educational psychologists, speech pathologists and developmental psychologists investigating AAVE speakers, on ways to gain a better appreciation for, and understanding of, the intricacies associated with African American Vernacular English. The paper closes with a discussion of the litigation and controversies surrounding AAVE.

‘To Infinity and Beyond…’: The American Vernacular and Democratic Space

The spatial strategies adopted by the founding fathers of the American Republic are examined and their political roots and consequences explored. In particular the reasons for the neo-classical style becoming prominent are questioned, and whether that style was an appropriate spatial strategy for democratization. An analysis is presented of how American writing and literature was a forum for the working out of the questions of expansion into, and settlement in, new space.

Representing the language of the ‘other’: African American Vernacular English in ethnography

Ethnography is often described as the translation of culture, yet there has been little discussion of actual linguistic translation in ethnography. Many ethnographers engage in research across divides of language that require them to make decisions about how to represent the language of their informants. The privileging of academic Standard English creates dilemmas for ethnographers whose subjects speak stigmatized languages. Based on an analysis of 32 book-length ethnographies about African Americans (reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology between 1999 and 2009), this article answers the questions of how ethnographers typically deal with language difference in their texts, particularly when research takes place across dialects of the same language, and why language matters in the production of ethnographic texts.

Bidialectal African American Adolescents' Beliefs About Spoken Language Expectations in English Classrooms

AbstractThis article describes the perspectives of bidialectal African American adolescents—adolescents who speak both African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Standard English—on spoken language expectations in their English classes. Previous research has demonstrated that many teachers hold negative views of AAVE, but existing scholarship has not considered the perspectives of students themselves. For this study, 51 African American adolescents were asked to write about the dialects they thought students should speak in their English classes. Most students noted that speaking Standard English in professional situations was important, but they expressed diverse opinions about dialect use in their English classes. Students' opinions centered on four themes: (1) fear of external judgment, (2) desire for clear communication, (3) maintenance of identity, and (4) demonstration of respect. The article concludes with suggestions for productive instructional approaches to spoken language and dialect use during literacy activities.

Students’ Comprehension of the representation of African American Vernacular in Alice Walker’s <i>The Color Purple</i>

This article was prompted by observations in tutorial lectures on African American Literature and reports on a subsequent pilot study. It explores students’ responses to African American Vernacular (AAV) as used in the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker. A questionnaire was used to explore students’ comprehension of AAV. The results indicate that although students were confident of their understanding of AAV, most could not correctly translate it into Standard English (SE). The findings have implications for the field of Applied Linguistics, in terms of the way linguistic features affect the reading and teaching of a literary text, and suggests that students will benefit from guidelines for interpreting Walker’s representation of AAV.Keywords: African American Literature, African American Vernacular, dialect, Standard English (SE), literary text, reading, teaching

Speech style and authenticity: Quantitative evidence for the performance of identity

AbstractThe question of what constitutes an authentic speaker, particularly with regard to African American Vernacular English (AAVE), has been the subject of some debate in sociolinguistics (Butters, 1984; Labov, 1980; Sweetland, 2002) and arises anew in the case of white hip-hop–affiliated youth (WHHs) who converge toward AAVE in their speech. This paper takes a quantitative approach to this question by examining how speech style alters the relationship between the frequencies of a variable in different linguistic environments. Guy (1991b) showed that the exponential relationship in English among rates of coronal stop deletion (CSD) in several morphological categories is systematically distorted by constraints on the surface-level phonology. Because stylistic variation appears to operate at this level, such distortion provides an internal measure of a speaker's stylistic shifting away from their neutral vernacular usage. Data on CSD deletion from WHHs who style shift toward AAVE show this kind of distortion when compared with the speech of AAVE speakers. This data provide strong internal evidence in support of the idea that some WHHs are “performing” a speech style that diverges from their unmarked style.

Negative Patterns and Forms in the African American Vernacular English With reference to Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Negative Patterns and Forms in the African American Vernacular English With reference to Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Fostering Linguistic Habits of Mind: Engaging Teachers’ Knowledge and Attitudes Toward African American Vernacular English

AbstractThis article outlines one linguistically based approach – contrastive analysis and code‐switching – for teachers of students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE). I discuss obstacles to bringing these linguistic insights and strategies to teachers in training and in the classroom. Across four scenarios from a teacher education program and from middle school classrooms, I describe (i) a grammatical construction or a linguistic insight covered in classes or professional development sessions with pre‐service and in‐service teachers and (ii) teachers’ work products (e.g. code‐switching charts) implementing their new knowledge. Analyzing the mismatch between (i) and (ii), I unpack teachers’ knowledge and ways of thinking about grammar, AAVE and Standard American English (SAE). This analysis reveals that teachers’ dominant language ideology and prior lack of training in the structure of English stand as limiting factors in the classroom, constraining their ability to implement a linguistically informed approach to stigmatized dialects, and constraining the linguist’s ability to communicate core linguistic principles. Finally, I show how this analysis led to adapting the core graphic organizer, the code‐switching chart, and to increasing the specificity of grammatical explanations to help teachers take steps toward building a linguistically informed language arts classroom.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and, more generally, African American English (AAE) are the most heavily studied group of dialects in North American English. Much of the enquiry has focused on morphosyntactic variation, but a significant amount has dealt with phonological and phonetic variables. Linguistic variables that can set AAE off from local European American varieties (EAE) in a given community span every realm of phonology and phonetics. Consonantal variables such as non-rhoticity, consonant cluster simplification, and th-stopping have attracted a great deal of attention. These variables usually involve phonological alternations, but phonotactic constraints also occur. Vowel variables, such as the degree of fronting of the GOAT vowel, are gaining some attention, mostly to address how closely local AAE varieties approach local EAE forms. Prosody has received some study and voice quality a small amount. Study of these variables is used to address several theoretical and applied issues. Among the most important theoretical issues are the Creolist ⁄Anglicist controversy, over the origins of AA(V)E; the convergence ⁄divergence controversy, over whether AAVE is becoming more or less like EAE vernaculars; and, recently, the uniformity controversy, concerning the degree of uniformity or diversity within AAE across the United States. Applied issues have focused largely on educational policy: whether or not AAE variants hinder learning for African American schoolchildren and to what extent AAE variants can be incorporated into classroom instruction.

Hip-Hop, White Immigrant Youth, and African American Vernacular English: Accommodation as an Identity Choice

How can scholars interpret the individual stylistic choices that speakers make? To what degree do individuals make identity choices to accommodate to one group or another? Much of the research on accommodation focuses on the standard—nonstandard or on the local—nonlocal dimension. There is notably little research into accommodation from forms that are indexical of a particular ethnic identity to forms that are indexical of another ethnic identity. This article takes up the question of accommodation toward African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and New York Latino English (NYLE) among white ethnic immigrants in New York City who affiliate with hip-hop culture. It provides evidence to support a view of accommodation that stems from a strong attitudinal orientation toward the group with which a speaker wants to associate.

Ethics and the Use of Technology in Rehabilitation Counseling

Standards for technology ethics were first introduced into the Code of Professional Ethics for Rehabilitation Counselors in 2002. Since that time, the proliferation of technology has enhanced practice, changed the American vernacular, and become infused in the delivery of services to and teaching of individuals, families, and groups. The 2010 revision to the Code updates and reinforces standards involving behavior, accessibility, confidentiality, informed consent, security, assessment, records, legal issues, advertising, research and publication, counseling unavailability, disclosure, and distance counseling. However, it introduces new standards that are absent from the literature in the counseling and helping professions specific to technology ethics involving consultative and distance group counseling as well as in teaching, supervision, and training.

Ethics and the Use of Technology in Rehabilitation Counseling

Standards for technology ethics were first introduced into the Code of Professional Ethics for Rehabilitation Counselors in 2002. Since that time, the proliferation of technology has enhanced practice, changed the American vernacular, and become infused in the delivery of services to and teaching of individuals, families, and groups. The 2010 revision to the Code updates and reinforces standards involving behavior, accessibility, confidentiality, informed consent, security, assessment, records, legal issues, advertising, research and publication, counseling unavailability, disclosure, and distance counseling. However, it introduces new standards that are absent from the literature in the counseling and helping professions specific to technology ethics involving consultative and distance group counseling as well as in teaching, supervision, and training.

LANGUAGES AND SPEAKERS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES

The many connections between Native Americans and African Americans throughout US history provide a reason for discussing these peoples and their languages together. The similarities in their experiences in North America are primarily the product of US white supremacist racism, which, to take one example, has created black ghettoes and Native American reservations. One language, with many regional and social varieties, unites African Americans, while Native American languages number in the hundreds, divided into dozens of language families. As they struggle for social justice, Native Americans face urgent issues of language endangerment and revitalization. As African Americans continue the struggle for full equality, they will probably continue to speak the very robust African American Vernacular English, which in its current form has significantly been shaped by residential segregation but also by ethnic pride. There is every indication that the African American Vernacular will have to play an important role in the teaching of African American schoolchildren if the cycle of low educational achievement, as measured by test scores, is to be ended.

From can to Dawg: Rendering Calzavara's Dialectal Poetry for Italophone and Anglophone Readers

This article suggests a new strategy for the translation of Italian dialectal literature, using the poem Can, written in Trevisan by Ernesto Calzavara, as a case study. After offering a brief bio-bibliographical description of Calzavara, this manuscript summarizes the history of the translation of Italian dialect poetry in the Anglo-American world, paying particular attention to those translators who have treaded new ground by making use of a trilingual format (dialect, Italian, English), and those who have focused their efforts on works authored in Venetian dialects. The most innovative aspect of this study is the co-authors' decision to translate a Trevisan poem into Southern American vernacular.

Review: Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular, by Scott L. Baugh

Review: <i>Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular</i>, by Scott L. Baugh

"Uncle Tom is Dead!": Wright, Himes, and Ellison Lay a Mask to Rest

In his recent valorization of Tom's Cabin as ur-text in the fictional depiction of Americans across the color line (xxvii), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explained that the novel's demise in the college classroom was due to utter disdain of the character by the black community in the postwar era (xxvi). For Gates as for Linda Williams, the text that mark[ed] the definitive end of the popular appeal (Williams 62) was James Baldwin's essay, Everybody's Protest Novel (1949), his infamous attack on Stowe's title character, a man robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex (18). Yet four other African American male writers produced equally revealing attacks upon the figure of at the time, beginning a decade earlier with Richard Wright's Tom's Children (1938). Chester Himes literally buried in the short story, Heaven Has Changed (1943); Ralph Ellison killed him off figuratively in the opening chapter of Invisible Man (1952). Duke Ellington's objective in staging his Los Angeles revue Jump for Joy (1941) was [to] take out of the theatre, [and] eliminate the stereotyped image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway (175). Despite the vast literature on these artists, scholarship on Wright's collection rarely focuses on the title's figure of disdain, the Himes story has never received critical attention, and Ellison's opening chapter has not been analyzed in this context. Neither Gates nor Williams mentions any of these texts as their scholarship recuperates issues of gender and family lacking in these masculinist works. (1) In returning to the literary texts of Wright, Ellison, and Himes, I will change the register of the object of vilification: it was less Stowe's that incited these authors to literary attack than what I will call the Tom-mask. During the mid-1960s [when] the term 'Uncle Tom' became synonymous with self-loathing (xii) as Gates recalled its function as a metonym, black man all too eager to please the whites around him ... [was] the embodiment of 'race betrayal' and an object of scorn, a scapegoat for all of our political self-doubts.... We talked about him as the model to be avoided (xi; original emphasis). Here and throughout the essay, Gates conflates Stowe's Tom--the literary character with the set of gestures involved in the survival technique of masking, especially (but not only) in the U.S. South. It was not Stowe's who was model to be avoided; the African American vernacular had long since appropriated this figure and dumped its literary association. What was under attack was the lived embodiment of deference marked by the in the public sphere--as a convention of American theater and music, as a set of physical disciplines, as a marker read by whites of African American acceptance of national racial ideology. Stowe's perhaps retained purchase for older white Americans as a literary fantasy of African American passivity--the character had, after all, been transposed into minstrel, theatrical, and cinematic fantasy--but in the African American vernacular, Uncle Tom registered a survival practice of everyday life that required figurative literary murder in order to liberate both African American male artistic agency and the right to individualized social protest. In fact, Wright, Himes, and Ellison assess their Tom-masked characters with surprising nuance; they slay the yet manage to honor the survival strategies of Southern African American men. The postwar period marks the end of what W. T. Lhamon has called blackface lore cycle, a set of transgressive verbal and physical gestures--from whistling to dance moves--projected onto African American men and women in the minstrel theater, and often accepted by white Americans as authentic representations of black men and women. For Lhamon, the NAACP's lawsuits against the last minstrel shows in the early 1950s mark the retiring [of] the blackface mask (148). …

Zora Neale Hurston, Biographical Criticism, and African Diasporic Vernacular Culture

her 2003 biography of Neale Wrapped in Rainbows, Valerie Boyd refers to Hurston as Zora throughout book. This gesture of familiarity, even intimacy, extends similar gestures reaching back to Alice Walker's acts of literary-filial devotion, chronicled in her 1975 Ms. magazine piece In Search of Neale Hurston, which helped resuscitate popular and critical interest in Hurston's life and works. Hurston's writings set stage for this intimate treatment, as she commonly employs a rhetoric of familiarity with her readers, from authorial I of her ethnographic Mules and Men (1935) to that of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). (1) Furthermore, her expert and pioneering use of African American vernacular, what she termed the idiom--not dialect--of Negro (Hurston, Florida 910), obscures artifice of that endeavor, making it easy for readers to feel an unmediated access to author behind words of such novels as Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The dazzling vernacular of her personal correspondence, which Carla Kaplan has made widely available with publication of Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2002), has intensified this feeling of unmediated access. sum, a combination of narrative, ethnographic, epistolary, critical, and biographical discourses has produced Hurston as a literary historical figure with whom her audience feels an intimacy as familiar as vernacular with which she has been so strongly identified. However, an analysis of numerous institutional entanglements of Hurston's life and career reveals degree to which familiar, intimate, vernacular Hurston paradoxically emerges from conditions of textual production she often struggled against as a student, theatrical producer, performer, anthropologist, essayist, letter-writer, and novelist. Her posthumous reception and canonization continue to evade range of discursive stances she aimed to achieve with regard to questions of African diasporic vernacular culture. a characteristic analysis at intersection of biographical, ethnographic, and literary discourses, Francoise Lionnet-McCumber reads Hurston's mapping of African diasporic culture through an invocation of Isis as Hurston's symbolic alter-ego: 'Isis' is wanderer who conducts her research, establishes spatio-temporal connections among children of diaspora, and re-members scattered body of material so that siblings can again 'touch each other' (256). With her reliance on family metaphors (children and siblings), Lionnet-McCumber suggests that Hurston's writings keep it all in family, so to speak, an authentic African diasporic family circumscribed by folk The allusion to Isis, though, intimates problems with this reading: as a figure from ancient Egyptian religion, Isis belongs to a tradition claimed by European, Afrocentric, and Semitic origin stories (Colla 10-15). This historiographic overlap, which Hurston invoked throughout her career in representations of Moses to be discussed below, reflects her project of cultural geography in a way unintended by Lionnet-McCumber and other critics who narrowly construe Hurston's affiliation with African diasporic material. Renewed attention to same biographical, ethnographic, and literary terrain upon which such a critical position relies offers a more diversified portrait of Hurston's mapping of African diasporic culture, a mapping that relies on prolific transculturations as well as a or vernacular aesthetic crucially involved with textuality. Numerous institutions enable and constrain Hurston's multidisciplinary project of representing the idiom--not dialect--of Negro, from backstages of Broadway to backwoods jook joints, from literary patronage and academic fellowships to marketing departments of publishing houses. This essay traces how Hurston operates within multiple institutional, cultural, and formal processes of African diasporic cultural production in which vernacular modes of orality and textuality mutually constitute one another. …

Anonymous architecture as counter-image: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's perspective on American vernacular

When Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (1903–1971) set out, in 1952, to write a book on anonymous architecture in America, it was a clever move. She had only recently become a teacher of architectural history at t...

Critical Language Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Class

The purpose of this study was to examine how classroom conversations about diverse dialects of English can provide a useful foundation for critical language and literacy instruction for students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and other stigmatized dialects. This article describes a weeklong unit on language variety that implemented what we call critical language pedagogy in three predominantly African American, 10th-grade English classes. Analyses of class discussions, interviews, and pre- and post-questionnaires demonstrate that the unit helped students critique dominant language ideologies, become more conscious of their own code-switching, and view dialect variation as natural and desirable.