This essay examines the language of an expatriate community as found in letters and petitions written by African Americans who migrated to Sierra Leone by way of Nova Scotia in 1792. These documents provide some of the earliest first-hand evidence of African American English and contribute to debates about the history of that variety. The paper compares selected grammatical features in that variety to modern-day African Nova Scotian English for insights to the history of African American English and develops a case for the principled use of manuscript documents for reconstructing earlier stages of colloquial English.
2012. The Application of the Quantitative Paradigm to Historical Sociolinguistics: Problems with the Generalizability Principle. In The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 61 ff.
KAUTZSCH, ALEXANDER
2000. LIBERIAN LETTERS AND VIRGINIAN NARRATIVES: NEGATION PATTERNS IN TWO NEW SOURCES OF EARLIER AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH. American Speech 75:1 ► pp. 34 ff.
Kytö, Merja
2019. English in North America. In The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 160 ff.
2021. North Versus South. American Speech 96:3 ► pp. 297 ff.
McCafferty, Kevin
2003. The Northern Subject Rule in Ulster: How Scots, how English?. Language Variation and Change 15:01
McCafferty, Kevin
2011. Victories fastened in grammar: historical documentation of Irish English. English Today 27:2 ► pp. 17 ff.
MCCAFFERTY, KEVIN
2017. Irish English in emigrant letters. World Englishes 36:2 ► pp. 176 ff.
MONTGOMERY, MICHAEL
2003. THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH. The Publication of the American Dialect Society 88:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
MONTGOMERY, MICHAEL
2005. PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. American Speech 80:4 ► pp. 341 ff.
Stephen J. Nagle & Sara L. Sanders
2003. English in the Southern United States,
Rupp, Laura & David Britain
2019. Past BE. In Linguistic Perspectives on a Variable English Morpheme, ► pp. 165 ff.
Schneider, Edgar W.
2004. Investigating Variation and Change in Written Documents. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ► pp. 67 ff.
Schneider, Edgar W.
2013. Investigating Historical Variation and Change in Written Documents. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ► pp. 57 ff.
SCHNEIDER, EDGAR W. & MICHAEL B. MONTGOMERY
2001. ON THE TRAIL OF EARLY NONSTANDARD GRAMMAR: AN ELECTRONIC CORPUS OF SOUTHERN U.S. ANTEBELLUM OVERSEERS' LETTERS. American Speech 76:4 ► pp. 388 ff.
2005. S marks the spot? Regional variation and early African American correspondence. Language Variation and Change 17:02
WRIGHT, LAURA
2002. THIRD PERSON PLURAL PRESENT TENSE MARKERS IN LONDON PRISONERS' DEPOSITIONS, 1562-1623. American Speech 77:3 ► pp. 242 ff.
[no author supplied]
2002. References. In The Development of African American English, ► pp. 213 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.
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