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8.3.6 |
Ethnic dialects |
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Over time, ethnic dialects might be expected to converge with local non-ethnic vernaculars, if not with regional or national standards, and this seems to be what has happened in the US with German-American English and IrishAmerican English, for example. Today, however, several ethnic varieties of AmE remain distinct, including those spoken in the Amish community (McArthur, 2002: 179), certain urban Jewish-American communities (McArthur, 2002: 198– 200) and American Indian communities (Leap, 1993); limitations of space prevent our describing those varieties here. Two other ethnic varieties are particularly salient. African American English has been the focus of considerable scholarly, political and even legal attention. Latino English, less well studied and described, is sometimes wrongly viewed as learner English.
8.3.6.1African American English (AAE)
Researchers disagree about the origins and evolution of African American English, particularly the extent to which it is based on a creole in the process of decreolisation or is a development of dialects first learned by African slaves chiefly on southern plantations (Mufwene, 2001). From the score of enslaved Africans first brought to Virginia on a Dutch boat in 1619, the tobacco and cotton plantations at the base of the South’s economy grew in reliance on slave labour, so that in 1790 the first US census showed nearly 48,000 families holding slaves in eight states. Coming mostly from West Africa and speaking many languages, slaves speaking the same language were systematically separated from one another. Today, across the thousands of miles separating New York and Los Angeles, and in urban centres throughout the US, AAE shows remarkably uniform grammatical, phonological, lexical and interactional patterns.
Besides a few unique features and some uncommon ones, AAE shares features with other varieties especially in the rural South, although speakers may display those features to a greater extent or in different linguistic environments. For example, in several varieties, desk, wild and passed may be pronounced [dεs], [wa l] and [phæs], but such consonant cluster reduction occurs to a greater extent in AAE than in other varieties, so much so that some speakers who pronounce the plural of desk as desses presumably have underlying /dεs/ rather than /dεsk/. Word-final stop consonants are variably deleted in words like side and borrowed, producing sigh and borrow. When the stop represents a separate morpheme (as in followed and tried), /d/ is preserved much more frequently than when it is part of a larger morpheme (e.g. side and rapid). Final stops in strongly stressed syllables (e.g. tried) tend to be preserved more than in weakly stressed syllables (e.g. borrowed, rapid). A following vowel most strongly preserves a final stop, as in side angle and tried it (cf. tried hard and side street).
The consonant represented by th in words like with, both and Bethlehem may be pronounced as a labiodental fricative ([wIf], [bof], [bεfləhεm]), while the underlying interdental fricative in words like smooth, bathe and brother may be
English in North America |
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pronounced as a labiodental ([smuv], [bev], [bɹ və]). AAE’s non-rhotic character is suggested by [bɹ və] for brother, and AAE also permits variable absence of intervocalic /r/, as in [phæs] for Paris. Two lexical pronunciations characteristic of AAE are aunt as [ant] or [ɑnt] (not [ænt]) and ask as [æks] (with metathesis), although the first also occurs in some standard varieties of New England and the South, the second in non-standard varieties throughout the US. Speakers of AAE show little or no participation in the Northern Cities Shift, even in urban centres where the shift is otherwise well advanced.
Among notable grammatical features are copula deletion, habitual be, negative concord, preterit had, existential it, and the verbal markers come and steady. Copula deletion occurs variably in present-tense expressions where standard English allows contraction: He my friend and The coffee cold (cf. He’s my friend). Habitual be, also called invariant be, signals recurring or repeated action, as in Yeah, the boys do be messin’ around a lot and I see her when I bees on my way to school. Negative concord, a feature widespread in non-standard dialects, appears in utterances like Don’t nobody never help me do my work and He don’t never go nowhere, in which more than one word is marked for negation, and the sense remains unmistakably negative.
Arising since the middle of the twentieth century and characteristic mostly of urban speakers is preterit had: the use of had with a past-tense verb to represent a simple past tense – a preterit – rather than the past perfect tense, as in standard varieties. Thus, urban AAE permits I had wrote and We had went (cf. standard I wrote and We went). ‘Existential it’ refers to the use of it is instead of there is in sentences such as Is it a Miss Williams in this office? and She’s been a wonderful wife and it’s nothin’ too good for her (cf. Is there a Miss Williams in this office? and . . . there’s nothing too good for her). Two verbal markers appear to be unique to AAE: come used as a modal to express speaker indignation (Don’t come telling me all those lies) and steady used as a modal to express an intense and continuous action of the verb (When I would talk to her, she wouldn’t pay me any attention. She would just steady drive) (Green, 2002: 22–4; see also Rickford, 1999).
AAE speakers also use characteristic vocabulary items and word senses not generally known by outsiders. Some words refer to phenomena associated with African American dress and personal care, such as ashy ‘the whitish coloration of black skin’ and kitchen ‘the hair at the nape of the neck’; others relate to patterns of behavior or interaction, as with saddity meaning ‘uppity’ or get over meaning ‘to take advantage of’, as in The students tried to get over on the teacher (Green, 2002).
Two interactional practices have been much discussed. Call and response occurs during church services and certain kinds of secular events at which a leader – a preacher, minister or speaker – says something and the congregation or audience responds spontaneously, though not necessarily in unison or harmony. The other, the dozens, can be illustrated from the work of African American novelists. Here, from a short story by Nora Zeale Hurston, is an example
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of playing the dozens, ‘the age-old black ritual of graceful insult’ (Gates, 1996: 291):
Yo’ mama don’t wear no Draws Ah seen her when she took ’em Off She soaked ’em in alcoHol
She sold ’em tuh de Santy Claus He told her ’twas aginst de Laws To wear dem dirty Draws (‘Hurricane’, 1946: 152)
Despite the popular sense that dialects are disappearing in the US largely as a consequence of nationwide television programmes, considerable evidence points to AAE’s becoming increasingly differentiated from mainstream varieties (see Butters, 1987).
8.3.6.2Latino English
Varieties of Latino English are spoken by residents of Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican and Latin American descent in many parts of the US. The best studied variety is that spoken by residents of Mexican descent in urban areas throughout the US and in rural areas of the southwest. Known as Chicano English (ChE), it is spoken natively by many Americans of Mexican ancestry, and as with other varieties of Latino English it would be inaccurate to characterise it as English spoken with a foreign accent. Still, some features characteristic of Latino English likely arose in situations where English was spoken as a second language, and some features may be supported by the continuing vitality of Spanish in Latino communities throughout the US. ChE exhibits consonant cluster reduction, as in [ s] for it’s, [kaIn] for kind, [ol] for old and [bεs] for best. Hardware may be pronounced [hɑw ] (Fought, 2003: 69) and It’s kind of hard [ skɑnəhɑɹ]. Consonant cluster reduction may appear within words, as in [ nəɹstæn] for understand. For the standard fricatives represented by th, speakers variably pronounce stops (typically apico-dental stops); thus, [t] or [t] for [θ] in thick and with and [d] or [d] for [ð] in then. Earlier reports suggesting that ChE devoices /z/, especially in word-final position, have not been confirmed, perhaps because those studies did not distinguish adequately between native speakers of ChE and speakers of learner English or because ChE has changed in the intervening decades. Support for the evolutionary view appears in a finding of occasional use in older but not younger speakers of ChE (Fought, 2003). Words like sing and long that end in -ng (not verbal -ing) are pronounced with both a velar nasal and a velar stop: [s ŋg] and [lɔŋg] instead of standard [s ŋ] and [lɔŋ].
The ChE vowel system is close to that of standard varieties, but shows less gliding and less reduction of unstressed vowels. In standard AmE, long vowels tend to be glided and are often represented, even phonemically, as diphthongs: /iy/ and /ey/, /uw/ and /ow/. Possibly as an abiding influence from Spanish, whose vowels are not glided, speakers of ChE pronounce long vowels more nearly as