In:Keeping in Touch: Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world
Edited by Raymond Hickey
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 10] 2019
► pp. 213–237
Chapter 10‘[T]his is all answer soon’
African American vernacular letters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Published online: 28 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.10sie
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.10sie
This chapter examines data from the Corpus of Older African American Letters from which two types sets of letters are in focus.
The first set of letters was written at the end of the eighteenth in Rhode Island and represent the oldest records by African Americans
themselves. While little is known about African American English in the North, the preliminary results show that vernacular features commonly
associated with (Southern) African American English are also attested for the North. The second set are letters from two members of the
Skipwith family who migrated to Liberia and who kept in touch with their former master. The analysis of the correspondence reveals that father
and daughter share a very similar group of dialectal features. However, a closer analysis of selected concord features gives evidence of
change in progress in the first decade after emigration, which can be explained by the participation in different networks and which testifies
to the value of a well documented family correspondene for historical sociolinguistics.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The data: The Corpus of Older African American Letters
- 3.Assessing the linguistic validity of letters
- 4.Structural analysis of the letters
- 4.1Letters from the Moses Brown Papers
- 4.2Letters from the Cocke Family Collection: The Skipwith Family
- 5.Conclusion
Notes References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Percy, Carol
Kytö, Merja & Lucia Siebers
2022. Earlier North American Englishes. In Earlier North American Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G66], ► pp. 1 ff.
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