In:Earlier North American Englishes
Edited by Merja Kytö and Lucia Siebers
[Varieties of English Around the World G66] 2022
► pp. 65–86
Dialect in early African American plays
A qualitative assessment
Published online: 15 July 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g66.04kau
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g66.04kau
Abstract
The sources for the historical reconstruction of African American English (AAE) are manifold, ranging from ex-slave narratives and interviews with hoodoo doctors to blues lyrics, and letters authored by semi-literates. The present article looks into the representation of AAE in a further source, early plays (1858–1938), and investigates non-standard morpho-syntactic features found in these imagined instances of AAE speech. A helpful tool for this task is the list of 235 features used in the World Atlas of Varieties of English (WAVE). The results will be compared to the WAVE features found in the more traditional sources of Earlier AAE speech, which ultimately tackles the question of how close the dialect used in these plays matches non-invented Earlier AAE.
Keywords: African American English, early plays, WAVE, literary dialect, morpho-syntax
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The WAVE features in a corpus of Earlier AAE transcribed speech (CEAAE-TS)
- 3.A Corpus of Earlier African American English Plays (CEAAE-P)
- 4.WAVE features in A Corpus of Early African American English Plays (CEAAE-P)
- 4.1Non-standard morpho-syntactic features by play
- 4.2Zooming into features
- 4.2.1Features attested in both plays and transcribed speech
- 4.2.1.1A features from CEAAE-TS
- 4.2.1.2B features from CEAAE-TS
- 4.2.1.3C features from CEAAE-TS
- 4.2.1.4Summary
- 4.2.2Features attested in transcribed speech only
- 4.2.3Features attested in plays only
- 4.2.1Features attested in both plays and transcribed speech
- 5.Summary and discussion
- 6.Conclusion
Notes References
References (40)
Bailey, G., Maynor, N. & Cukor-Avila, P. (eds). 1991. The Emergence of Black English. Text and Commentary. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Bailey, G. & Smith, C. 1994. Reconstructing Southern American English. In Regionalsprachliche Variation, Umgangs- und Standardsprachen / Regional Variation, Colloquial and Standard Languages / Variation des dialectes régionaux, langues familières et langues standard, W. Viereck (ed.), 17–26. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Cooley, M. 1997. An early representation of African-American English. In Language Variety in the South Revisited, C. Bernstein, T. Nunnally & R. Sabino (eds), 51–58. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Douglass, F. 1845. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office. [URL] (23 January 2022)
Ewers, T. 1996. The Origin of American Black English. Βe-forms in the HOODOO Texts. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hamalian, L. & Hatch, J. V. (eds). 1991. The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858–1938. With a foreword by G. C. Wolfe. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Hatch, J. V. 1991. Introduction: Two hundred years of black and white drama. In Hamalian & Hatch (eds), 15–37.
Holton, S. W. 1984. Down Home and Uptown: The Representation of Black Speech in American Fiction. Rutherford, NY: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Hyatt, H. M. 1970–1978. Hoodoo – Witchcraft – Conjuration – Rootwork. Vols. 1–5. Washington: The Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation.
Ives, S. 1950a. The Dialect of the Uncle Remus Stories. PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
1954. The Phonology of the Uncle Remus Stories [Publication of the American Dialect Society 22]. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
1955. Dialect differentiation in the stories of Joel Chandler Harris. American Literature 27: 88–96.
1971 [1950]. A theory of literary dialect. In A Various Language: Perspectives on American Dialects, J. V. Williamson & V. M. Burke (eds), 145–177. New York etc.: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971.
Kautzsch, A. 2002a. The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English. An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
2002b. Combining early sources: A new approach to the historical study of African American English. In Anglistentag Wien 2001. Proceedings, D. Kastovsky, G. Kaltenböck & S. Reichel (eds), 57–73. Trier: WVT.
2012a. 115. English in contact: African American English (AAE) early evidence. In Historical Linguistics of English [Handbücher zu Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 34.2], A. Bergs & L. Brinton (eds), 1793–1807. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
2012b. Earlier African American Vernacular English. In Kortmann & Lunkenheimer (eds), 2012b, 126–140.
2013. Earlier African American Vernacular English. In Kortmann & Lunkenheimer (eds). [URL] (23 January 2022).
2019. Morpho-syntactic features in Earlier African American English: A qualitative assessment of semi-literate letters. In Keeping in Touch. Familiar Letters across the English-speaking World, R. Hickey (ed.), 239–260. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
(eds). 2012b. The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
(eds). 2013. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. [URL](23 January 2022).
Miethaner, U. 2005. I Can Look through Muddy Water: Analyzing Earlier African American English in Blues Lyrics (BLUR). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.
Minnick, L. C. 2004. Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Perdue, C. L., Barden, T. E. & Phillips, R. K. 1992 [1976]. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Poplack, S. (ed.). 2000. The English History of African American English. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Rawick, G. P. (ed.). 1977/79 The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood.
Schneider, E. W. 1989. American Earlier Black English: Morphological and Syntactic Variables. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Schneider, E. W. & Wagner, C. 2006. The variability of literary dialect in Jamaican Creole: Thelwell’s The Harder They Come. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 21(1): 45–96.
Singler, J. V. 1986. Copula variation in Liberian Settler English and American Black English. In Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, G. Smitherman (ed.), 129–164. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Stewart, W. A. 1968. Continuity and change in American Negro dialects. Florida Foreign Language Reporter 6: 3–14.
Troike, R. C. 2010. Assessing the authenticity of Joel Chandler Harris’s use of Gullah. American Speech 85 (3): 287–314.
Van Herk, G. & Poplack, S. 2003. Rewriting the past: Bare verbs in the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 18 (2): 231–266.