Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:39:17.491Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Regional differences in low SES African-American children's speech in the school setting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2007

Anne H. Charity
Anne H. Charity
Affiliation:
The College of William and Mary
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Comprehensive investigations of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) have demonstrated that most features of AAVE reported in the sociolinguistic literature are consistently seen in nearly every African-American speech community in which vernacular speech has been documented. This article highlights quantitative regional differences in the speech produced by African-American children from three U.S. cities in an academic setting. In this analysis, 157 5- to 8-year-old African-American children in New Orleans, LA, Washington, DC, and Cleveland, OH imitated the sentences of a story presented in Standard American English (SAE) by teachers. The 15 sentences included many items that were possible mismatches between the child's vernacular and SAE. Afterwards, the children retold the story in their own words. Children's use of SAE and AAVE features in both tasks was analyzed. Higher rates of AAVE feature use occurred in New Orleans than in Cleveland or Washington, DC.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , October 2007 , pp. 281 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adero, Malaika (ed). (1993). Up South: Stories, studies and letters of this century's black migrations. New York, New Press.Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy. (2005). You know my steez: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a black American speech community. American Dialect Society Publications, Durham, NC: Duke University.Google Scholar
Bailey, Richard. (2003). The foundation of English in the Louisiana Purchase: New Orleans, 1800–1850. American Speech 78:363–384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baugh, John. (1983). Black street speech: Its history, structure, and survival. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Charity, Anne. H. (2003). Style-shifting and range of dialect in the formal speech of African-American elementary school children. The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Vol. 9.2, New Ways of Analyzing Variation 31 Proceedings. 27–38.Google Scholar
Charity, Anne. H. (2005). Dialect variation in school settings among African-American children of low-socioeconomic status. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Charity, Anne. H., Scarborough, Hollis, & Griffin, Darion (2004). Familiarity with School English in African-American children and its relation to early reading achievement. Child Development 75:1340–1356.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Childs, Rebecca. (2005). Investigating the local construction of identity: Sociophonetic variation in Smoky Mountain African American women's speech. Doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia.Google Scholar
Craig, Holly, & Washington, Julie. (2000). An assessment battery for identifying language impairments in African American children. Journal of Speech, Language, & Hearing Research 43: 366–379.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Craig, Holly, & Washington, Julie (2006). Malik goes to school: Examining the language skills of African American students from preschool–5th grade. Mawah, NJ: Earlbaum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dandy, Evelyn. (1991). Black communications: Breaking down the barriers. Chicago: African American Images.Google Scholar
Delpit, Lisa, & Dowdy, Joanne Kilgour. (2003). The skin that we speak: Thoughts on language and culture in the classroom. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Dubois, Sylvie, & Horvath, Barbara. (2003a). Creoles and Cajuns: A portrait in black and white. American Speech 78:192–207.Google Scholar
Dubois, Sylvie, & Horvath, Barbara (2003b). The English vernacular of the creoles of Louisiana. Language Variation and Change 15:255–288.Google Scholar
Dubois, Sylvie, & Horvath, Barbara (2003c). Verbal morphology in Cajun vernacular English: A comparison with other varieties of southern English. Journal of English Linguistics 31:34–59.Google Scholar
Fought, Carmen (2001). Ethnicity. In Chambers, J. K., Peter, Trudgill, Natalie, Schilling-Estes (Ed.), The handbook of language variation and change (pp. 444–472). Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Fraser, Colin, Belugi, Ursula, & Brown, Roger. (1963). Control of grammar in imitation, comprehension, and production. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 2:121–135.Google Scholar
Green, Lisa. (2002). African American English: A linguistic introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Lisa (2004). Production and comprehension of three be's in child African American English. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 33, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1972a). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1972b). The isolation of contextual styles. In Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 70–100.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1998). Co-existent systems in African-American English. In Mufwene, Salikoko S., Rickford, John R., Bailey, Guy, & Baugh, John (eds.), African-American English: Structure, history and use. New York: Routledge. 85–109.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Cohen, Paul, Robins, Clarence, & Lewis, John. (1968). The non-standard English of black and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City, final report, No. 3288. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.Google Scholar
La Chance, Paul. (1992). The foreign French. In Hirsch, Arnold R. & Logsdon, Joseph (eds.), Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 101–130.Google Scholar
Lemann, Nicholas. (1991). The promised land: The great black migration and how it changed America. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Oetting, Jana, & McDonald, Janet. (2001). Nonmainstream dialect and specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44:207–223.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Picone, Michael. (2003). Anglophone slaves in francophone Louisiana. American Speech 78:404–433.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radloff, Carla (1991). Sentence repetition testing for studies of community bilingualism. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.Google Scholar
Rickford, John. (1999). Phonological and grammatical features of African-American vernacular English. In African American vernacular English: Features and use, evolution, and educational implications. Oxford: Blackwell. 3–14.Google Scholar
Smedley, Audrey. (1999). Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Stockman, Ida. (1996). The promises and pitfalls of language sample analysis as an assessment tool for linguistic minority children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 27:355–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The University of Illinois-Chicago Big City Teacher Preparation Initiative. (2006). http://www.uic.edu/educ/bctpi/greatmigration2/dataviewer/usa/USAcounties.htmlGoogle Scholar
United States Census Bureau website. (Feb. 28, 2005). Population Division, Racial Statistics Branch. http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/race/black.htmlGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro Speech. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, Adger, Carolyn Temple, & Christian, Donna. (2003). Language variation in schools and communities. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, & Carpenter, Jeannine. (2006). Trajectories of change in African American English. Paper presented at the Linguistic Society of America 2006 Annual Conference, Albuquerque, NM.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, & Schilling-Estes, Natalie. (2005). American English: Dialects and variation. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar