African-American English (AAE) . . . pidgins . . . creoles

African-American English (AAE) . . . pidgins . . . creoles linguistic reality features theories about their genesis Note: On April 3rd I updated or added a few slides; they are prominently indicated with a green background (you’ll see when you flip through ‘em).

Web stuff • Hear creoles: http://www.ling.su.se/Creole/Speech.html Sali’s web page (read Ebonics article): http://humanities.uchicago.edu/humanities/linguistics/faculty/ebonics.html

What is AAE? • William Labov’s famous (1972) definition: “that relatively uniform grammar found in its most consistent form in the speech of the [adolescent] black youth from 8 to 19 years old who participate in the street culture of the inner cities” • This definition is not entirely adequate: do the rest of African Americans speak white middle-class English or white nonstandard English? • Is it legitimate to project the variety spoken by teen members of street culture, a subset of the youth, as the prototype of African American’s vernacular?

What is AAE? • A better definition: AAE is a cover term for all the language varieties perceived as manifestations of basically the same ethnic language variety. In reality, AAE is almost certainly diverse and may vary structurally from one speaker, setting, or region to another - just like nonstandard varieties of white English. • AAE should probably not be confused with Gullah, a creole language variety spoken in the vicinity of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

Pidgin versus Creole – Classical – but controversial - definitions • A pidgin is an “auxiliary” language, one that has no native speakers. It is a speech system that has been formed to provide a means of communication between people who have no common language. • The idea is that when children are born into a pidgin-speaking population, they take the pidgin, “mold” it and give it structure, and make it a full-blown (new) language. We call this language a creole language.

Creole vs. dialect • A creole is considered a wholly new language, and not a dialect of, e.g., the “lexifier” - the language that most of the words of the language seem to come from. • So, for example, the “lexifier” of Jamaican Creole is British English, though there are some words with other origins (e.g. Carib, African). • But Jamaican Creole, for example, has different structural features - in a rather dramatic way - from British English (though things become murkier when we actually look at the nonstandard British sources of the vocabulary). • In the case of creoles, the underlying languages brought by the speakers of the language to, e.g., the New World, had a strong influence on the structure of the language.

Creole vs. dialect • Creole languages are of particular interest to linguists because some linguists (myself not included) have felt them to be direct insights into Universal Grammar. • When speakers of different languages come together (e.g., as on board a slave ship, or on a plantation), the impoverished form of communication they use to communicate is referred to as a pidgin. • Pidgins are choppy strings of words borrowed from the language of the colonizers or plantation owners, highly variable in order and with little in the way of grammar.

Creole vs. dialect • But things do seem to change if the contact situation persists. Upon the introduction of a new generation of children, according to some linguists, a “creole” is born. It is, according to these linguists, the result of children being exposed to the pidgin while they are acquiring language. They take the pidgin and make it richer in a way only children can do, because they acquire language much more rapidly and more rich a fashion than adults. That is, not content to reproduce the fragmentary word strings of pidgins, the children injected grammatical complexity where non existed before. The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole. • The idea is that the pidgin the children are exposed to is to impoverished to build a fully functional language out of. So, they fall back on their innate knowledge of Universal Grammar, or the “bioprogram” for language. Thus, many linguists regard creole languages as direct reflections of Universal Grammar.

Creole vs. dialect • Other linguists, myself included, have objected, however, arguing that creole languages are a complex product of mixing “superstrate” varieties (e.g. nonstandard poor white British dialects) with “substrate” varieties (e.g. African languages like Wolof). • The research paradigm becomes a bit different then - in my case, trying to figure out the complex logic that dictates why, e.g., certain African features have been selected, and why others have not. This issue appears to be an issue in chaos science - the study of nonlinear dynamical phenomena. • Contrast this with the Universal Grammar approach, which, to borrow a computer metaphor, is more like a linear “top down” approach - the idea is that UG, as a sort of master processor, directly dictates the terms of the resulting creole language. • Who is right? It is still a matter of huge controversy . . .

Creole vs. dialect • According to the textbook: A dialect is a distinct form of a language (or other communication system) that differs from other forms of that language in specific linguistic features (pronunciation, vocabulary, and/or grammar), possibly associated with some regional, social, or ethnic group, but that is nevertheless mutually intelligible with them. • Otherwise, it is frequently joked that a “langauge is a dialect with an army” - the point being that there is no hard and fast distinction between “language” and “dialect.” • And there are problems with the mutual intelligibility criteria above - the “dialects” of China, for example, are mutually unintelligible. And my white Southern English dialect is not always mutually intelligible with, e.g., Scottish English, even though both are supposed to be dialects of English. • For this reason, linguists prefer to speak simply of “language varieties.”

AAE - a creole or dialect? • Evidence suggests that AAE is a non-creole language variety. It seems to share many features with, e.g., nonstandard Southern white English, though with different statistical distributions. • Shortly, we will look at sociohistorical evidence that seems to suggest that AAE does not have creole origins. • But first, some of the features of AAE...

Linguistic features of AAE: phonology • Absence of intedental fricatives in words such as think, them, mouth, Ruth, with, and mother. In word-initial position, they are often replaced by /t/ or /d/, thus producing tink and dem. In intervocalic and word-final position, they are sometimes replaced by /f/ and /v/, producing movuh, mouf, roof, and wiv. In the name Ruth, a glottal stop is sometimes substituted for the fricative, yielding Ru’. • AAE is often characterized as “non-rhotic” because postvocalic r is typically not pronounced in word-final position, as in car, or before a consonant, as in guard.

Linguistic features of AAE: phonology • The lateral consonant l is often omitted in preconsonantal and word-final positions, as in help and toll, pronounced hep and to’, although the feature may not be as common as the omission of postvocalic r. • The case of help is related to a more general phenomenon regarding the simplification of consonant clusters typically in word-final position. Thus, guest, desk, and wasp are often pronounced without the final stop, viz., as guess, dess, and wass.

Linguistic features of AAE: phonology • Noteworthy in some varietes of AAVE is the merger of the vowels of words such as pen/pin and ten/tin pronounced indistinguishably as pin and tin. The merger seems to be restricted to a prenasal environment; it does not affect pairs such as bet/bit or tell/till. • In words such as cry, toy, loud, and road, the diphthongs /ay, oy, aw/ and /ow/ are frequently monophthongized, or at least their glides are very weak. Although the same tendency is obvervable among white Southerners, it seems to occur more frequently in AAE.

Linguistic features of AAE: phonology • Prosodically, viz., in terms of stress, AAE is very similar to nonstandard white English. For instance, the following words are typically assigned their stress on the first, rather than the second, vowel in both varieties: police, Detroit, and umbrella.

Linguistic features of AAE: syntax • In AAE, the possessive marker is not attested in phrases such as Nate book, and the plural marker is absent in two puppy. In this respect, AAE is similar to many creole languages. Note that in many West African languages, constituent order may be considered the primary (and sufficient) marker of possession in a possessive construction.

Linguistic features of AAE: syntax • AAE differs from other varieties of American English regarding predication, i.e. what the subject combines with to from a sentence. Aside from verb phrases, there are some verbless predicate phrases in which the key information is conveyed by an adjective, a preposition, or a non-pronominal noun phrase, as in John (very) sick “John [is] very sick”, they with Belle sister “they [are] with Belle’s sister,” and Diane the girl “Diane [is] the girl.” • These are environments in which the copula (any form of nonexistential be) is required ineducated and other varieties of American and British English.

Linguistic features of AAE: syntax • Compare this copula situation with, e.g., Gullah and Jamaican Creole. For instance, Gullah uses one copula, duh/da (pronounced with a schwa) as in Sara duh talk “Sarah is talking,” Faye duh she chile “Fay is her child,” and Teddy (duh) in the city “Teddy is in the city.” • On the other hand, Jamaican Creole distinguishes between the locative verb de (pronounced [d] as in Jaaj de a mi yaad “George is at my house” and the copula a as in Mieri a mi tiicha “Mary is my teacher.”

The genesis of AAE: Questions • Did AAE develop from a now-extinct creole either in the US or the Caribbean? • In what ways, if at all, did non-standard varieties of white British English affect the variety now known as AAE? • What about the role of West African languages? • How do the circumstances that led to the development of AAE differ, e.g., from the circumstances that led to the development of Gullah?

The genesis of AAE: “restructuring” • The theoretical notion of “restructuring” means “system reorganization.” Materials and principles selected from extant systems are rearticulated into a new system, in which they need not be integrated in the same ways as in the earlier one(s). The sources of these materials and rules need not be the same dialect or language. • AAE represents the result of a complex mixture of nonstandard white colonial varieties against the backdrop of African languages. • What are the sociohistorical circumstances leading to its development?

The genesis of AAE: Early contacts in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, and between them • In 1619, 12 years after the founding of the Virginia colony, the oldest English colony in the New World, a Dutch frigate traded 20 Africans to the Virginia governor in exchange for food. The settlers did not quite know how to use them. Those who bought them used them typically as domestics, in the same socio-economic status of indentured servents as many Europeans. The survivors managed to buy their freedom in 5-7 years and, as Free Blacks, they developed their own land and hired their own indentured servants, a number of home were Europeans.

The genesis of AAE: Early contacts in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, and between them • Few, if any, major plantations had developed yet. The Africans lived in annexes to the planters’ “big house” in Williamsburg or in homesteads outside the original capital. Although they must have gone through interlanguage phases in acquiring colonial English, nothing in this particular kind of social history suggests that the Africans would have developed a pidgin or creole. The circumstances are not typical of those in which pidgins have developed; contacts with speakers of the lexifier were certainly more than occasional and the Africans did not communicate mostly among themselves. Thus, the kind of social setup that would have favored the restructuring and divergence of their new vernacular did not obtain yet. The Africans were scattered and integrated within a European majority.

Sidebar: How this sociological/demographic situation differs from that that led, e.g. to Jamaican English or any other New World creole language… • … it differs because in the cases of massive linguistic structuring that eventually led to the development of true “creole” languages (e.g. Haitian Creole French), there was a massive demographic split – in terms of raw numbers – between the relatively few whites (speakers of European languages) and massive numbers of Africans (speakers of West African languages). • The telephone game scenario, with the founder population already having imperfect access to the European “lexifier,” as opposed to the relatively easy access (they lived in close physical and sociological proximity) in the case of the contact situation that eventually led to the development of African-American English.

The genesis of AAE: Early contacts in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, and between them • Overall, the slave population in Virginia grew very slowly during the 17th century. Toward the end of this period, it increased more by local births than by importation (though this was to change with the onset of the plantation system). • The status of Africans as indentured servants continued up to about 1675, providing 56 years of founder population that presumably spoke the same kind of English as the Europeans with whom they interacted and worked on a regular basis. (This is not to deny that the Africans were discriminated against in several ways. They were obviously discriminated against, because a consequency of this dsicrimination was the move toward slavery for life, as opposed to indenture. • Even after the status of Africans changed to that of slaves for life (from that of indentured servants), the low proportion of Africans and their sparse distribution among Europeans just did not favor the development of separate varieties of English, unless there would be race-based reasons for such a divergence to have taken place - And no working assumptions in today’s linguistics encourages this kind of correlation between race and language acquisition or evolution.

Other hypotheses (prob wrong) . . . The Founder Phenomenon • Some have argued that AAE is the way it is because around this time (17th cent.), some slaves were imported from Caribbean way stations like Barbados and St. Kitts. • But the notion of the Founder Principle argues against this. The Founder Principle is a notion from population genetics that suggests, in crude terms, “whoever gets there first sets the tone for future developments.” According to this principle, newcomers to the region would have sought to adapt to the local norms rather than impose their own. • Why have we not talked about Gullah in the Sea Islands? Because it was the Chesapeake colonies, not the Sea Islands, that provided the hinterland colonies (Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas) with the founder slave populations to start theircotton plantations. Viz, it was this population that was involved in the contact situation that eventually led to the development of AAE (African-American English) in the US.

The genesis of AAE: Early contacts in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, and between them • In general, the financial situation in Virginia, which, again, provided most of the population for the cotton plantations in the Southern hinterlands, just did not allow for massive importation new slaves. • The population grew more by birth - not by importation. • Contrast this with the situation on the rice plantations in the Sea Islands, where a creole (Gullah) did develop. Here, the improving financial conditions of the white planters permitted the massive importation of slaves either directly from Africa or via, e.g., Barbados (where they may have already acquired/developed a creole language). • Population did not increase by natural births so much as by importation. Why? Sterility, and the savageness of the labor conditions on the rice plantations.

The genesis of AAE: Early contacts in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, and between them • In this Sea Island ecology, wave after wave of massive African slave importation started a sort of “telephone game,” with the language rapidly and radically evolving away from white varieties, as the number of Blacks was substantially greater than the number of whites. This is the sort of ecology that leads to a creole language like Gullah, a creole language spoken in the Sea Island of South Carolina and Georgia. • By contrast, on the large cotton plantations of the Southern hinterlands, a variety closer to the nonstandard white Englishes of the Chesapeake has already taken hold. It is this ecology that is believed to have given rise to current AAE.

The genesis of AAE: Early contacts in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, and between them • Though there was discrimination in Virgina against (descendants of Africans), in Virginia, rigid segregation was not to be instituted until much later in the 19th century because there was not as much a demographic threat to the colonial European population as on the coastal South Carolinian and Georgian plantations. The relative integration of Blacks and poor Whites - both living primarily on small land holdings - favored the development of similar Black and White vernaculars.

The genesis of AAE: Early contacts in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, and between them • Agricultural industry became more lucrative for both Virginia and South Carolina by the end of the 17th century. However, indentured labor became more and more expensive, as job opportunities improved and labor wages increased in England, while word spread around there that the conditions of indenture in the colonies was harsh. This change made slave labor more attractive and less expensive as life-long investments. The planters turned to predominately African slave labor, importing it directly from Africa and less from the Caribbean.

Creole genesis – alternative views • I have promoted a strict-Darwinian natural selection view of the genesis of creole languages, a view I also insist largely accounts for development and change in ALL languages. • Therefore, the only thing that is “special” about creole languages according to this view is that the contact situation that led to the development of these sorts of languages was characterized by a radical demographic split between the two populations (white and black) in terms of raw numbers and a more extended second-language acquisition scenario whereby you had wave upon wave of Africans newly arrived on plantations learning the “lingua franca” of the plantation that eventually became the creole language.

Creole genesis – alternative views • But in principle – in terms of the basic mechanisms of language change – the linguistics of creole genesis (development of creole languages) are no different from the historical (diachronic) linguistics of any other language. • Note that this is a FAR CRY from the traditional way many modern – esp Chomsky-influenced – linguists think about creole languages.

Creole genesis – alternative views • For these linguists, creole languages are very special and unique, because they putatively represent a more or less direct reflection of Universal Grammar (UG) on the level of syntax and phonology (the latter being the organization of the sound system). The words may be, e.g., English or French-based, with a few West African words thrown in for good measure, but the claim is that the underlying structure of the creole language is a direct reflection of UG.

Creole genesis – alternative views • There are other hypotheses as well, some of which may complement the strong-Darwinian-hypothesis I have presented you. • One interesting – though I think a bit far-fetched – hypothesis is that the basis of modern creole languages is a 15th century Portuugese-based lingua franca known as Sabir – allegedly used my Portuguese adventurers, mercenaries, pirates, and slave traders. Note that the Portuguese were the earliest European population to begin economically exploiting the West African coast.

Creole genesis – alternative views • Another hypothesis is the so-called “Ship English” hypothesis initially promoted in Celis (1991)* and has had mild staying power. This hypothesis asserts that a powerful influence in the development of modern creole languages in, e.g., the Caribbean basin, may have been a special language called, for lack of a better name, “Ship English,” spoken by the mixed crews aboard slave ships. • The research of Celis (1991) suggested that the dialect of the city of Bristol may have contributed strongly to this “Ship English,” as a disproportionate number of slave ship crew members seem to have initially embarked from Bristol. And, in fact, so-called “gentlemen travelogues” from the 18th century indicate that Bristol had a unique “Bristol-only” dialect at that time – sort of like Philly English but much stronger.

African-American English (AAE) . . . pidgins . . . creoles