Invariant Be in an Unnoticed Source of American Early Black English

Bibliographic Data

ID8728624
AuthorsWolfgang Viereck (corresponding author)
Year1988
Volume63
Issue4
Pages291-291
Publication date1988-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Speech (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/455262
OpenAlexW2321658667
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited2

really like are provided by three corpora which were compiled in the 1930s and 1940s.' They were not compiled with a subsequent linguistic analysis of the data in mind, and it was Jeutonne P. Brewer who first directed our attention to the linguistic importance of two of the corpora. I refer to the.so-called Ex-Slave Narratives (Rawick 1972, 1977, 1979), unedited interviews with elderly blacks most of whom had experienced slavery firsthand during childhood. The recollections of more than 3,500 former slaves from twenty-six states were recorded and written down in normal orthography by a number of interviewers.2 Although the interviews were conducted in the recent past, their diachronic relevance lies in the fact that almost all the informants were at least 60 and in some cases over 100 years old at the time of the interviews; their language thus reflected the black English of a much earlier time-the period between 1830-1870, the time of the informants' own language acquisition.3 When Brewer studied the archival materials (from which Rawick's interviews were drawn) in the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress, she discovered the second source: mechanically recorded interviews with former slaves. Later, she was also able to interview John Henry Faulk, one of the interviewers in 1941 (Brewer 1983). In comparison with the Ex-Slave Narratives, this corpus is very small; it contains approximately six hours of interviews, and one-fourth must be disregarded because of poor recording quality. The usable parts contain the speech of thirteen persons--eight men and five women from Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Maryland who were born between 1844 and 1861.4 They represent a small but important source of early black English and also provide a means of checking some of the results against those obtained from the written narratives

Invariant (physics · Gender Studies in Language · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Multilingual Education and Policy · History · Mathematical Physics

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