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10. Beyond Hyde Co: The Past & Present Development of AAVE

Explore the transformation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) over time through examining past and present developments, including linguistic shifts, social influences, and the establishment of norms.

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10. Beyond Hyde Co: The Past & Present Development of AAVE

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  1. 10. Beyond Hyde Co: The Past & Present Development of AAVE

  2. Overall trends: • Young EurAms are accentuating selected local dialect features • Young AfAms are increasingly conforming to AAVE norm • Some local traits (vowel system) are being abandoned by both groups

  3. What did earlier AAVE look like? • There are many things that we cannot discover • Evidence of both partial alignment of regional EurAm and AAE, and of long-term substrate influence that has perpetuated the ethnolinguistic divide • Evidence does not support claim that an extensive plantation creole existed in the South • But AAVE may have been influenced by creole features, even if no widespread creole existed • AAVE speakers have selectively maintained AAVE features

  4. Trajectories of change • Earlier Hyde Co AfAms accommodated the regional dialect much more than current generation • AfAms do not participate in local dialect focusing – EurAms do • AfAms are adjusting their speech to an external norm • Elderly AfAm speakers “sound white”; younger AfAm Hyde Countians “sound black”

  5. Patterns of change • Parallel: AfAms & EurAms are both losing Hyde Co vowel features • Divergence: weren’t leveling is being accentuated by EurAms and lost by AfAms; habitual be is being adopted by AfAms but not by EurAms • Accentuation of earlier differences: r-lessness & are copula absence are increasing among young AfAms

  6. Idealized trajectories of change • See figure 10.1 on p. 200 • Initial, pre-WWI difference > WWI convergence > greater and greater divergence with complete loss of local dialect features among AfAms • Period of school integration corresponds to time of intense divergence (recall that AfAms protested against integration)

  7. How are norms of AAVE established and conveyed? • Actuation issue: where do the norms come from? • Embedding issue: what is the social practice of establsihing norms, what social meaning do they have? • Diffusion issue: how are norms spread? Usual models of spread (contagious, hierarchical, and contrahierarchical) do not account for supraregional normative developments in contemporary AAVE • Dynamic issue: how do we account for fact that vernacular varieties are constantly changing?

  8. Discussion point: • Codification of vernacular norms is covert and informal. We know little about the regulatory procedures and social mechanisms used to instantiate and perpetuate vernacular dialectal norms.

  9. How do we explain the supraregional norms of contemporary AAVE? • Distinctive structures already existed in earlier AAVE – vestiges have been amazingly resilient • Expanded mobility & interregional intraethnic contact situation arose for 20th C AfAms • Continuing racial segregation of society • Growing sense of ethnic identity associated with AAVE

  10. Discussion point: • “The development of AAVE into an ethnolinguistically distinct variety with a transregional base is one of the strongest arguments for the robustness of vernacular language norming.”

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