What Edgar W. Schneider has taught us: The English origins of African American Vernacular English

Mufwene, Salikoko S.

doi:10.1075/veaw.g49.20muf

In:The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyond
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch
[Varieties of English Around the World G49] 2014
► pp. 349–364

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download Book PDF

The English origins of African American Vernacular English

What Edgar W. Schneider has taught us

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Published online: 12 September 2014

https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g49.20muf

This chapter shows how the English-origins hypothesis on the emergence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) seems to prevail against the creole-origins alternative. My arguments are embedded in the socioeconomic history of contacts between African slaves and European colonists (mostly farmers and indentured servants) on the tobacco and cotton plantations of the American Southeast, where Southern English emerged before the institutionalized race segregation in the late 19th century. I submit that Jim Crow fostered AAVE indirectly in triggering the Great Migration of African Americans to segregated northern and western cities, where they relocated in separate ethnic ghettos, and their otherwise regional vernacular was ethnicized. I make allowance for African and creole substrate influence, which I distinguish from the creole-origins hypothesis.

Keywords: African American Vernacular English (AAVE), American Southern English, American White Southern English (AWSE), Atlantic English creoles (AEC), creole origins, English origins, Gullah, Jim Crow, segregation, West African Pidgin English (WAPE)

References (61)

Bailey, G. 2001. The relationship between African American and White vernaculars in the American South: A sociocultural history and some phonological evidence. In S.L. Lanehart (ed.), 53–92.

Bailey, G. & Thomas, E. 1998. Some aspects of African-American vernacular English phonology. In S.S. Mufwene et al. (eds), 85–109.

Baugh, J. 1983. Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure and Survival. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.

Cassidy, F.G. 1986. Barbadian Creole: Possibility and probability. American Speech 61(3): 195–205.

Coleman, K. 1978. Georgia History in Outline, revised edn. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press.

Dillard, J.L. 1972. Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. New York NY: Random House, Vintage Books.

. 1985. Toward a Social History of American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

. 1992. A History of American English. London: Longman.

. 2000. The evidence for pidgin / creolization in Early American English. In Creolization in the Americas, D. Buisseret, D.H. Usner Jr., M.L. Galvin, R. Cullen Rath & J.L. Dillard (eds), 131–145.College Station TX: Texas A & M University Press.

Edgar, W. 1998. South Carolina: A History. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Eliason, N.L. 1956. Tarheel Talk: An Historical Study of the English Language in North Carolina to 1860. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Ewers, T. 1995. The Origin of American Black English: Be-forms in the Hoodoo Texts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Gonzales, A.E. 1922. The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast (with a Glossary). Columbia S.C.: The State Co.

Green, L. 1998. Aspect and predicate phrases in African-American Vernacular English. In S.S. Mufwene et al. (eds), 37–68.

. 2002. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harris, J.C. 1934. Uncle Remus Stories. Akron, Ohio: Saalfield Publishing.

Kautzsch, A. 2002. The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English: An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Krapp, G.P. 1924. The English of the Negro. The American Mercury 2(5): 190–195.

Kulikoff, A. 1986. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapealte. 1680-1800. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press.

. 1991. Colonial economy. In The Reader’s Companion to American History, E. Foner & J.A. Garaty (eds), 201–203. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Labov, W. 1998. Co-existent systems in African American vernacular English. In S.S. Mufwene et al. (eds), 110–153.

Lanehart, S.L. (ed.). 2001. Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English [Varieties of English Around the World G27]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

McDavid, R.I. Jr. 1950. Review of Lorenzo Dow Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah dialect . Language 26: 323–333.

McDavid, R.I. Jr. & McDavid, V. 1951. The relationship of the speech of the American Negroes to the speech of whites. American Speech 26(2): 3–17.

Mufwene, S.. 1984. The count / mass distinction and the English lexicon. In Papers from the Parasession on Lexical Semantics, D. Testen, V. Mishra & J. Drogo (eds), 200–221. Chicago: CLS.

. 1986. Number delimitation in Gullah. American Speech 61(1): 33–60.

. 1992. Why grammars are not monolithic. In The Joy of Grammar: A Festschrift in Honor of James D. McCawley, D. Brentari, G. Larson & L. McLeod (eds), 225–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

. 1994. On decreolization: The case of Gullah. In Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations, M. Morgan (ed.), 63–99. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for African-American Studies.

. 1998. The structure of the noun phrase in African-American Vernacular English. In S.S. Mufwene et al. (eds), 69–81.

. 2000. Some sociohistorical inferences about the development of African-American English. In The English History of African American English, S. Poplack (ed.), 233–263. Oxford: Blackwell.

. 2001a. The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

. 2001b. What is African-American English? In S.L. Lanehart (ed.), 21–51.

. 2001c. African-American English. In The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 6: History of American English, J. Algeo (ed.), 291–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

. 2005a. Cr©oles, cologie sociale, volution linguistique. Paris: L’Harmattan.

. 2005b. How many bes are there in English? In Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley’s Legacy, S.S. Mufwene, E.J. Francis & R.S. Wheeler (eds), 225–246. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

. 2008. Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change. London: Continuum Press.

. 2009. The indigenization of English in North America. In World Englishes: Problems, Properties, Prospects. Selected Papers from the 13th IAWE Conference , T. Hoffmann & L. Siebers (eds), 353–368. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Mufwene, S.S. 2014. Globalisation conomique mondiale des XVIIe-XVIIIe si¨cles, ©mergence des cr©oles, et vitalit© langagi¨re. In Langues cr©oles, mondialisation et ©ducation, A. Carpooran & Y. Bosquet-Ballah (eds), 23–79. St. Louis, Mauritius: Creole Speaking Unit.

Mufwene, S.. To appear. The emergence of African American English: Monogenetic or polygenetic? Under how much substrate influence? In The Oxford Handbook of African American Language, S. Lanehart, L. Green & J. Bloomquist (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mufwene, S., Rickford, J.R., Bailey, G. & Baugh, J. (eds). 1998. African-American English: Structure, History and Use. London: Routledge.

Poplack, S. & Tagliamonte, S. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Malden MA: Blackwell.

Poplack, S. (ed.). 2000. The English History of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell.

Rawley, J.A. 1991. Slave trade. In The Readers Companion to American History, E. Foner & J.A. Garraty (eds), 994–995. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Rickford, J.R. 1974. Insights from the mesolect. In Pidgins and Creoles: Current Trends and Prospects, D. De Camp & I. Hancock (eds), 92–117. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.

. 1977. The question of prior creolization of Black English. In Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, A. Valdman (ed.), 190–221. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

. 1998. The creole origins of African-American Vernacular English: Evidence from copular absence. In S.S. Mufwene et al. (eds), 154–200.

Schneider, E.W. 1983a. The diachronic development of the Black English in the USA: Some new evidence. Journal of English Linguistics 16(1): 55–64.

. 1983b. The origin of the verbal -s in Black English. American Speech 58(2): 99–113.

. 1985. Regional variation in 19th century black English in the American South. In Papers from the Sixth International Conference on Historical Linguistics , J. Fisiak (ed.), 467–485. Poznan: Adam Micklewicz University Press.

. 1989. American Early Black English. Morphological and Syntactic Variables. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

. 1995. Black-White language contact through the centuries: Diachronic aspects of linguistic convergence or divergence in the United States of America. In Linguistic Change Under Contact Conditions, J. Fisiak (ed.), 237–252. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Schneider, E.W. & Montgomery, M.B. 2001. On the trail of early nonstandard grammar: An electronic corpus of Southern U.S. antebellum overseers’ letters. American Speech 76(4): 388–410.

Schuchardt, H. 1914 [1979]. Die Sprache der Saramakkaneger in Surinam.Amsterdam: Johannes Muller.Republished as The language of the Saramaccans, in The Ethnography of Variation: Selected Writings on Pidgins and Creoles, trans. and ed. by T.L. Markey, 73–108. Ann Arbor: Karoma.

Spears, A.K. 1982. The Black English semi-auxiliary come . Language 58(4): 850–872.

Stewart, W. 1965. Urban Negro speech: Sociolinguistic factors affecting English teaching. In Social Dialects and Language Learning, R. Shuy (ed.), 10–18. Champaign IL: The National Council of Teachers of English.

. 1967. Sociolinguistic factors in the history of American Negro dialects. The Florida Foreign Language Reporter 5(2): 1–4.

. 1969. Historical and structural bases for the recognition of Negro dialect. In Report of the twentieth Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies, J.E. Alatis (ed.), 239–247. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.

. 1974. Acculturative processes in the language of the American Negro. In Language in its Social Setting, W.W. Gage (ed.), 1–46. Washington DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington.

Sutcliffe, D. 1998. Gone with the wind? Evidence for 19^th century African American speech. Links and Letters 5: 127–145.

Troike, R.C. 1973. On social, regional, and age variation in Black English. The Florida Foreign Language Reporter 11: 7–8.

. 2010. Assessing the authenticity of Joel Chandler Harris’s use of Gullah. American Speech 85(3): 287–314.