The book, titled "The Development of African American English," was written by Dr. Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English, and Dr. Erik Thomas, associate professor of English, and is scheduled to be released in England by Blackwell Publishing this week. It asserts that African-American speech is derived both from British-based dialects, which would have been adopted by blacks as they were enslaved and brought to colonial America, and vestiges of an African-based Creole language markedly different from British-based dialects. Based largely on research conducted in Hyde County, N.C., Wolfram and Thomas call into question the dominant linguistic theories of the past 50 years. The book concludes that earlier African-American speech was much more regional, but that it coexisted with language roots from its African heritage.
The history of sociolinguistic theory on African-American English has been dominated by three main theories, according to Wolfram and Thomas: the Anglicist hypothesis of the 1950s, which asserts that blacks spoke British dialects just like any other immigrant ethnic group; the Creolist hypothesis of the 1960s and '70s, which maintains that AAVE has its roots in an expansive Creole language brought from Africa; and the 1990s neo-Anglicist position, which reasserts the Anglicist hypothesis while acknowledging that AAVE radically diverged in the 20th century, making it far different from white vernacular speech.
A team of researchers from NC State conducted about 150 interviews of African-Americans and whites in Hyde County, a small, rural county of mostly marshland that is home to some of the earliest settlements in North Carolina. European-American and African-American communities settled there as early as the turn of the 1700s. A distinguishing linguistic characteristic of Hyde County is the Outer Banks dialect, a recognized, European-American dialect studied in Wolfram's previous work on Ocracoke Island, and exemplified by pronunciations like "hoi toid" for "high tide."
"Limited in-migration and population growth and the relatively stable co-existence of white and black families make Hyde County an ideal laboratory," Wolfram says. "Listening to older African-Americans in Hyde County can tell you what black speech was like; listening to younger African-Americans there can tell you where it's going."
Listening to one 87-year-old African-American from Hyde County sounds a lot like listening to an older white person from Hyde County, "hoi toids" and all, Wolfram and Thomas learned. Wolfram says, however, that there are vestiges of African influence present that almost no white people in Hyde County would ever use while speaking; for example, the absence of an 's' attached to a verb after a third-person singular noun, as in the sentence "The dog always bark at noon."
If older African-Americans and older whites in Hyde County sound similar, the speech of younger Hyde County African-Americans couldn't be more different, Wolfram and Thomas assert. That's because black speech became strongly identified with a sense of black identity in the 20th century, Wolfram says. Simply put, younger blacks don't necessarily want to sound like whites.
"One of the ways African-Americans have become increasingly black is by disassociating themselves from local white speech," Wolfram says. "Young African-Americans from Hyde County don't sound like Hyde County folks. Instead, they sound more like a national norm of what African-American speech is supposed to sound like."
Wolfram and Thomas believe that one of the major ways black speech norms in the 20th century have been transmitted is by interregional contact among African-Americans.
"In effect, African-American speech in Hyde County turned away from local, rural norms toward the norms of African-American English found in other settings throughout the United States, particularly urban contexts," the book states. "It is now well established that there is a core set of AAVE structures regardless of where AAVE is spoken in the United States. This generalized core of features seems to be the norm that younger African-American speakers are turning to as their vernacular model at the same time they are moving away from the Hyde County regional dialect norms."
Wolfram and Thomas' research takes a different tack in another portion of Hyde County, though it still supports the new theory. Muzial Bryant is a 97-year-old African-American whose family has lived on Hyde County's Ocracoke Island since the 1860s. In fact, her family has been the only African-American family living on the island, and she now is the only black resident on the island. Yet she does not sound completely like the white Ocracokers she's been around all her life. Most people listening to her say she sounds black.
"How can a single black person sound this way on a historically isolated, all-white island?" Wolfram asks. "The answer must lie in the fact the Bryant family went to Ocracoke with black speech, and in its isolation the Bryant family became its own speech community. The nine children in Bryant's family perpetuated African-American vestiges of speech."
Current research of an isolated pocket of African-Americans in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina also supports Wolfram and Thomas' thesis. African-Americans sound a lot like whites, but use vestiges of African speech that aren't present in white speech, Wolfram says. Moreover, blacks use these same African vestiges in both Hyde County and in the mountains; Wolfram believes these people have not had any contact, so only his new theory would explain their speech similarities.
"Other theories of African-American speech haven't understood the dynamics of race historically, and therefore of language as it existed and continues to project identity in the 20th century," Wolfram says.
The book was supported by the National Science Foundation and the William C. Friday Endowment.
A noted scholar and past-president of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Wolfram has pioneered research on a broad range of vernacular dialects over the past three decades. Under his direction, the program in language variation studies at NC State has become one of the top research programs in language variation in the country. Thomas is a specialist in phonetics who focuses on the computerized measurement of vowel sounds.