Cover not available
Part of
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

| University of Duisburg-Essen
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
  • 5.Summary and discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g66.04kau
References (40)
References
Bailey, G., Maynor, N. & Cukor-Avila, P. (eds). 1991. The Emergence of Black English. Text and Commentary. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
2000. Literary dialect in The Yorker’s Stratagem . Journal of English Linguistics 28(2): 173–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dillard, J. L. 1972. Black English. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Hatch, J. V. 1991. Introduction: Two hundred years of black and white drama. In Hamalian & Hatch (eds), 15–37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holton, S. W. 1984. Down Home and Uptown: The Representation of Black Speech in American Fiction. Rutherford, NY: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.Google Scholar
Hyatt, H. M. 1970–1978. Hoodoo – Witchcraft – Conjuration – Rootwork. Vols. 1–5. Washington: The Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation.Google Scholar
Ives, S. 1950a. The Dialect of the Uncle Remus Stories. PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
1950b. A theory of literary dialect. Tulane Studies in English 2: 137–182.Google Scholar
1954. The Phonology of the Uncle Remus Stories [Publication of the American Dialect Society 22]. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
1955. Dialect differentiation in the stories of Joel Chandler Harris. American Literature 27: 88–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Kautzsch, A. 2002a. The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English. An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012b. Earlier African American Vernacular English. In Kortmann & Lunkenheimer (eds), 2012b, 126–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kortmann, B. & Lunkenheimer, K. 2012a. Introduction. In Kortmann & Lunkenheimer (eds), 2012b, 1–11.Google Scholar
(eds). 2012b. The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(eds). 2013. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. [URL](23 January 2022).
Krapp, G. P. 1924. The English of the negro. American Mercury 2: 190–195.Google Scholar
Miethaner, U. 2005. I Can Look through Muddy Water: Analyzing Earlier African American English in Blues Lyrics (BLUR). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Minnick, L. C. 2004. Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Pedersen, L. 1985. Language in the Uncle Remus Tales. Modern Philology 82: 292–298. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Poplack, S. (ed.). 2000. The English History of African American English. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Poplack, S. & Tagliamonte, S. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rawick, G. P. (ed.). 1977/79 The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Schneider, E. W. 1989. American Earlier Black English: Morphological and Syntactic Variables. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Stewart, W. A. 1968. Continuity and change in American Negro dialects. Florida Foreign Language Reporter 6: 3–14.Google Scholar
Troike, R. C. 2010. Assessing the authenticity of Joel Chandler Harris’s use of Gullah. American Speech 85 (3): 287–314. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weise, G. 1999. Literary dialect and earlier African American English. In Form, Function and Variation in English: Studies in Honour of Klaus Hansen, U. Carls & P. Lucko (eds), 183–192. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar