Sociolinguistic Folklore in the Study of African American English

Abstract

Although sociolinguists have performed a valuable service in challenging folk theories about African American English (AAE), they also have unwittingly participated in the construction of sociolinguistic folklore about variation and change in AAE. Several examples of sociolinguistic myths are presented, including the supraregional myth, the change myth, and the social stratification myth. Data used to challenge the canon of AAE description include empirical studies of different types of rural Southern African American communities as well as ethnographic observation. Historical circumstance, social and professional enculturation, and academic exclusivity are considered in explaining the construction of these questionable axioms about AAE. The examination indicates that unchallenged assumptions, unilateral explanations, and imagined dichotomies need to be scrutinized more critically with regard to the canon of AAE description.

Operationalizing Style: Quantifying the Use of Style Shift in the Speech of African American Adolescents

“…If there is indeed a homogeneous core in AAVE, it obviously is highly nuanced and more of a convenient, politically based fiction than a rigorous linguistic construct. In fact, in line with Lippi- Green (1997), Wolfram (2007) observes that the notion of a unitary, homogeneous variety of AAVE is a bit of sociolinguistic folklore: it is a kind of strategic essentialism in the sense of Spivak (1988). That is, African Americans temporarily forgo variation to highlight their commonality, as well as to combat popular interpretations of their speech patterns in terms of the principle of linguistic subordination, whereby language varieties associated with socially subordinate groups are viewed as linguistic deficits rather than neutral linguistic differences (Lippi- Green 1997).…”

“…Most investigations of AAVE, such as Wolfram (1969), suggest that men use higher levels of AAVE features than women. His study of third-person singular -s absence in Detroit, for example, indicated that working-class men tended to use the vernacular form significantly more frequently than women.…”

The Low-Back Merger in the Steel City: African American English in Pittsburgh

“…Moreover, there has traditionally been a lack of attention to regional variety in AAE, and those who have studied it focused on cross-regional similarities rather than how AAE differs from one region to the next (Fought 2002;Wolfram 2007). However, with recent work on African American vowel systems, many scholars are challenging the "sociolinguistic folklore" (Wolfram 2007) surrounding AAE that has prevailed since the 1960s and 1970s.…”

“…Also for later investigation is the timing and mechanism of the merger in this speech community with archived recordings of African Americans born in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As other scholars have argued (e.g., Childs and Mallinson 2004;Wolfram 2007), as we continue to investigate regional varieties of AAE, we must fully consider the social, linguistic, and historical facts that converge to account for the linguistic patterns discovered. …”

“…Furthermore, even if some varieties of AAE are characterized by a fronted /A/, whether AAE in all regions exhibits this feature remains an empirical question. More studies of the low-back merger in regional varieties of AAE will help to assess claims of its relative infrequency in African American speech and will provide a basis on which to delimit dialect boundaries within AAE, as we further depart from the idealization of African American English as a homogenous supraregional language variety (see Wolfram 2007). …”