4 - The African American speech community

Summary

African American English (AAE) is important to African American people. It is about ideas, art, ideology, love and memory. Whether they celebrate or criticize AAE, its continued presence is indisputable evidence of what they have been through and achieved in society today. The speaker who relies on its most vernacular form represents his or her social world and the encroachments of racism, inadequate education systems and class inequities. The successful adult who claims an allegiance to standard, “good” speech uses language as proof that the escape from racism is successful and over. The teenager who confronts and confounds the world with language games and verbal usage that celebrates the dialect is recognizing its power to both simultaneously represent a generation and defy authority. The college student and computer specialist who uses elite speech when working with others and AAE when theorizing and plotting to build an empire is using every creative linguistic resource to build a future. The US president who is constantly attacked in terms of identity and citizenship uses it to demonstrate that he understands what is going on. AAE is part and parcel of social, cultural and political survival.

Contact and the African American speech community

Discussions of language contact in earlier chapters have alluded to the extreme circumstances that can result from the often violent meeting of peoples and their languages. Discussion of the development of the African American speech community and its survival provides an important example of how speech communities often develop, and how dialect difference and language itself may become the context that represents and condemns the contact. The African American speech community refers to the community of speakers whose African ancestors experienced plantation slavery in the US. According to Eltis and Richardson (2007), between 1525 and 1866 an estimated 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Some 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 Africans were shipped directly to North America. According to Henry Louis Gates (2013), some believe that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans were taken to the US after arriving in the Caribbean, making the total approximately 450,000 Africans who arrived in the US over the course of the slave trade.