Part of
The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyondEdited by Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch
[Varieties of English Around the World G49] 2014
► pp. 349–364
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch
[Varieties of English Around the World G49] 2014
► pp. 349–364
The English origins of African American Vernacular English
What Edgar W. Schneider has taught us
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.
References
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 19th 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.