Search

This essay is a call out and a roll call of Black women scholars – Black Feminists, Critical Race Theorists, Intersectionality Theorists and co-conspirators – doing the work of the elder women and ancestors whose shoulders we stand on. I frame the research on African American Women’s Language around Hull, Bell-Scott and Smith’s (1982) seminal book All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave to shout out not only how language and linguistics researchers got it twisted and need to reckon with truth and say my (language’s) name: African American Women’s Language. And put some respeck on it while you’re at it.

In this chapter, my primary goals are to advocate for operationalizing theory into praxis and revolutionary action for social justice advocacy and activism in sociolinguistics, or Critical Sociolinguistics (CSLx), for the benefit of participants and the communities we study. I do so, as a Sociolinguist, in response and as a tribute to Prof. John Russell Rickford’s body of scholarship, but particularly two influential articles: ‘Unequal partnerships’ (1997b) and ‘Language and linguistics on trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other vernacular speakers) in the courtroom and beyond’ (with Sharese King 2016e). I pursue my primary goal by: (1) demonstrating why CSLx should be integral in academia, scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and leadership; (2) showing how protest syllabuses, such as the #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus, can function as change agents in CSLx; (3) presenting a case study of teaching #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) to provide an example of what can be some in classrooms; and (4) providing directions for future CSLx.

This chapter discusses teaching the History of the English Language (HEL) as a sociolinguist and being guided by three areas in learning sciences: goals, self-regulated learning, and interest, particularly social and personal. Specifically, this chapter addresses the age-old student question, “How is this relevant to me?” Part of our job as college teachers involves getting students to realize the practicality of a course for their needs (e.g., “I need to take this class in order to graduate”), and another part is to acknowledge (or awaken in some cases) their intellectual curiosity (e.g., “I’ve always wondered why “knight” is spelled with letters that aren’t even pronounced”). This chapter provides examples of instruction and assignments that correspond to research literature on goals and interest with respect to teaching and self-regulated learning more broadly and teaching HEL from the perspective of a sociolinguist more specifically.

Language Use in African American Communities: An Introduction Sonja L. Lanehart, Jennifer Bloomquist, and Ayesha M. Malik PART I. ORIGINS AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES The English Origins Hypothesis Gerard Van Herk The Creole Origins Hypothesis John R. Rickford The Emergence of African American English: Monogenetic or Polygenetic? With or Without "Decreolization"? Under How Much Substrate Influence? Salikoko S. Mufwene On the Origins of African American Vernacular English: Beginnings Donald Winford African American English Over Yonder: The Language of the Liberian Settler Community John Victor Singler Documenting the History of African American Vernacular English: A Survey and Assessment of Sources and Results Edgar W. Schneider Regionality in the Development of African American English Walt Wolfram and Mary E. Kohn PART II. LECTS AND VARIATION The Place of Gullah in the African American Linguistic Continuum Tracey L. Weldon and Simanique Moody Rural African American Vernacular English Patricia Cukor-Avila and Guy Bailey African American English in the Mississippi Delta: A Case Study of Copula Absence and /r/-Lessness in the Speech of Black Women in Coahoma County Rose Wilkerson African American Voices in Atlanta William A. Kretzschmar African American Language in Pittsburgh and the Lower Susqueshanna Valley Jennifer Bloomquist and Shelome Gooden African American Phonology in a Philadelphia Community William Labov and Sabriya Fisher African American Language in New York City Renee A. Blake, Cara Shousterman, and Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz African American Vernacular English In California: Four Plus Decades Of Vibrant Variationist Research John R. Rickford The Black American Sign Language Project: An Overview Joseph Hill, Carolyn McCaskill, Robert Bayley, and Ceil Lucas The Sociolinguistic Construction of African American Language Walt Wolfram PART III. STRUCTURE AND DESCRIPTION Syntax and Semantics Lisa J. Green and Walter Sistrunk The Systematic Marking of Tense, Modality and Aspect in African American Language Charles E. DeBose On the Syntax-Prosody Interface in African American Language James A. Walker Segmental Phonology of African American English Erik R. Thomas and Guy Bailey Prosodic Features of African American English Erik R. Thomas PART IV. CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND DEVELOPMENT Language Acquisition in the African American Child: Prior to Age Four Brandi L. Newkirk-Turner, RaMonda Horton, and Ida J. Stockman The Development of African American English through Childhood and Adolescence Janneke Van Hofwegen Development of Variation Lisa J. Green and Jessica White-Sustaita Narrative Structures of African American Children: Commonalities and Differences Tempii B. Champion and Allyssa McCabe Some Similarities and Differences between African American English and Southern White English in Children Janna B. Oetting Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives for Assessing Young and School-Age AAE Child Speakers Toya A. Wyatt PART V. EDUCATION African American Language and Education: History and Controversy in the Twentieth Century Geneva Smitherman Managing Two Varieties: Code-switching in the Educational Context Monique T. Mills and Julie A. Washington Balancing Pedagogy with Theory: The Infusion of African American Language Research Into Everyday Pre K-12 Teaching Practices Sharroky Hollie, Tamara Butler, and Jamila Gillenwaters History of Research on Multiliteracies and Hip Hop Pedagogy: A Critical Review K.C. Nat Turner and Tyson L. Rose African-American Vernacular English and Reading William Labov and Bettina Baker Dialect Switching and Mathematical Reasoning Tests: Implications for Early Educational Achievement J. Michael Terry, Randall Hendrick, Evangelos Evangelou, and Richard L. Smith Beyond Bidialecticalism: Language Planning and Policies for African American Students John Baugh PART VI. LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY African American Church Language Charles E. DeBose The (Re)turn to Remus Orthography: The Voices of African American Language in American Literature James Braxton Peterson African American Language and Black Poetry Howard Rambsy II and Briana Whiteside African American Divas of Comedy: Staking a Claim in Public Space Jacquelyn Rahman The Construction of Ethnicity via Voicing: African American English in Children's Animated Film Jennifer Bloomquist SWB: (Speaking while Black or Speaking while Brown): Linguistic Profiling and Discrimination Based on Speech as a Surrogate for Race in International Perspective John Baugh PART VII. LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY Racializing Language: Unpacking Linguistic Approaches to Attitudes about Race and Speech Kate T. Anderson African American Standard English Arthur K. Spears African American English in the Middle Class Erica Britt and Tracey L. Weldon African American Women's Language: Mother Tongues Untied Marcyliena Morgan Black Masculine Language David E. Kirkland Hip Hop Nation Language: Localization and Globalization H. Samy Alim African American Language and Identity: Contradictions and Conundrums Sonja L. Lanehart

Survey research in Atlanta suggests that the usual national generalizations about race and language need to be examined in the light of local evidence. The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States preserves recordings of interviews with a number of African Americans from the 1970s, to set a historical baseline for the community. A contemporary random-sample study of African Americans in Atlanta showed that our speakers were highly variable in their vowel production. They not only did not match national generalizations, but appeared to have more of Labov's "Southern Shift" than the local non-African-American speakers who were supposed to be characterized by it. Only a minority of speakers show “mean” behavior for the whole set of vowels. Still, black/white speech relations in the Atlanta metro area create perceptions such that a child from a historic African American neighborhood in Roswell had to "learn how to talk hood" to fit in with children from the Atlanta public schools. And Atlanta, with its central place in the hip-hop community alongside New York and Los Angeles, maintains an identity on the national scene with roots in local speech. History and contemporary evidence combine to show that African American voices in Atlanta belong to a complex system in which speakers can be themselves in their neighborhoods, while at the same time they participate in historical and national trends.