LINGUIST List 13.837

Tue Mar 26 2002

Review: Socioling: Poplack & Tagliamonte (2001)

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  • William Stone, African American English in the Diaspora

    Message 1: African American English in the Diaspora

     Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 15:04:02 -0600
    From: William Stone <W-Stoneneiu.edu>
    Subject: African American English in the Diaspora


    Poplack, Shana, and Sali Tagliamonte (2001) African American English in the Diaspora. Blackwell, paperback ISBN 0-631-21266-3, xxi+293pp, Language in Society 30

    William J. Stone, Northeastern Illinois University

    African American English in the Diaspora investigates the origins of African American Vernacular English (A.A.V.E.). Using evidence from recorded conversations of ex-slaves and their descendants in the United States, the Samana Peninsula in the Dominican Republic and in Nova Scotia, this work attempts to bring more light to bear on the convergence/divergence debate that has been one of the main foci of attention in A.A.V.E. studies in the past sixteen years since the publication of Labov and Harris's (1986) "De Facto Segregation of Black and White Vernaculars."

    In this book, Poplack and Tagliamonte provide ample and necessary background information about the diaspora itself: about who the people involved were, why they left and where they went. They investigate the tense/aspect system of historic (or preserved) varieties to establish whether their structure is more commensurate with a creole origin or with an English origin. They argue that, even after a prolonged period of decreolization, a language should show signs in its tense and aspect of a creole origin if one exists. They combine methods of variationist sociolinguistics and historical linguistics to asses the relationships between various corpora including historic and contemporary speech communities in North America and England.

    In the first chapter, the basic structure of the book is outlined with summaries of the nature of the diaspora communities and the methods to be used in the analysis of the data.

    In chapters two and three,the validity of the data for this research is outlined. Convincing historical material is reviewed which confirms that the population of the Samana Peninsula of the Dominican Republic and the North Preston and Guysborough communities in Nova Scotia provide language data of a variety of A.A.V.E. that should be relevant to the current research. The relative isolation of these communities guaranteed that the speech that was analyzed had been essentially unaffected by outside influences and, thus, closely reflects the A.A.V.E. of the time of the diaspora.

    Chapter four outlines the external controls in the research in the form of data from Ex-Slave Recordings (E.S.R.) and language data from Guysborough Village, a white enclave in Nova Scotia, from Ottawa, Canada and from Tiverton, Devon in England. The Guysborough data is clearly relevant being geographically close to one of the A.A.V.E. groups under investigation. The Ottawa data represents a source of near standard Canadian English. The Tiverton data represents a British example that should have changed little being in a relatively isolated part of England. The Guysborough Village, Ottawa and Tiverton corpora are uncontroversial selections for controls, but the E.S.R. are more debatable.

    The E.S.R. were made largely largely in the 1930s of people born into slavery between 1840 and 1865. There is criticism of the validity of these recordings as viable sources of linguistic data, but Poplack and Tagliamonte go to some length in assuaging our fears over this issue. The E.S.R. act as a control for the Samana and Nova Scotia data in so far as the e-slaves recorded were born within a few decades of the migrants of the diaspora. However the potential for speech accommodation on the part of the interviewees is not fully addressed and this still leaves the reader with some doubt as to the usefulness of the data.

    Chapter five outlines the comparative method used in the analysis of the data. Chapter six applies this to an analysis if the past tense and chapter seven to an analysis of the present tense. Chapter eight looks at the future. These three chapters impress the reader with the rigor of their approach. The multivariate statistical analysis provides convincing evidence of a lack of an underlying creole origin. It is suggested that the lack of past markings in weak verbs can largely be accounted for by phonological rule (-t/-d deletion) which is widely established in the literature. The fact that strong verbs maintain the past markings offers further evidence in support of the proposal that lack of tense marking is phonological rather than morphological and does not, therefore, prove a genetic link to creoles that lack a past marker. The evidence for the present tense argument is less convincing especially in light of research by Singler (1997) among others. They argue equally convincingly that the use of -s provides evidence for a creole origin to A.A.V.E. in its various guises.

    Chapter nine summarizes the findings of the analyses. The basic finding of the research is that the statistical evidence from what appears to be the language of African Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century showed that A.A.V.E. was more like the white varieties of English than a creole. This suggests that the creole origin hypothesis is put seriously in doubt and that we have been experiencing marked divergence in black and white varieties of the language which brings us to the position that currently obtains in North America.

    As stated above, the arguments presented in the text are extremely convincing. However, there are a few points that might be addressed. Although the book is very much focused on the tense/aspect system, this is not the only factor that can tie into a creole or British origin to the language. Singler (1989) for example, has found evidence from plural markings in Liberian Settler English to support a creole origin. Rickford (1999), among others, investigates the copula in A.A.V.E. and finds ties to creole languages.

    One addition that this reader feels would greatly add to the arguments of this work would be the use of an acknowledged creole language used as a control for comparison purposes. As Jamaican Patwa and Trinidadian Creole provide data of a post-creole continuum, it would be interesting to see how an analysis of that data would compare with the other corpora analyses that are outlined in this work.

    Of course, we have no in depth discussion of A.A.V.E. in the centuries prior to the diaspora. Rickford (1999) provides a useful socio-historic context that suggests that a creole is still a viable option for A.A.V.E. genesis. More significantly, he, (Rickford) (1987) has shown that convergence and divergence can be operant at different times in the same speech varieties. He suggests that there is no evidence to show that A.A.V.E. had not already decreolized by the middle of the last century as we have no actual data related to periods before that time. Even those who support the creole genesis theory do not suggest that A.A.V.E. decreolized uniformly. Those with more contact with Caucasian speakers would have more acrolectal speech. Consequently, at any given time there will exist a whole continuum of A.A.V.E. from the basilectal to the accrolectal. We would need to know the social standing of all those who migrated to the various diaspora destinations. It would be wrong to assume a basilectal language level for all of the migrants as we know that many of those who lead the migrations were not field slaves but educated and , thus, almost certainly spoke a variety of English reasonably high in the A.A.V.E. continuum. This would clearly affect the development of their language in the following century.

    Although this book provides excellent and rigorous discussion of clearly relevant data, it does not write the final word (nor does it claim to) on the whole divergence/convergence origin of A.A.V.E. debate.

    This volume is the most recent addition to the excellent Language in Society series from Blackwell. It is essential reading for any student of A.A.V.E.

    REFERENCES Labov, William and Wendell Harris. 1986. "De Facto Segregation of Black and White Vernaculars." in Diversity and Diachrony. ed. by David Sankoff. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Rickford, John. (1987) Dimensions in a Creole Continuum: History, Texts and Linguistic Analysis of a Guyanese Creole. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    _____. (1999) African American Vernacular English. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc.

    Singler, J. V. (1989) "Plural Markings in Liberian Settler English" in American Speech 64: 40 - 64.

    _____, (1997) On the genesis, evolution and diversity of African American English: Evidence from verbal -s in the Liberian Settler English of Sinoe. Paper read at SPCL at London, England.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER William J. Stone received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2000 and is now an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. His current interests include A.A.V.E., Syllable Structure, T.E.S.L. and Syntax for teaching purposes.