Second generation West Indian Americans and English in New York City

Bibliographic Data

ID20357367
AuthorsRenée Blake, Cara Shousterman (New York University)
Year2010
Volume26
Issue3
Pages35-43
Publication date2010-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnglish Today (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0266-0784 • E-ISSN: 1474-0567
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0266078410000234
OpenAlexW2096182809
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Within American sociolinguistics there is a substantial body of research on race as a social variable that conditions language behavior, particularly with regard to black speakers of African American English (AAE) in contact with their white neighbors (e.g., Wolfram, 1971; Rickford, 1985; Myhill, 1986; Bailey, 2001; Cukor-Avila, 2001). Today, the communities that sociolinguists study are more multi-layered than ever, particularly in a metropolis like New York City, thus warranting more complex analyses of the interaction between race and language. Along these lines, Spears (1988) notes the sorely underestimated social and linguistic heterogeneity of the black population in the U.S., which needs to be considered in studies of the language of black speakers. This critique is addressed in work of Winer and Jack (1997), as well as Nero (2001), for example, on the use of Caribbean English in New York City. These two studies broaden our notions of the Englishes spoken in the United States by black people, particularly first generation immigrants. The current research goes one step further with an examination of the English spoken by children of black immigrants to New York City. We focus on second generation Caribbean populations whose parents migrated from the English-speaking Caribbean to the United States, and who commonly refer to themselves as West Indians

Ethnic group · Immigration · Linguistics · Population · Sociolinguistics · Sociology · Anthropology · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy

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