Neighborhood effects on use of African-American Vernacular English

Abstract

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is systematic, rooted in history, and important as an identity marker and expressive resource for its speakers. In these respects, it resembles other vernacular or nonstandard varieties, like Cockney or Appalachian English. But like them, AAVE can trigger discrimination in the workplace, housing market, and schools. Understanding what shapes the relative use of AAVE vs. Standard American English (SAE) is important for policy and scientific reasons. This work presents, to our knowledge, the first experimental estimates of the effects of moving into lower-poverty neighborhoods on AAVE use. We use data on non-Hispanic African-American youth (n = 629) from a large-scale, randomized residential mobility experiment called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which enrolled a sample of mostly minority families originally living in distressed public housing. Audio recordings of the youth were transcribed and coded for the use of five grammatical and five phonological AAVE features to construct a measure of the proportion of possible instances, or tokens, in which speakers use AAVE rather than SAE speech features. Random assignment to receive a housing voucher to move into a lower-poverty area (the intention-to-treat effect) led youth to live in neighborhoods (census tracts) with an 11 percentage point lower poverty rate on average over the next 10-15 y and reduced the share of AAVE tokens by ∼3 percentage points compared with the MTO control group youth. The MTO effect on AAVE use equals approximately half of the difference in AAVE frequency observed between youth whose parents have a high school diploma and those whose parents do not.neighborhood effects | segregation | language | African-American Vernacular English | code switching

Diglossia in the Etiology of Schizophrenia

“…In the case of African-Americans in the United States, Standard English represents the H variety which is desired for education, jobs, and communication with non-speakers, while the mother tongue, AAVE is the L dialect for everyday use within the community (Ogbu, 1999). AAVE use is associated with adverse educational, housing, income, and employment outcomes (Rickford et al, 2015). Furthermore, AAVE is more frequently adopted by men (Rickford, 2010) These features and effects of the diglossic AAVE correlate with some of the risk factors for schizophrenia, namely the higher risk among African Americans, the male preponderance, urbanicity, unemployment, the low educational and socioeconomic status.…”

“…The case of Multicultural London English (MLE) is another example of a non-standard variety resembling AAVE (Rickford et al, 2015), which is widely spoken in parts of urban London particularly amongst the Pakistani and Afro-Caribbean communities (Torgersen and Hansen, 2012), who are also amongst the highest-risk ethnic groups in London with up to 4 and 10 times higher rates respectively (Kirkbride et al, 2017). MLE presents another example of the potential relationship between diglossia, urbanicity and schizophrenia with the same mentioned parallels, but also ties in the influence of migration, another established risk factor for the development of schizophrenia (Cantor-Graae and .…”

Enculturation Trajectories: Language, Cultural Adaptation, and Individual Outcomes in Organizations

“…evaluations (e.g. Rickford et al 2015) and is a reflection of her self-perceived similarity with her interlocutors (e.g. Ireland et al 2011).…”

Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory

“…Distinguishing dialects through phonology can reveal distinct social worlds underlying spoken interaction (Rickford et al 2015). For example, phonological cues from interviews performed with National Longitudinal Study of Youth respondents reveal how ebonics, urban culturally marked slang, accounts for wage gaps between respondents better than race (Grogger 2011).…”