African-American English
A guide to the rich online resources on African-American English
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database project provides information on the almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly transported over 10 million Africans to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The website enables users to search the database for specific voyages and examine data about the slave trade; it also includes a searchable African Names Database. http://slavevoyages.org/
Graphics provided by the US Census Bureau reveal the population shifts brought about by the Great Migration in the United
States, from around 1910 to 1970, in two distinct waves. www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/
In 2010, the US Census Bureau released a brief, The Black Population: 2010, which “provides a portrait of the Black population in the United States.” Review the data in this brief and consider how the data may change by the 2020 US Census. www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-06.pdf
This YouTube video, sponsored by the WikiTongues project, features Caroline, a native speaker of Gullah and English, discussing features of Gullah and differences between Gullah and English. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCd5W4gwJsI
“Baldamor, Curry, and Dug: Language Variation, Culture, and Identity among African American Baltimoreans” is a podcast produced by Inte’a DeShields, a fourth-generation African-American Baltimorean and graduate student. The podcast explores three main linguistic features of native Baltimoreans who speak African-American English, including the pronunciation of the sequence [eɹ] at the end of a syllable as [əɹ] and its connection to Baltimore club music. Expert interviews with linguists who study African-American English are incorporated into the discussion. https://baltimorelanguage.com/baldamor-curry-and-dug-podcast/
In this video, linguist Lisa Green discusses the grammatical system of African-American English, focusing on the regularity of speakers’ use of zero auxiliary and zero copula: https://youtu.be/S80mBPmFyWI?list=PL8csRAB3UNkzRqsd8F3Yz03q9ISqZ2jr
The blog post “The Rap: More Than Just Hip-Hop,” in Word: The Online Journal on African American English, describes the African-American English tradition of verbal performance known as “the rap,” which includes signifying. The post deconstructs the social and linguistic context of “the rap,” and provides examples from popular culture that illustrate different types of verbal performances. https://africanamericanenglish.com/2010/04/17/the-rap-morethan-just-hip-hop/
In an interview for New Republic magazine in 1981, author Toni Morrison said, “It is the thing that black people love so much – the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion … It’s terrible to think that a child with five different present tenses comes to school to be faced with those books that are less than his own language.” https://newrepublic.com/article/95923/the-language-must-not-sweat
Also read an earlier article by author James Baldwin, written in 1979, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?”. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html
Watch the video clip, “African-American English in North Carolina,” produced by the Language and Life Project under the direction of linguist Walt Wolfram. Choose three of the phonological features of African-American English described in this language profile, listen for them in the video clip, and identify words with those features. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTt07IVDeww
Linguist John R. Rickford wrote about Toni Morrison’s 1981 interview in his (1997) article “Suite for Ebony and Phonics” when he discussed verb tenses in African American English. The essay can be found at http://discovermagazine.com/1997/dec/suiteforebonyand1292
Conventional testing situations have been shown to cause African-American (as well as other) children to become hesitant and taciturn because of the way that fill-in-the-blank and other test items often ask for answers that are not part of AAE. Download a copy of the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) Oral Reading Fluency Progress Monitoring First Grade Student Materials booklet (https://dibels.uoregon.edu/docs/materials/hifi_DORF_G1-6_PM_6th_Ed.pdf).