Research Perspectives on American Black English
A Brief Historical Sketch
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8727282 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Riley B Smith (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1974 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 1/2 |
| Pages | 24-24 |
| Publication date | 1974-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3087916 |
| OpenAlex | W2318532485 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
NTIL THE MASS MIGRATION of largely rural southern blacks into the cities of the northern and western United States following the Great Depression and the Second World War, little systematic attention had been paid to the speech of American blacks. Exceptions are such rare studies as those by Harrison (1884), Farrison (1936), and Pardoe (1937). Turner (1945, 1948, 1949), it is true, had studied the Gullah dialect in some detail, and though his data are still extremely valuable to both American dialectologists and creolists, his influence at the time was limited (Walker 1968, p. 12) owing to the controversial nature of his thesis that the linguistic legacy from West Africa in this dialect was extensive and profound,' as well as to the fact that the rhetorical intent of his study was comparative rather than descriptive. Indeed, Gullah has long been rightly judged to be the most divergent dialect in the Atlantic states (Mencken 1948, p. 101), and Gullah speakers were in effect ignored as informants in the dialect surveys for the Linguistic Atlas (Atwood 1953, p. 41, fn. 15). Though many peculiarities of general American black English had long been recognized even by amateur students of the language (Mencken 1948, pp. 264-65), accurate systematic treatments prior to the 1960s were rare--an important exception being the studies of general southern black phonology by Wise (1933; 1957, pp. 293-302). The typical treatment by linguists was to deny racial or caste speech differences, and to correlate such peculiarities as were found with region and class. Thus, in this view (expressed explicitly by Krapp 1925, 1: 162), black dialect differed hardly at all from other varieties of lower-class, or uneducated, English of the same area (see also Greet 1934; Read 1939; Kurath 1949, p. 6). And in spite of burgeoning research in black English during the late 1960s and extending up to the present, this position, though somewhat modified now, is still not a completely unpopular one for linguists to take. It is defended by McDavid (1967b, 1971), Farrison (1969), and Davis (1969). A more extreme position was formerly held even by linguists: that of dismissing from serious linguistic consideration whatever peculiarities were found, on the basis that they were the product, somehow, of arrested language
Sketch · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · History
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |