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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
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