The Oxford Handbook of African American Language

by Lanehart, Sonja

• ISBN13: 9780199795390
• ISBN10: 0199795398
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-06-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The goal of The Oxford Handbook of African American Language is to provide readers with a wide range of analyses of both traditional and contemporary work on language use in African American communities in a broad collective. The Handbook offers a survey of language and its uses in African American communities from a wide range of contexts organized into seven sections: Origins and Historical Perspectives; Lects and Variation; Structure and Description; Child Language Acquisition and Development; Education; Language in Society; and Language and Identity. It is a handbook of research on African American Language (AAL) and, as such, provides a variety of scholarly perspectives that may not align with each other -- as is indicative of most scholarly research. The chapters in this book "interact" with one another as contributors frequently refer the reader to further elaboration on and references to related issues and connect their own research to related topics in other chapters within their own sections and the handbook more generally to create dialogue about AAL, thus affirming the need for collaborative thinking about the issues in AAL research. Though the Handbook does not and cannot include every area of research, it is meant to provide suggestions for future work on lesser-studied areas (e.g., variation/heterogeneity in regional, social, and ethnic communities) by highlighting a need for collaborative perspectives and innovative thinking while reasserting the need for better research and communication in areas thought to be resolved.

Author Biography

Sonja Lanehart is Professor and Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Literature and the Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Table of Contents

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
Renée 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-Sustaíta

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