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Part of
Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English
Edited by Sandra Jansen and Lucia Siebers
[Studies in Language Variation 21] 2019
► pp. 139–156

Chapter 8
African American English in nineteenth-century Liberia

Processes of change in a transported dialect

This chapter investigates African American English as it was transported to Liberia in the nineteenth century based on vernacular Liberian letters compiled in the Corpus of Older African American Letters. The analysis focuses in particular on the individual variation in the verbal paradigm of an emigrant family. The findings show that family members evince similar changes in progress transported from the American South but that social changes induced by the migratory movement have resulted in changes with regard to verbal -s marking that take very different paths of developments in two generations of the same family.

Keywords: Earlier African American English, Liberia, emigration, individual variation, social change, verbal concord
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on African American English in Liberia
  • 3.Data: The Corpus of Older African American English
    • 3.1The Skipwith letters
  • 4.The sociohistorical context: Emigration to Liberia
    • 4.1The American Colonization Society
    • 4.2The first settlements in Liberia
  • 5.Methodology and data analysis
    • 5.1Past be
    • 5.2Present be
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.21.08sie
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