AAVE

The history of African-American Vernacular English is not unlike that of other dialects of US English -- migration (although in this case forced, and ending in enslavement), partial assimilation with English, and (in the end) a significant contribution to our national linguistic strength and variety. And yet, more so than any other dialect, it's been haunted by its often-distorted shadow in popular culture, from the 1830's until the present, from Minstrelsy to R&B to Hip-hop. Its authentic cultural productions have always had to compete with imitation, parody, and appropriation.

Blackface Minstrelsy may very well have been the single most popular American form of entertainment from the 1840's through to the 1940's. Its popularity waxed and waned, from a peak in the 1850's, through a gradual decline until a revival in the 1880's, followed by a gradual shift toward more "refined" versions produced by both amateur and professional companies in the period between WWI and WWII. The 1940's saw its permanent decline, in large part due to social changes, integration of the armed forces, and the post-war rise of television, although it still survives in a few isolated places such as Derby Connecticut, where a clown-face "Gang Show" is now in its 100th year (they stopped using blackface in 1944). On American TV it was familiar enough for Sonnny & Cher to parody it with a "greenface" parody dubbed a "Monstrel Show" in 1976, while in the UK, where minstrelsy had been enormously popular from its earliest period, the Black and White Minstrel Show remained on the air until 1978!

Of course it is easy to see this tradition as fundamentally compromised from the start, as it relied upon a distorted, comical, theatrical version of "blackness" devised by white entertainers. And yet, from the beginning, it was a hybrid form, appropriating bits of actual Black culture and mixing them with elements such as Irish jigs, regional "rustic" humor, melodrama, and early skits and vaudeville routines. As early as the 1850's there were a number of Black Blackface troupes ("Black people in blacker faces," as Bamboozled's Pierre Delacroix puts it), some of which enjoyed even wider success than white troupes. The commercial success of the form, for better and for worse, paved the way for other artforms which were, or were perceived as, "Black," including Dixieland jazz, blues, and Black vaudeville.

Fortunately, the actual history of AAVE is more complex, and infinitely richer, than its pop-cultural avatars. Its origins can be traced to various West-African languages and trade pidgins (these were argots drawn from languages along a trade route, such as the Congo river). When slaves were deliberately sold in lots in which there was no common dialect, the trade pidgin formed the basis of communication; when latter agglomerated within various colonial languages, they became "creoles." Jamaican "patwa" is an English creole, and there are Spanish, French, and Portuguese creoles scattered through the Caribbean and the Cape Verde Islands. AAVE, in its origin, was also a creole, but as its speakers were part of a much larger population surrounded by land instead of water, there was a longer period of addition and assimilation. Modern AAVE is a full, complete, English dialect which indeed -- as it preserves some features of West African languages, such as a "habitual" mood of the verb "to be" -- is more capacious than "standard" English.

English with an Accent

We're shifting gears this week -- from historical English to the Englishes of today, from an emphasis on written language to one on spoken language in all its variety, from the underlying structures beneath language to the overlying srtuctures society erects above and on top of language. And we could have no better guide at this moment than Rosini Lippi-Green.

In this chart, taken from her book English With an Accent, we see how white undergrads in Indiana thought about samples of spoken language -- how "correct" or "normal" was the speech they heard. Of course, they sounded normal to themselves, and so did most folks from the Midwest, along with California, Colorado, and Washington State. The southwest, particilarly Texas, sounded less correct, and the dep south -- sometimes called the "Southern Trough" -- sounded the most incorrect of all. Rhode Islanders, incidentally, came out in the second quintile -- that is, just a little less normal than Hoosiers -- and better than New Yawk.

But what does this perception mean? If such a survey had been conducted sixty or seventy years ago, it might have come out a bit different, as most Amderican in public life -- politicians, actors, and speech-makers -- adapted the "Mid-Atlantic" accent (you can hear it, among many other places, in 1939's "The Wizard of Oz," in which everyone says Wizzahd instead of Wizerd).  But this common upper-middle-to-upper-class accent faded away after WWII, and the era of broadcast television; rumbly midwesterners such as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Tom Brokaw soon set the standard, and placed our national normative right in the middle of the midwest.

But of course American accents -- mostly "L1" accents, that is, accents acquired from infancy via regional variations in one's natural/family language -- are only one part of it. For those, whether in the US or abroad, for whom English was their second (or third, or fourth) language, there's another set of issues; these we know as "L2" accents. In the same way we might call an American accent a "Southern" or a "New England" accent, L2 accents are often called "foreign," though that's not really a good way to describe them. Foreign to whom? The key difference, though, is that L2 speakers are more likely to substitute sounds from their native language in the place of less familiar (or less-familiarly-placed) sounds in English. Thus, say, a German speaker might say "heff" instead of "have," and a French speaker might pronounce "sweater" as "swettauw." We're exposed to such accents all the time, but -- as with L1 accents -- it's pop culture, in the form of cartoons, comedy skits, and television shows that often sets up our expectations. Certainly, during the time I was growing up, it was hard to avoid picking up on the negative connotations of a German accent (Colonel Klink), a Russian one (Boris Badanov), or even a French one (Pepé le Pew) -- and there were plenty of "bad" L1 accents in cartoons too (anyone remember the Hillbilly Bears?).

This week, we're going to use both the Speech Accent Archive and various Accent Tags to bend our ears to the sounds of English: here, there, and everywhere.

American English

The history of American English usage marks the most recent, and in some ways the most dramatic set of changes in English since the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare.  And yet, in this change, there was no single author, no single literary or political influence to credit, or blame; like the United States itself it was a patchwork affair, arrived at by degrees and with contributions from both immigrants and indigenous peoples over a period of more than four hundred years.

There is, however, one name that is often linked to some of the key changes in spelling and usage which made American English distinctive, and it's that of Noah Webster (1758-1853). Webster was a schoolmaster who, like many such men of his time, wrote his own textbooks, with a focus on orthography -- the spelling and pronunciation of words -- as well as elements of grammar.  He used the books in his school, and sold them to others; at a time when the printing business was in its infancy, Webster's "Spellers" as they became known, soon dominated the market.  The money he earned from them enabled Webster to work on his Dictionary, on which his larger hopes and ambitions rested.  In his instruction, as in his books, Webster held that the study of Latin and Greek, admirable though it was, should not take precedence over the study of English, and that everyday American usage, not that of British aristocrats, should be the model. He once lamented that "the whispers of common sense, in favour of our native tongue, have been silenced amidst the clamour of pedantry in favour of Greek and Latin."

One may note his usage there -- clamour and favour used the older British spellings that Webster would eventually abandon, preferring clamor and favor -- but his was no overnight reform, and the changes he made took place gradually over the course of his career.  Perhaps that, along with the ubiquity of his books, helped American adapt to, and eventually adopt, his spellings. Not all of his reforms succeeded -- we still use ache instead of Webster's ake, soup rather than his soop, and tongue rather than tung -- but for the most part, his changes have become permanent.  He even had some influence on British usage -- Charles Dickens, for one, tended to use the -or rather than the -our endings -- but his publishers corrected these and so the Brits (and Canadians and Australians) are stuck with with them.

American English also marked a period of renewed growth and change in our lexicon. We added words from native languages (moccasin, kayak, tomahawk), as well as from the waves of immigrants who arrived on our shores (look up brogan, schmaltz, gauntlet, banana, tycoon, paprika, mammoth, or adobe for a sense of how wide the influence has been), along with all kinds of crazy coinages of our own, from shenanigans to shindig, from oink to woof, from pesky to phony, from vittles to vroom. Much like the UK, strong regional variations of English have developed, not only in terms of phonology but also lexicon and idiomatic phrases; the Dictionary of American Regional English catalogs these, and there are tens of thousands of them. Would you eat a "dropped egg"? How would you feel if you had the "mulligrubs"? And what does one do at a "chic sale?" All things considered, the American turn of English has been a wonderfully enriching one, and it ain't done yet.