AAE as a bounded ethnolinguistic resource for white women with African American ties.

This paper considers the use of features classically considered AAE (Labov, 1972, Rickford, 1999; Wolfram and Thomas, 2002; Green, 2002) by adult white women with significant social ties with African Americans and explores why some members of a dominant ethnic group adopt the linguistic features of a non-dominant ethnic group with whom they have social ties, while others with similar social ties do not. Participants’ use of a constellation of phonological features associated with AAE is considered, and an exemplary variable which represents this constellation—/l/ vocalization—is analyzed. Through implementation of an ethnographically-informed multi-category quantitative metric of social and cultural practice, the density and affective quality of speakers’ ties to members of the African American community throughout the stages of their lives is measured (cf. Milroy, 1980; Bortoni-Ricardo, 1985), as is speakers’ participation in aesthetic practices associated with their African American cohorts (cf. Bourdieu, 1991; Adli, 2006). Intra-group variation in use of AAE phonological features is evident within the sample; participants also vary with regard to their adoption of other semiotic practices linked to African American ethnicity. These findings reveal that there is no static way of “being” a white woman with African American social ties. Additionally, differentiated use of ethnically-marked linguistic features and participation in other ethnically-marked aesthetic and cultural practices are not only reflective of speakers’ varied social ties, but also signify speakers’ varied personal ideologies about the boundaries of ethnic identification, as evidenced in discursive commentary from the speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]