Linguistic Subordination and Ethnolinguistic Identity:
The Construction of African American Vernacular English
Walt Wolfram
North Carolina State University
Language and
Ethnicity
At first glance, it may appear that the association of language with ethnic group membership is one of the more transparent relationships in culture. Most of the 6,000 languages of the world, for example, are strongly associated with an ethnocultural group of some type. But this initial impression is immediately betrayed by the fact that language is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for ethnic group membership (Fishman 1999). Like sociocultural parameters, linguistic boundaries are permeable, constructed notions defined more adequately on the basis of sociopolitical and ideological considerations than on the basis of linguistic structures and sociolinguistic relationships. Even the dichotomy between “language” and “dialect” turns out to be based more on cultural and political issues than on mutual intelligibility or structural linguistic correspondence. Thus, Sino-Tibetan language varieties such as Cantonese and Mandarin are commonly referred to as dialects of Chinese even though they are not generally mutually intelligible whereas Norwegian and Swedish are considered to be different languages although speakers usually understand each other. In the former case, there is an overarching cultural unity that transcends structural linguistic differences whereas, in the latter case, there is a national political boundary that reifies linguistic dichotomy. By the same token, sociopolitical struggles about language—such as those over the status of Afrikaans in South Africa, the role of French and English in Canada, and the validity of Ebonics as a variety of English—are ultimately not about language, but about relations of sociopolitical power, ideology, and culture.
The Complex Language Continuum
Linguists view language diversity as a continuum rather than a discrete set of established linguistic entities, with attributes that range from a universal set of cognitively organized language principles to locally defined parameters that delimit the structures of a particular language, or, in the terminology of the day, “I-Language” (internalized language) versus “E-Language” (externalized language). The theoretical and methodological challenge of defining linguistic boundaries is every bit as complex as the challenge of defining social and cultural ones. Furthermore, ethnicity does not stand alone in its correlation with language variation; it invariably interacts with a wide array of other sociocultural and sociopsychological variables and is embedded within an intricate set of sociocultural relationships, processes, and identities.
Although many language situations might serve to illustrate the complexity of ethnolinguistic variation and the sociopolitical context in which it is embedded, few instances are as illustrative as the case of so-called “Ebonics”, or preferably, African American Vernacular English (henceforth AAVE).[1] Reactions to the assertion that some African Americans may speak a distinct ethnolinguistic variety range from immediate dismissal as a racist caricature to the proactive affirmation of this variety as a separate language. In the O.J. Simpson trial, for example, a groundskeeper’s comment about hearing a voice that sounded “like a black man” was met with an immediate—and sustained—objection by defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran on the basis that it was a racist connection between language and race (Baugh 1988). Meanwhile, 500 miles to the north, the Oakland School Board was preparing a resolution that declared that Ebonics was a separate language with its roots implanted in Africa rather than in the British-based varieties that gave rise to American English.
The empirical reality of ethnic identification is both simple and complex (Thomas 2002). Native English listeners, given a randomly selected set of content-neutral audio-recordings, can accurately identify African American speakers approximately 80 percent of the time. In fact, the reliability of ethnic identification has led linguist John Baugh of Stanford University to become involved in several highly publicized legal cases of “linguistic profiling” in which speakers identified as African American over the telephone were informed that apartment vacancies were already filled while European American callers were invited to visit the advertised vacancies. Determining the linguistic, sociocultural and sociohistorical locus of such ethnolinguistic identity, however, is not nearly as straightforward its subjective effects. Linguistically, there are different components of language organization that may be in involved in ethnolinguistic differentiation, ranging from minute segmental and suprasegmental phonetic details to generalized discourse strategies and conversational routines. Socially, there are demographic factors that affect ethnic identification such as region, social status, and education, as well as interactional factors such as interlocutors and speech situations. And then, of course, there are sociopsychological factors that include solidarity and identity. All of these factors enter into the ethnic labeling game, and manipulating the array of internal linguistic and external social and personal variables greatly affects the likelihood of reliable ethnic identification. Thus, the ethnicity of some African American speakers may be identified correctly less than 5 percent of the time while other speakers are correctly identified more than 95 percent of the time (Thomas and Reaser 2002).
How did ethnolinguistic differences in AAVE originate to begin with, and how have they evolved during the history of African Americans, from the time of forced importation and slavery through the Jim Crow laws and up to the contemporary social dynamics of de facto segregation? How are such differences interpreted within American society given the politics of race? And how has ethnolinguistic division been socially embedded within the African American community itself? In the following sections, we consider some of these issues, beginning with sociopolitical context of contemporary African American speech.
The Ideological Context of African American Vernacular English
Most Americans still readily recall the so-called “Ebonics Controversy” that took place when the Board of the Oakland Unified School System passed a resolution in 1996 that recognized Ebonics as the primary language of the majority of the 28,000 African American students who attended the Oakland Public Schools. If nothing else, the controversy and media blitz surrounding Oakland Unified School Board resolution vividly highlighted several important lessons about perceptions of dialect differences in American society. It exposed, for example, the intensity of people's beliefs and opinions about language and language diversity. In fact, a Newsweek article (Bridgeman 1998:1) reported that an America Online poll about Ebonics drew more responses than the polls asking the public whether O.J. Simpson was guilty. The controversy further emphasized the persistent and widespread level of public misinformation about language variation in public life and in education. There is an entrenched mythology and "miseducation" about dialects that pervades the understanding of this topic, particularly with respect to the relationship between socially subordinate, or “vernacular” varieties, and standard varieties (Lippi-Green 1997; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998; Wolfram, Adger, and Christian 1999). Such information is not simply innocent folklore; it affects how we view and treat people and how they view themselves on both a formal, institutional level and an informal, personal level.
To understand the full significance of the periodic controversies about dialect diversity that erupt in American society, we have to understand the fundamental ideology that frames such debates. By language ideology here I mean an underlying, consensual, and unquestioned belief system about the way language is and is supposed to be (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). In its most pervasive form, language ideology appears to make "common sense" so that no specialized knowledge or expertise is required to understand fundamental "facts" about language and its role in society. The primary socialization processes of an ideology naturalize and universalize beliefs so that they are self-evident. Furthermore, social reality is obscured in ways convenient to the belief system, so that alternative ways of thinking are excluded and denigrated. In Foucaultian terms (1972) ‘regimes of truth’ legitimize a set of beliefs and practices. Such views, which are derived from the same core of beliefs that govern religion, morality, and ethics, are assumed to be inflexible and unassailable. In the case of language diversity, a set of perspectives and practices is established that is associated with heterogeneous groups. Beliefs about language need not be made explicit; in fact, as Fairclough (1989:85) notes, language ideology is most effective when its workings are least visible. At the root of the struggle over the status of AAVE, then, is an entrenched ideology that recognizes the sovereignty of the standard variety and the linguistic inadequacy of vernaculars, particularly those associated with class and ethnic asymmetries.
To a large extent, diversity in American English is situated within a national language ideology governed by the principle of linguistic subordination, in which language varieties associated with socially subordinate groups are viewed as linguistic deficits rather than neutral linguistic differences (Lippi-Green 1997). By contrast, beliefs about the sovereignty of Standard English are embedded in what Anderson’s (1991) labels a “sacred imagined community,” where privileged access to truth and power are rooted in the Standard English script.
Linguists, of course, view language structure as independent of its social valuation and maintain that the relationship between linguistic structure and social marking is quite arbitrary. Therefore, linguists’ response to the Ebonics debate was to affirm—unanimously and unequivocally—that AAVE “is systematic and rule-governed like all natural speech varieties” and that its social valuation stands apart from fundamental linguistic adequacy (The Linguistic Society of America Resolution on the Oakland Ebonics Controversy, 1997). Language variation is not a controversial issue for linguists; it is an endemic part of dynamic language organization.
While linguists affirm the fundamental linguistic validity of AAVE, the social valuation of language diversity mirrors the social asymmetries of racial ideology that have characterized American society since the involuntary transportation of Africans to the American continent. Attitudes toward AAVE are therefore symbolic of the evaluation of behavior perceived to be associated with African Americans rather than speech. As Johnson (2001:599) notes, “It is not language per se, but its power to function as a ‘proxy’ for wider social issues which fans the flames of public disputes over language.”
In challenging the fundamental belief system with respect to the way language is supposed to be, the resolution of Oakland Unified School District opened, or more accurately, reopened the intensive, heated discussion of language ideology and linguistic subordination. From time to time, particular events in society may bring to the surface foundational beliefs about language, and language itself may become an object in the ideological struggle. In an important sense, the resolution was controversial because it challenged primitive, collective beliefs about language and linguistic diversity, offering an alternative set of beliefs. The questions and comments about Ebonics thus provided a forum for exposing the ideological struggle of AAVE within the sociopolitical context of linguistic subordination.
Language is considered to be at once a collective and a personal matter, a token of group identity as well as personal character. In its collective capacity, it is a shared, ordinary commodity, and no specialized knowledge or expertise is required for public commentary. This status means that authoritative critique on the topic is not limited to those with specialized expertise. In fact, the Ebonics controversy taught us that social and political prominence is considered to be sufficient for the assumption of authoritative stance on language. Fuel was added to the fire of the Oakland Ebonics controversy when prominent public figures ranging from the President of the United States to educators and leaders in the African-American community offered immediate and pronounced condemnation of the Oakland school board for its resolution recognizing the linguistic integrity of Ebonics and proclaiming it to be a separate language.
One of the ironies of the public commentary on Ebonics was the seemingly incongruous alliance of public figures who commented on the topic. Public commentary brought together leaders from the African-American community known for their social activism and progressive sociopolitical perspectives and European Americans known for their conservative, reactionary politics. On what other topic have conservative icons such as the media commentator, Rush Limbaugh, and the social activist, Jessie Jackson, agreed upon yet they united in their public condemnation of Ebonics? Even hip-hop artists and rappers, who often use vernacular speech in their symbolic estrangement from mainstream society, may, at the same time, unwittingly embrace the linguistic subordination principle. Thus, hip hop artist, Big L, in a lyric titled “Ebonics”, alludes to this variety with a chorus that invokes metaphors of illegality and illness.
“Speak with a criminal slang-Nas
That’s just the way that I talk, yo
Vocabulary spills, I’m ill”-Nas[2]
The general American public, regardless of race, class, politics—and even education—has been socialized into the same language ideology. In effect, the principle of linguistic subordination cuts an inclusive swath across the social spectrum in a society that would be quite divided on most other issues. Americans can stand united in totalitarian support of the sovereignty of Standard English—even as they stridently disagree on other moral issues such as the guilt of O.J Simpson, the sexual behavior of Bill Clinton, or the validity of waging war on Iraq.
With such a consensual base, the small group of academic linguists and “radical” members of the Oakland School Board who sought to legitimize a vernacular variety like AAVE could be safely marginalized as disenfranchised, out-of-touch groups who deserve no public voice in language policy. In fact, one of the greatest challenges for linguists speaking out on Ebonics was their credibility as practically minded citizens who genuinely were interested in the academic success of AAVE-speaking students. The threat of marginalization is faced at every turn by sociolinguists who attempt to describe the linguistic structures of this variety and to chart its path of development over time and place. While great controversy over the historical development and the current trajectory of change in AAVE exists in linguistic circles, these pale by comparison with the broad-based and continuing struggle to have this variety viewed as a legitimate, natural language system. It is also not accidental that practically every public lecture I have given on this topic in the past three decades has had to begin with a preliminary statement about the systematicity of AAVE and a disclaimer about the relationship between language and race.
Given the depth and breadth of linguistic subordination, one of the significant questions that must be asked about AAVE is how this variety managed to survive in the face of such linguistic oppression. But not only did it survive; as we shall see, AAVE expanded its ethnolinguistic base and intensified its structural distinctiveness in the face of powerful sociopolitical pressure to eradicate it under the sovereign rule of Standard English.
The Linguistic Base of Ethnolinguistic Variation
At least four major issues need to be considered in the construction of an ethnolinguistic variety: (1) the actuation issue; (2) the embedding issue; (3) the diffusion issue; and (4) the dynamic issue. The actuation issue refers to the circumstances and forces—internal and external—that give rise to language change and variation, thus providing the linguistic resources for the correlation of language differences with an array of social and cultural variables, including ethnocultural ones. There are several factors that may provide the foundational base for constructing a distinct language variety, ethnic or otherwise. These include differential rates of language change, language contact, and innovation.
Language change may take place at different rates and in different directions, and this selective process may result in the correlation of the linguistic variation with different social groupings, including ethnocultural groupings of speakers and speech communities. The reconfiguration of language structures may also be activated through language contact situations where the speakers of different varieties accommodate, transfer, and borrow structural linguistic elements from other languages or dialects. The products of these language contact situations range from the radical restructuring of entire language systems to the subtle transfer of structural elements from one language to another. In the most extreme case, that of the so-called “creole” language, the lexicon of one language—invariably the one associated with the socially dominant group—may be imposed upon a drastically restructured but universally based grammatical system to create a kind of hybrid language system.[3] At the other extreme are the integrative effects of language structures from historical language contact between different language groups that persist as a kind of substrate language effect. Examples range from the unglided o and e vowels of stereotypical Minnesotan English derived from the Scandinavian languages to the reduction of word-final consonant clusters in west as wes’ or find as fin’ in AAVE from ancestral African languages on the West Coast of Africa.
Ethnolinguistic markers may also be triggered by internally motivated, independent language innovations. These developments result from natural processes that guide changes on the basis of a language system’s own internal linguistic logic quite apart from language diffusion or language contact. Thus, linguists have shown that a structure such as ‘habitual be’ (e.g. My ears be itching) in AAVE has developed into a distinct grammatical marker of tense and aspect within this variety primarily on the basis of an internally motivated, independent language change (Bailey and Maynor 1985; Dayton 1996; Labov 1998).
The embedding issue concerns the process whereby linguistic features are adopted as part of a socially constructed speech community, including those that may be defined on ethnocultural bases. On one level, the establishment of ethnic language varieties appears to be a relatively straightforward case of co-variance in which particular linguistic variants become established as ethnic markers by virtue of their association with an externally defined socially grouping. On another level, however, the instantiation is a complex, selective process involving a full range of subjective and objective social and cultural variables. There are, for example, different patterns of co-variance, ranging from saturated, group-exclusive usage patterns in which most but only members of a given group use a given linguistic item, to systematic variable differences in which different groups share features but at different frequency levels of usage. The subjective side of social recognition may include ethnic indicators (language differences with no conscious recognition), ethnic markers (conscious recognition of differences without overt comment), and ethnic stereotypes (conscious recognition of differences that become the object of overt commentary).
The diffusion issue concerns the spread of language norms and boundaries, both within and across communities. Demographic patterns of settlement, migration, and re-settlement are implicated in diffusion, as well as interactional intra- and inter-community communication networks. Traditional models of geolinguistic diffusion include the contagious diffusion model, in which the spread of language features follows a straightforward wave-like time and distance relation; the hierarchical diffusion model, in which features spread from areas of denser population to areas of sparser population; and the contrahierarchical diffusion model, in which features spread from more sparsely populated areas to more densely populated locales (Bailey, Wikle, Tillery, and Sand 1993). As useful as these macro models may be for profiling some kinds of change, they are not always adequate for describing the spread of linguistic items with respect to ethnically defined groups.
Mechanistic geolinguistic models that are reduced to population ecology and spatial distribution are often limited in their explanatory potential. For example, one of the most noteworthy discoveries about the distribution of contemporary AAVE in the US is the widespread representation of a common core of ethnically distinctive vernacular dialect traits. AAVE speakers in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Raleigh, and elsewhere in North America appear to share a set of unique structural dialect traits that distinguish them from their benchmark European American English cohorts in their respective regions. Although historical settlement and migration patterns may link African Americans to a common set of Southern linguistic roots in the US and fluid patterns of interregional movement may provide a social mechanism for the transmission of these supra-regional norms, these factors alone do not adequately account for the abandonment of or resistance to local European American dialect norms by some African Americans. Instead, the local ethnolinguistic divide is more adequately traced to a pervasive biracial ideology and a developing consciousness of the symbolic role of African American speech. The understanding of ethnic boundaries clearly calls for explanatory models that transcend some of the conventional, mechanistic models of diffusion.
Finally, we must consider the dynamic issue, which relates to the fact that ethnically associated language varieties, like all other language varieties, are constantly undergoing change. Accordingly, language norms shift over time, including the linguistic locus of symbolic ethnic representation. Part of the investigation of a variety such as AAVE, then, is the consideration of the changing configuration of ethnolinguistic norms, as well as the social mechanisms used to transmit and regulate these changing norms. For “standard” and national languages, academies, usage books, internet grammar hotlines, and other public venues provide for the codification of these language norms, and various language guardians, including language specialists, teachers, and parents/caretakers serve as linguistic gatekeepers. There is, however, no comparable codification of vernacular language norms, as their transmission takes place on a covert, informal level. At this point, we know little about the regulatory procedures and mechanisms used to instantiate vernacular ethnolinguistic norms, though it must be recognized as an essential component in the maintenance of ethnolinguistic division. Speech communities can be quite flexible and creative in utilizing available language resources to carve out their distinctive ethnic identities.
The Development of AAVE
In order to understand the construction of contemporary AAVE, it is necessary to understand its origin and early development, as well as its evolution into the 21st century. Linguists attempting to reconstruct the earlier development of African American speech have been challenged by the paucity of documentary evidence from the legacy of slavery and linguistic subordination. They have had to rely on a limited corpus of written documents, amanuensis accounts, reports about speech, a few audio recordings of ex-slaves, and spoken language data from historically insular African American enclave communities.
Earlier AAVE
The question of genesis and early development is still highly disputed among linguists, though we feel confident that we are now closer to a more authentic reconstruction than we were a half century ago when this topic became the object of serious sociolinguistic inquiry. Hypotheses regarding the origin and development of AAVE may be divided into three major positions: the Anglicist, the Creolist, and the Neo-Anglicist hypothesis. In the mid-twentieth century the Anglicist hypothesis—that the speech of African Americans derived directly from British-based dialects—was commonly accepted by prominent American dialectologists, along with the conclusion that twentieth century African American speech was identical to that of benchmark rural Southern vernacular white speech (Kurath 1949; McDavid and McDavid 1951). The traditional Anglicist position maintains that the language contact situation of African descendants in the United States was roughly comparable to that of other groups of immigrants. Slaves may have spoken different African languages, as well as some pidgin and creole varieties that arose in the African diaspora, but over the course of a couple of generations speakers simply learned the regional and social varieties of surrounding European American groups, making them indistinguishable from their benchmark European American cohorts.
In the 1960s and 70s, this position was replaced by the widespread acceptance of the creole hypothesis, which maintains that the roots of AAVE were embedded in an expansive creole extending from the west coast of Africa through the West Indies and into the antebellum Plantation South (Stewart 1967, 1968, Dillard 1972). Under the creole hypothesis the primary distinguishing features of AAVE are derived from this creole past. Though it has “decreolized” over time, the decreolization process was neither instantaneous nor complete, and contemporary AAVE still reveals the linguistic legacy of its creole predecessor. Though not all AAVE researchers accepted such a strong interpretation of the creolist hypothesis, most linguists at least followed Fasold’s (1981:164) conclusion that “the creole hypothesis seems most likely to be correct, but it is certainly not so well established as Dillard (1972), for example, would have us to believe.”
The emergence of new corpora that included an expanding base of written documentation as well as data from expatriate, transplant black enclave communities led to the neo-anglicist hypothesis in the 1990s (Montgomery Fuller and DeMarse 1993; Montgomery and Fuller 1996; Mufwene 1996; Poplack 1999; Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001). This position, like the Anglicist hypothesis of the mid-twentieth century, maintains that earlier, colonial and post-colonial African American speech was directly linked to the early British dialects brought to North America. In this respect, it is identical to the earlier Anglicist position. However, the Neo-Anglicist position acknowledges that AAVE has since diverged so that it has now become quite distinct from contemporary European American vernacular speech. Based on studies of expatriate black communities in Samaná and Nova Scotia, whose speakers migrated to these locales in the early 1800s, Poplack (1999:27) asserts that “AAVE originated as English, but as the African American community solidified, it innovated specific features” and that “contemporary AAVE is the result of evolution, by its own unique, internal logic.” According to researchers such as Poplack and Labov (1998), AAVE is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century.
Our recent research on the early development of African American speech challenges all three of these hypotheses in different ways. We have found, based on studies of enclave situations in coastal areas such as Hyde County, North Carolina (Wolfram, Thomas, and Green, 2000; Wolfram and Thomas 2002) and in the Appalachian mountains (Mallinson and Wolfram 2002; Childs and Mallinson 2003), that elderly African American speakers in these remote rural areas adopted many traits of the regional dialect system associated with European Americans, including some of the primary vowel features and the distinctive, local grammatical structures. For example, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, earlier African Americans typically revealed the distinctive backing and raising of the vowel in words like time and tide, so that they sound more like toid and toim, respectively (Wolfram and Thomas 2002). Similarly, in the mountains of North Carolina, elderly African Americans speakers show regionalized dialect patterns such as the attachment of the suffix –s on third plural subject constructions in sentences like People goes there or The dogs that barks are hunting dogs (Mallinson and Wolfram 2002). We therefore conclude that earlier African American speech in some rural areas of the South was probably more regionally accommodating than it appears to be in many present-day urban areas, particularly in the North.[4] This conclusion is supported by various perceptual tests (Thomas 2002; Thomas and Reaser 2002; Wolfram and Thomas 2002) that show that elderly African Americans in Hyde County, for example, are predominantly identified as “white” during ethnic identification tasks.
Though elderly speakers
representing earlier African American speech show more regional accommodation
than most contemporary versions of this variety, these speakers simultaneously
indicate linguistic forms that are most reasonably interpreted as persistent
substrate effects from the earlier contact situation involving Africans and
English-speaking Europeans. These include, for example, the prevocalic
reduction of consonant clusters (e.g. wes’
en’ for west end or miss’ out for missed out), the absence of the copula and auxiliary form be in sentences such as She nice or They taking it, and the absence of the third person singular –s suffix, all of which are generally
recognized as effects from language contact situations that involved languages
with non-isomorphic structural typologies. The emerging evidence, then,
suggests that earlier African American speech indicated a mixed alignment of
dialect features. That is, earlier African American speech shared local
features of regionally situated speech at the same time that it showed a
persistent ethnolinguistic divide. Though many of these substrate effects are
not particularly salient structural traits, the fact that they have persisted
in opposition to the structures found in benchmark European American
communities argues against the Anglicist and the Neo-Anglicist positions. It
does not, however, necessarily argue in favor of the Creolist position, since
it is quite possible for language transfer to take place in a language contact
situation without adopting a creole language as a lingua franca. That is, the
secondary effects of a creole in the middle passage and the fossilized
retentions of the original language contact situation between African languages
and English may have been responsible for the enduring substrate effects rather
than a creole predecessor. In fact, the social dynamics and the population
demographics of the antebellum South do not support the establishment of a
widespread plantation creole, apart from Gullah, spoken on the coastal islands
off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where a special social and
population dynamic existed (Winford 1997; Rickford 1997; Mufwene 2001).
AAVE in the Twentieth Century
In some respects, the most instructive aspect of our research is not the reconstruction of the historical development of earlier AAVE, but its trajectory of change over the course of the twentieth century. We find, for example, that the path of change for African American speech in the remote Hyde County coastal community does not follow a simple regression slope across different generations. For a number of distinctive regional dialect traits (Wolfram, Hazen, and Schilling-Estes 1999), earlier African American speech, as reflected by elderly speakers, shows congruence with Pamlico Sound English. However, this trend contrasts with younger speakers, who have largely abandoned these local dialect characteristics. Over the same time span, core AAVE features—that is, features that characterize African American speech as it is distributed elsewhere in the US—show a mirror image change trajectory, with the older groups of speakers showing moderate levels of core AAVE features and the younger generations showing a progressive increase in the use of these features. The idealized trajectory of change for Pamlico Sound features and core AAVE feature, based on our extensive analysis of a number of representative features (Wolfram and Thomas 2002), is plotted in figure 1. For convenience, the four time periods of speakers are broken down on the basis of different sociohistorical periods: speakers who were born and raised in the early twentieth century up through World War I; speakers born and raised between World War I and school integration in the late 1960s; speakers who lived through the early period of school integration as adolescents; and speakers who were born and raised after legalized institutional integration.
Figure 1. Idealized trajectory of changer for African Americans in Hyde County (adapted from Wolfram and Thomas 2002)
On one level, the explanation of this change trajectory is based on the local social history of Hyde County, but on another level it appears to be indicative of a more general path of change for rural Southern African American English (Bailey 2001; Cukor-Avila 1995, 2001). The middle-aged group of speakers in our sample represents those born in the mid-1950s through the mid 1960s—the group most directly affected by the racial conflict brought about by court-ordered school integration. As children and adolescents, they experienced the social upheaval of school integration firsthand. In this sociopolitical milieu, and in the integrated schools that followed, African Americans started intensifying the ethnolinguistic divide between the groups—by reducing their alignment with local dialect features and intensifying vernacular norms now associated with urban AAVE. We thus see that the integration period actually correlated with a reduction rather than an increase in dialect accommodation by the speakers in the African American community. On one level, this path of change speaks to the limited effects of institutionally mandated integration in circumscribed settings on dialect convergence. On another level, however, it speaks to the growing consciousness of the role of language in maintaining ethnolinguistic identity in the face of sociopolitical pressure and legal coercion to integrate. Language change cannot be divorced from the social and historical events that affect general populations and specific communities of speakers.
Explaining the Norms of Contemporary AAVE
Our description in previous sections indicates an apparent incongruity in terms of the status of AAVE. On the one hand, we have shown that this variety is strongly devalued and dismissed by mainstream American society as nothing more than an inadequate and unworthy approximation of Standard English. At this same time, and despite this persistent linguistic denigration, AAVE intensified its structural foundation and become a more expansive and salient ethnic variety, developing a kind of supra-regional vernacular norm. Though AAVE is still regionally situated to some extent, its prominent vernacular structures transcend many of the regional boundaries associated with European American regional dialects. Thus, studies of AAVE in urban communities such as New York City (Labov 1972), Washington, D.C. (Fasold 1972), Detroit (Wolfram 1969), Philadelphia (Dayton 1996), and Los Angelos (Baugh 1983), among others, indicate that it shares a common core of vernacular traits that distinguishes it from local European American cohorts. At this same time, it exhibits limited accommodation to the regional dialect traits peculiar to its local host European American varieties. In fact, the use of local dialect features by African Americans often typically leads to ethnic misidentification and the label “sounding white” (Graff, Labov, and Harris 1985).
How do we explain the development and maintenance of a supra-regional AAVE norm in the twentieth century, especially in light of its ever-present linguistic censure within mainstream society? Several factors seem to converge in this explanation. As pointed out earlier, despite regional accommodation, some distinctive long-term ethnically distinctive traits did endure—even in highly regionalized contexts where African Americans adopted many areal dialect features (Wolfram and Thomas 2002). These features may have been perceptually less salient than the regional dialect icons they adopted, but they provided continuity with a distinct linguistic heritage that was not shared with their cohort European Americans. The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation that has shaped the lives of most African Americans over the centuries has served to preserve this linguistic inheritance, though often in subtle linguistic ways. A set of common substrate structures from the earliest contact situation provided a linguistic foundation for the development of an enduring ethnolinguistic divide. This, however, is not the only or the whole story, since there is also evidence for innovation in AAVE that is indeed a product of the twentieth century (Bailey and Maynor 1985, 1987; Dayton 1996; Labov 1998).
Patterns of mobility and inter-region, intra-ethnic social relations may also have helped support a supra-regional foundation for AAVE in the twentieth century (Johnson and Campbell 1981). African Americans in isolated rural regions of the South, for example, tend to have much more expanded contact with other African Americans in urban areas than they did a century ago. We observe, for example, that in Hyde County, older and younger residents often have different patterns of inter-regional mobility. Elderly residents rarely left the county when they were younger, whereas younger residents today travel outside of the county on a regular basis and often visit larger, more urban areas. Furthermore, African Americans who move from the rural South often return for various homecoming events and family reunions that bring together those who live within and outside of the community (Stack 1996). Patterns of inter-regional continuity and increased mobility may help transmit models for a supra-regional norm.
At the same time, the continuing de facto segregation of American society serves as a fertile environment for maintaining a distinct ethnic variety. Many northern urban areas are, in fact, more densely populated by African Americans today than they were several decades ago (Labov and Harris 1986), and the informal social networks of many urban African Americans remain quite segregated (Stack 1996). The lack of regular and multi-varied interaction with European Americans by many African Americans in large urban areas provides a fertile environment for the growth of ethnolinguistic distinctiveness.
Along with explanations based on population movement and segregation, we must appeal to the role of cultural identity. Over the past half century, there has been a growing sense of ethnic identity associated with AAVE. This identity is supported through a variety of informal and formal social mechanisms that range from community-based social networks to stereotypical media projections of African American speech (Lippi-Green 1997). Part of the definition of African American speech is not simply the adoption of features associated with AAVE, but the avoidance of features that are associated with “white speech” (Ash and Myhill 1986; Graff, Labov, and Harris 1986), including regional dialect traits. Fordham and Ogbu (1986) note that the adoption of Standard English is at the top of the inventory of behaviors listed as “acting white.” So-called “oppositional identity”, in which African Americans avoid conduct with strong associations of white behavior (Fordham and Ogbu 1986), may thus be an important part of the explanation for the rejection of regional dialect features that have strong white connotations.
Even portrayals of African American speech in the media may serve to support a supra-regional norm for African American speech behavior. Though linguists tend to discount the active role of the media in the acquisition of particular dialect traits because of its impersonal and passive role in communicative interaction, this venue may still provide a kind of portrayal of African American speech. In the media, the vernacular speech norm for African Americans tends to be urban and general rather than rural and local.
Although it may seem contradictory for the speech of African Americans to be simultaneously embraced and discounted, it is important to recognize that different levels of social valuation may be assigned to same variety under different circumstances. Sociolinguists often distinguish between overt and covert prestige in the assignment of social valuation (Trudgill 1972). Overt prestige is established by higher-status groups and perpetuated by agents of standardization in our society—teachers, editors, and other language authorities responsible for setting the standards of linguistic behavior. A full range of social classes and communities, constituting the mainstream standard for language use, usually acknowledges overt norms. On the other hand, covert prestige tends to relate to group solidarity and to norms that are not shared across all groups. In many cases, the covert prestige norms may, in fact, be quite localized. In the case of overt prestige, the social valuation lies in a united, widely accepted set of social norms, whereas in the case of covert prestige, the positive social significance lies in the subculture or local culture. From this perspective, AAVE may be overtly stigmatized while it is valued covertly as a manifestation of distinctive African American behavior.
During the twentieth century, AAVE has become much more of an urban than a rural phenomenon (Bailey and Maynor 1985, 1987). In this developing ethnolinguistic context, traditional rural dialects like Hyde County dialect would carry strong associations of white, rural speech. For example, younger African American subjects in our study (Wolfram, Thomas, and Green 2000) describe the speech of older Hyde County African Americans as “sounding country” and being “more white” than the speech of younger African Americans. Younger speakers who identify strongly with African American culture contra “white culture” would therefore be inclined to change their speech toward the more generalized version of AAVE and away from the localized regional norm. An essential ingredient of the contemporary supra-regional norm for AAVE is thus the heightened symbolic role of language as an ethnic emblem of African American culture. Such an identity would enhance the role of a widespread supra-regional AAVE norm vis-à-vis accommodation to a regional dialect norm with strong connotations of white speech behavior.
Foundations of
Ethnolinguistic Construction
Though unique in some respects, the case of AAVE is still instructive for identifying the kinds of factors that need to be considered in any explanation of ethnolinguistic development. First, there is a system-internal, linguistic dimension. It is apparent that some vernacular forms arise through parallel, independent development, or “drift” due to the operation of general processes of analogy and a universal tendency to move toward unmarked or more natural linguistic forms. For example, a survey of various socially subordinate vernacular varieties in the US (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998), England (Trudgill 1990), and around the world (Cheshire 1981) shows the uniform tendency to expand the regularization of once-irregular plurals (e.g. two sheeps), the regularization of past tense forms (e.g. They growed up), and the adoption of negative concord (e.g. They didn’t do nothing), along with the stopping of syllable-onset, interdental fricatives (e.g. [dIs] ‘this’). These structures fit Chambers’ (1995:242) definition of “ubiquitous, primitive vernacular features.” If, as Chambers (1995:246) asserts, the prescriptive standard norm is "more strictly tightly constrained in its grammar and phonology" than its vernacular counterparts, then vernacular norms would be under less social pressure to resist some of these natural linguistic changes. The unifying dimension of such common vernacular traits, referred to as the vernacular congruity principle (Wolfram forthcoming), seems to be the operation of natural linguistic processes in a social context more relaxed with respect to the overt prescriptive norms that would otherwise impede naturally occurring changes.
There is also a sociohistorical component to be factored into the explanation of vernacular norms. Patterns of population settlement, migration, and diffusion are as vital for understanding the growth and maintenance of vernacular varieties as they are for understanding socially sanctioned dialects. Thus, the migration of African Americans from the South in the early and mid-twentieth century (Johnson and Campbell 1981), as well as the maintenance of connections and family ties, provided a communication network for the diffusion of vernacular norms from the South to the North and West. In more recent decades, the return of some African Americans to the South (Stack 1996) no doubt has also provided for the inter-regional diffusion of vernacular norms from urban areas, the current focal area for AAVE, back to rural areas which were once the primary regions for earlier vernacular development. The ebb and flow of migration, along with the regular maintenance of inter-regional connections has afforded a transmission route for contemporary supra-regional AAVE norms.
There is also a sociolinguistic component in the sense that vernacular structures are socially meaning within particular speech communities. Communities may differ significantly in their social embedding of dialect structures, selectively focusing on some variants as dialect icons while ignoring others. Particular dialect features of AAVE have become emblematic of African American speech, and some have even become stereotypical icons. The form be in They be tripping seems to be taking on a kind of symbolic status of AAVE while more subtle vowel traits go virtually unnoticed on an overt level (Bailey and Thomas 1998). Structures are selectively and differentially marked in the process of social embedding.
There is also a sociopsychological component in that individual and group identities are constructed and maintained through dialect variation. The role of oppositional identity, for example, may explain why younger African American speakers who have lived all of their lives in isolated, distinctive dialect areas such as the Outer Banks or in Appalachia are abandoning their regional dialect roots in favor of an external, supra-regional AAVE norm. Present-day AAVE speakers want to sound neither “white” nor “country.”
Finally, there is an ideological component to be recognized in the construction of vernacular norms like AAVE. Underlying assumptions and beliefs about ethnic group membership may influence the establishment of vernacular norms just as beliefs about language standards have shaped America’s attitudes about language diversity. Part of the reason that AAVE is so strongly defined along ethnic lines is no doubt due to the historical and current bi-racial ideology that defines US society. African Americans in Boston, Los Angeles, the rural South, and elsewhere in the US distinguish themselves from European Americans in their speech and in other behaviors.
Perhaps the most essential lesson to be taken from this discussion is that the development of vernacular varieties cannot be reduced to a single dimension or circumstance. Linguistic, demographic, sociohistorical, sociocultural, sociopsychological, and ideological factors all enter into the construction of vernacular norms. In various permutations, these factors would expected to play a role in the construction of ethnolinguistic varieties wherever such language varieties exist, whether they be languages, dialects, or some other type of language-differentiated group behavior.
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