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Mahurin-Smith, Jamie, Monique T. Mills, and Rong Chang. "Rare Vocabulary Production in School-Age Narrators From Low-Income Communities." Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 52, no. 1 (2021): 51–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2020_lshss-19-00120.
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Purpose This study was designed to assess the utility of a tool for automated analysis of rare vocabulary use in the spoken narratives of a group of school-age children from low-income communities. Method We evaluated personal and fictional narratives from 76 school-age children from low-income communities ( M age = 9;3 [years;months]). We analyzed children's use of rare vocabulary in their narratives, with the goal of evaluating relationships among rare vocabulary use, performance on standardized language tests, language sample measures, sex, and use of African American English. Results Use of rare vocabulary in school-age children is robustly correlated with established language sample measures. Male sex was also significantly associated with more frequent rare vocabulary use. There was no association between rare vocabulary use and use of African American English. Discussion Evaluation of rare vocabulary use in school-age children may be a culturally fair assessment strategy that aligns well with existing language sample measures.
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Edwards, Jan, Megan Gross, Jianshen Chen, et al. "Dialect Awareness and Lexical Comprehension of Mainstream American English in African American English–Speaking Children." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 57, no. 5 (2014): 1883–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2014_jslhr-l-13-0228.
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Purpose This study was designed to examine the relationships among minority dialect use, language ability, and young African American English (AAE)–speaking children's understanding and awareness of Mainstream American English (MAE). Method Eighty-three 4- to 8-year-old AAE-speaking children participated in 2 experimental tasks. One task evaluated their awareness of differences between MAE and AAE, whereas the other task evaluated their lexical comprehension of MAE in contexts that were ambiguous in AAE but unambiguous in MAE. Receptive and expressive vocabulary, receptive syntax, and dialect density were also assessed. Results The results of a series of mixed-effect models showed that children with larger expressive vocabularies performed better on both experimental tasks, relative to children with smaller expressive vocabularies. Dialect density was a significant predictor only of MAE lexical comprehension; children with higher levels of dialect density were less accurate on this task. Conclusions Both vocabulary size and dialect density independently influenced MAE lexical comprehension. The results suggest that children with high levels of nonmainstream dialect use have more difficulty understanding words in MAE, at least in challenging contexts, and suggest directions for future research.
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Okoh, Harriet. "The English in Ghana: British, American or Hybrid English?" Studies in English Language Teaching 7, no. 2 (2019): 174. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/selt.v7n2p174.
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<p><em>As a result of colonization of the British, the English used in many African countries and for that matter Ghana, is the British standard variety. However, the English used in Ghana, appears to have been invaded by the American English. This poses a problem as both teachers and students especially at the senior high school level confuse themselves about which word or spelling is right and vice versa. This study thus seeks to investigate students’ awareness of this invasion, the extent of the invasion and also to ascertain which of the aspects of the language has been much influenced by the American variety. The underpinning framework for this study is Kachru’s (1985) concentric model to situate the type of English used in Ghana. A sample size of 100 Students of English Education Department of University of Education, Winneba was selected for the study. The data was a secondary one: a random collection of vocabulary. Test, interview and questionnaire were also employed to gather other related data for the study. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to analyse the data with precedence on qualitative analysis and the findings were thematically presented. The results indicate that although students use both American and British English together, they have little knowledge about the differences between them, especially, with the vocabulary aspect. Students have fair knowledge about the differences between the two varieties as regards the orthography aspect. These findings have implications on the teaching of English language and on examination issues in the country. It also informs writers of various educational materials about what variety to use.</em></p>
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Craig, Holly K., and Julie A. Washington. "Grade-Related Changes in the Production of African American English." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47, no. 2 (2004): 450–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2004/036).
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This investigation examined grade as a source of systematic variation in the African American English (AAE) produced by students in preschool through fifth grades. Participants were 400 typically developing African American boys and girls residing in low- or middle-income homes in an urban-fringe community or midsize central city in the metropolitan Detroit area. Between preschoolers and kindergartners, and between first through fifth graders, there were no significant differences in the amounts of dialect produced during a picture description language elicitation context. However, there was a significant downward shift in dialect production at first grade. Students who evidenced dialect shifting outper-formed their nonshifting peers on standardized tests of reading achievement and vocabulary breadth.
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Connor, Carol McDonald. "Language and Literacy Connections for Children Who are African American." Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) Populations 15, no. 2 (2008): 43–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/cds15.2.43.
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Abstract Focusing on the links between language and literacy, this paper discusses possible reasons for the persistent reading skill gap between African American and White children. Three theories that describe the mechanisms through which the use of African American English (AAE) might affect literacy learning include (a) teacher bias against AAE, (b) the mismatch between the phonological and morphosyntactic structure of AAE and Standard or Mainstream American English (SAE), and (c) the linguistic flexibility theory, which suggests that it is not the mismatch per se that interferes with literacy learning, but rather students' limited linguistic flexibility. Thus, children who have strong linguistic flexibility are able to switch between the phonological and morphosyntactic structures of AAE and text SAE facilely, but children with weaker linguistic flexibility do not. Plus, a disproportionate number of African American children live in poverty. Thus, they tend to have weaker language and vocabulary skills (and, hence, less linguistic flexibility) when compared to their more affluent peers. By promoting teachers' understanding and sensitivity to students' AAE use and encouraging the use of more effective instructional strategies that are responsive to students' skills and areas of weakness, SLPs can work with teachers to help them understand ways to support African American children's language and literacy learning.
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LAW, FRANZO, TRISTAN MAHR, ALISSA SCHNEEBERG, and JAN EDWARDS. "Vocabulary size and auditory word recognition in preschool children." Applied Psycholinguistics 38, no. 1 (2016): 89–125. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716416000126.
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ABSTRACTRecognizing familiar words quickly and accurately facilitates learning new words, as well as other aspects of language acquisition. This study used the visual world paradigm with semantic and phonological competitors to study lexical processing efficiency in 2- to 5-year-old children. Experiment 1 found this paradigm was sensitive to vocabulary-size differences. Experiment 2 included a more diverse group of children who were tested in their native dialect (either African American English or mainstream American English). No effect of stimulus dialect was observed. The results showed that vocabulary size was a better predictor of eye gaze patterns than was maternal education, but that maternal education level had a moderating effect; as maternal education level increased, vocabulary size was less predictive of lexical processing efficiency.
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MCDONALD, JANET L., CHRISTY M. SEIDEL, REBECCA HAMMARLUND, and JANNA B. OETTING. "Working memory performance in children with and without specific language impairment in two nonmainstream dialects of English." Applied Psycholinguistics 39, no. 1 (2017): 145–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716417000509.
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ABSTRACTUsing speakers of either African American English or Southern White English, we asked whether a working memory measure was linguistically unbiased, that is, equally able to distinguish between children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) across dialects, with similar error profiles and similar correlations to standardized test scores. We also examined whether the measure was affected by a child's nonmainstream dialect density. Fifty-three kindergarteners with SLI and 53 typically developing controls (70 African American English, 36 Southern White English) were given a size judgment working memory task, which involved reordering items by physical size before recall, as well as tests of syntax, vocabulary, intelligence, and nonmainstream density. Across dialects, children with SLI earned significantly poorer span scores than controls, and made more nonlist errors. Span and standardized language test performance were correlated; however, they were also both correlated with nonmainstream density. After partialing out density, span continued to differentiate the groups and correlate with syntax measures in both dialects. Thus, working memory performance can distinguish between children with and without SLI and is equally related to syntactic abilities across dialects. However, the correlation between span and nonmainstream dialect density indicates that processing-based verbal working memory tasks may not be as free from linguistic bias as often thought. Additional studies are needed to further explore this relationship.
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Stankov, Lazar, Jihyun Lee, and Insu Paek. "Realism of Confidence Judgments." European Journal of Psychological Assessment 25, no. 2 (2009): 123–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759.25.2.123.
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This paper addresses measurement and conceptual issues related to the realism of people’s confidence judgments about their own cognitive abilities. We employed three cognitive tests: listening and reading subtests from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL iBT) and a synonyms vocabulary test. The sample consisted of community college students. Our results show that the participants tend to be overconfident about their cognitive abilities on most tasks, representing poor realism. Significant group differences were noted with respect to gender and race/ethnicity: female and European American participants showed smaller levels of overconfidence than males and African Americans or Hispanics. We point out that there appear to be significant individual differences in the understanding of subjective probabilities, and these differences can influence the realism of confidence judgments.
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Smitherman, Geneva. "African Americans and "English Only"." Language Problems and Language Planning 16, no. 3 (1992): 235–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lplp.16.3.02smi.
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RESUMEN Los americanos de origen africano y el "inglés solamente" El movimiento en pro del "inglés solamente" generalmente no se caracteriza como tema rel-acionado a los afro-americanos; se tiende a limitar el enfoque a los hispanos y asiâticos. Sin embargo, la lucha histórica de los negros en general, y en torno al vernáculo negro en particular, puede ser una fuerza importante en la lucha pro los derechos linguisticos de los grupos minori-tarios. Se investiga la perspectiva negra a través de un breve repaso de los amplios beneficios sociales de la lucha afro-americana - por medio del lente del liderato negro - y a través de una encuesta de afro-americanos residentes de grandes ciudades. La conclusión destaca la necesidad de activar y educar a los afro-americanos en cuanto al "inglés solamente". RESUMO Afrikaj usonanoj kaj la movado "Nur-Angla" La nuntempa movado "Nur-Angla" (kiu celas oficialigi la anglan lingvon en Usono kiel solan oficialan lingvon) kutime ne estas karakterizata kiel demando por afrikaj usonanoj, car gi foku-sigas je hispanparolantoj kaj azianoj. Sed la historia strebado de nigruloj generale, kaj cirkaŭ la nigrula angla idiomo specife, implicas ke afrikaj usonanoj povas konsistigi signifan forton en la strebado por minoritataj lingvaj rajtoj. Oni ci tie esploras la nigrulan perspektivon pri Nur-Angla per mallonga superrigardo de la pli vastaj sociaj avantagoj de la afrik-usona strebado, tra la lenso de la nigrula gvidantara klaso, kaj per publika enketo de afrikaj usonanoj en cefaj urboj. La artikolo konkludas, ke necesas aktivigi kaj klerigi la afrikajn usonanojn pri Nur-Angla.
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Thomas, Erik R., and Phillip M. Carter. "Prosodic rhythm and African American English." English World-Wide 27, no. 3 (2006): 331–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.27.3.06tho.
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Prosodic rhythm was measured for a sample of 20 African American and 20 European American speakers from North Carolina using the metric devised by Low, Grabe and Nolan (2000), which involves comparisons of the durations of vowels in adjacent syllables. In order to gain historical perspective, the same technique was applied to the ex-slave recordings described in Bailey, Maynor and Cukor-Avila (1991) and to recordings of five Southern European Americans born before the Civil War. In addition, Jamaicans, Hispanics of Mexican origin who spoke English as their L2, and Hispanics speaking Spanish served as control groups. Results showed that the North Carolina African Americans and European Americans were both quite stress-timed overall, with no significant difference between them. Spanish emerged as solidly syllable-timed, while Jamaican English and Hispanic English were intermediate. The ex-slaves were significantly less stress-timed than either younger African Americans or European Americans born before the Civil War. This finding suggests that African American English was once similar to Jamaican English in prosodic rhythm.
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Aqil, Mammadova Gunay. "American English in Teaching English as a Second Language." International Journal of English Language Studies 3, no. 2 (2021): 52–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijels.2021.3.2.7.
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With the lapse of time the two nations- Americans and British always blamed each other for “ruining” English. In this article we aim to trace historical “real culprit” and try to break stereotypes about American English status in teaching English as a second language. In comparison with Great Britain the USA has very short and contemporary history; nevertheless, in today’s world American English exceeds British and other variants of English in so many ways, as well as in the choices of language learners. American English differs from other variants of the English language by 4 specific features: Inclusiveness, Flexibility, Innovativeness and Conservativeness. Notwithstanding, British disapprove of Americans taking so many liberties with their common tongue, linguistic researcher Daniela Popescu in her research mentions the fields of activities in which American words penetrated into British English. She classifies those words under 2 categories: everyday vocabulary (480 terms) and functional varieties (313 terms). In the case of functional varieties, the American influence is present in the areas of computing (10 %), journalism (15 %), broadcasting (24%), advertising and sales (5 %), politics and economics (24%), and travelling and transport (22%). Further on, the words and phrases in the broadcasting area have been grouped as belonging to two areas: film, TV, radio and theatre (83%), and music (17%). The purpose of the research paper is to create safe and reliable image of American English in the field of teaching English as a second language. Americans are accused in “ruining” English and for that reason learners are not apt to learn American English. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used while collecting the data. The study concluded that the real culprits are British who started out to ruin English mainly in in the age of Shakespeare and consequently, Americans inherited this ruin from the British as a result of colonization. Luckily, in the Victorian Age British saved their language from the ruins. The paper discusses how prejudices about American English effect the choices of English learners.
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Zano, Kufakunesu, and Nkidi Caroline Phatudi. "Vocabulary learning strategies of South African English First Additional Language learners." Journal for Language Teaching 54, no. 2 (2021): 53–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jlt.v54i2.3.
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This article reflects the qualitative part of a doctoral degree thesis, in which the researchers used an explanatory, sequential, mixed-methods research design to investigate the role of English academic vocabulary in the reading comprehension of Grade 11 English First Additional Language (EFAL) learners in a district in South Africa. The study represents an attempt to investigate which vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) the learners used. To this end, the researchers employed a focus group discussion to collect data from a sample comprising eight (n=8) Grade 11 EFAL learners. The data were analysed using content analysis. The findings revealed that it is important to explore and broaden learners’ VLS knowledge. Also, the results showed that learners can take control of their vocabulary learning as long as their teachers are trained to offer them opportunities to learn and practise those strategies. It is recommended that stakeholders become conscious of the VLSs which learners in the EFAL environment use, so that the former can design and deliver vocabulary instruction and training accordingly. The teacher needs to assist learners in becoming independent learners during EFAL vocabulary learning. This can be done by exposing them to different VLSs.
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Montgomery, Michael. "Eighteenth-Century Sierra Leone English." English World-Wide 20, no. 1 (1999): 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.20.1.01mon.
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This essay examines the language of an expatriate community as found in letters and petitions written by African Americans who migrated to Sierra Leone by way of Nova Scotia in 1792. These documents provide some of the earliest first-hand evidence of African American English and contribute to debates about the history of that variety. The paper compares selected grammatical features in that variety to modern-day African Nova Scotian English for insights to the history of African American English and develops a case for the principled use of manuscript documents for reconstructing earlier stages of colloquial English.
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Rahman, J. "MIDDLE-CLASS AFRICAN AMERICANS: REACTIONS AND ATTITUDES TOWARD AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH." American Speech 83, no. 2 (2008): 141–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2008-009.
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Speicher, Barbara L., and Seane M. McMahon. "Some African-American perspectives on Black English vernacular." Language in Society 21, no. 3 (1992): 383–407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500015499.
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ABSTRACTSixteen African Americans affiliated with a university participated in open-ended interviews exploring their experiential, attitudinal, and descriptive responses to Black English Vernacular (BEV). The fields of sociolinguistics and education report complex and contradictory attitudes and research findings regarding this code. In addition, media representations of BEV have been misleading. This article investigates how these sources have influenced the attitudes of these African Americans over the last 20 years. We found few trends and little unanimity among our respondents. This finding is neither problematic nor surprising. African Americans do not comprise a monolithic group, acting, speaking, and thinking as one. The results are summarized, and three issues that emerged from the interviews are discussed: problems with the label, Black English Vernacular; the possibility that BEV was socially constructed; and the perception that BEV is a limited linguistic system. (Sociolinguistics, education, attitudes toward language varieties, Black English Vernacular)
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King, Sharese. "From African American Vernacular English to African American Language: Rethinking the Study of Race and Language in African Americans’ Speech." Annual Review of Linguistics 6, no. 1 (2020): 285–300. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030556.
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African American Vernacular English (AAVE), one of the most studied dialects in American English, has undergone several changes in its label across the years. Its most recent designation, African American Language (AAL), reflects a change in approaches to studying race and language in the field. Drawing on observations from related fields like linguistic anthropology and critical race theory, I discuss different conceptualizations of the relationship between race and language and argue in favor of an approach that both recognizes and prioritizes the study of variation within the dialect. This approach will enable researchers to advance theory in language variation and change while also contributing to larger sociopolitical objectives to diversify narratives of blackness.
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Pretorius, Elizabeth J., and Lieke Stoffelsma. "How is their word knowledge growing? Exploring Grade 3 vocabulary in South African township schools." South African Journal of Childhood Education 7, no. 1 (2017): 13. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/sajce.v7i1.553.
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In this article, we report on a study that examined the active and receptive English vocabulary of two different groups of Grade 3 learners in South African township schools. The groups consisted of English Home Language (HL) learners in the Western Cape and Xhosa HL and English First Additional Language (FAL) learners in the Eastern Cape. The purpose was to document their different vocabulary trajectories during Grade 3. The Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey was used to measure the active vocabulary levels of 118 learners at the beginning and the end of the school year. Another 284 learners from the same eight Grade 3 classes participated in a receptive vocabulary test at the end of the year. This test assessed their knowledge of the 60 most frequent words that occur in South Africa Grade 4 English textbooks. Results showed that although the HL learners knew almost double the number of words their English FAL peers did, both groups of learners increased their active word knowledge through the year by about 9%. Regarding their receptive vocabulary, the English FAL learners on average only knew 27% of the most frequent words at the end of their Grade 3. No significant gender differences were found. Learners in both language groups who were above their grade age had significantly lower scores than their younger peers. This confirms findings that children who start school with weak language skills tend to stay weak. Finally, initial active vocabulary knowledge was found to be a strong predictor of vocabulary development during the school year.
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Fought, Carmen. "Language as a representation of Mexican American identity." English Today 26, no. 3 (2010): 44–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078410000131.
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Demographic data indicate that the English of Mexican Americans is destined to play a key role in the sociolinguistic study of language variation in the United States. In fact, Mexican American speakers are reported to account for more than 12.5% of the U.S. population. In 2003, the U.S. Census released data showing that Latinos and Latinas had replaced African Americans as the largest minority ethnic group in the U.S., and by 2007, 29.2 million Americans listed their ancestry as Mexican (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009). Moreover, in addition to the large numbers of Mexicans (first generation) and Mexican Americans (second generation) living in the Southwest, we are now seeing a new representation of these ethnic groups in other areas, such as the South. For example, between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina experienced a higher percentage of growth in its Mexican American population than any other state (Wolfram, Carter & Moriello, 2004).These statistics are important with respect to language because they reveal that a large and increasing population of English speakers in the U.S. are Latinos and Latinas of Mexican origin. Our notion of American English, then, must be extended to include the variety traditionally spoken by the children of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., generally referred to in the literature as Chicano English. In addition, if we look at the Mexican American population as a whole, we will find a number of other varieties of English spoken.
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McWhorter, John. "Revisiting Invariant am in Early African American Vernacular English." American Speech 95, no. 4 (2020): 379–407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8661842.
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Scholars of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have generally assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of Black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier Black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in renditions of interviews with ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the interviewers. The author argues that the use of invariant am in a great many literary sources written by Black writers with sober intention, grammatical descriptions of Black speech that note invariant am as a feature, and the use of invariant am in regional British dialects imported to the New World suggest that invariant am was present in earlier AAVE and common among Black slaves and their immediate descendants, yet had largely disappeared by World War II.
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Trupej, Janko. "Strategies for translating racist discourse about African-Americans into Slovenian." Babel. Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation 63, no. 3 (2017): 322–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/babel.63.3.02tru.
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Abstract This article examines how racist discourse about African-Americans has been translated from English into Slovenian throughout history. Strategies for translating explicitly racist discourse, racial terminology and African American Vernacular English in translations published between 1853 and 2007 are analyzed. The results of the textual comparison are considered in the light of contemporary Slovenian attitudes towards black people and the socio-political situation in the target culture. The results show that the strategies for translating racist discourse in pre-World War II translations differed significantly from those used after a socialist regime was established in Slovenia. Translation strategies were also influenced by the important role that the Slovenian language played in the development of the national identity, by the target readership of the translations, as well as by contemporary relations between the source and target culture. Ideological interventions sometimes considerably affected the interpretive possibilities of a particular literary work.
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Baugh, John. "Shanna Poplack (ed.), The English history of African American English. (Language in Society, 28.) Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Pp. v + 277. Pb $31.95." Language in Society 30, no. 2 (2001): 311–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404501352053.
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Poplack and other contributors to this important volume are to be commended for an exceptionally well crafted book, with a succession of groundbreaking studies of African American English (AAE). Although this work will undoubtedly add fuel to the flames of historical linguistic controversy that continue to swirl around African Americans, Poplack and her colleagues go far to advance hypotheses and analyses that argue in favor of the English origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
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Montgomery, Michael, Janet M. Fuller, and Sharon DeMarse. "“The black men has wives and Sweet harts [and third person plural -s] Jest like the white men”: Evidence for verbal -s from written documents on 19th-century African American speech." Language Variation and Change 5, no. 3 (1993): 335–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500001538.
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ABSTRACTThe analysis of letters written by 19th-century African Americans shows constraints on verbal -s marking which parallel those found in the writing of Scotch-Irish immigrants in the same time period and region, specifically a subject type constraint and a proximity to subject constraint. This correlation is highly suggestive for the study of the development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This study finds no support for a basis from a creole or from Standard English for AAVE in verbal concord and concludes that some, perhaps many, African Americans used varieties of English with little or no creole influence. Earlier studies have assumed that standard dialects of English constituted the superstrate in colonial and antebellum America; this analysis makes it clear that we must examine the features of the local varieties, black and white, before making any claims about the influences of language contact on a given variety. Further, the consistent patterns of inflections found in this study show that written documents, in particular letters written by semiliterate African Americans, are a good source for further linguistic study of 19th-century language.
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Borisova, Anna A., and Yulia N. Ebzeeva. "Gastronomic Vocabulary as a Feature of Nigerian English." Russian Journal of Linguistics 23, no. 3 (2019): 820–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.22363/2312-9182-2019-23-3-820-836.
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The World Englishes Paradigm studies various aspects of the English language characterized by specific peculiarities and changing as a result of contacts with indigenous languages and cultures. The history of English in Nigeria embraces 500 years of an interaction between highly different cultural systems and civilizations. Language contacts between English and the indigenous languages of Nigeria have led to its linguistic, cultural and intrastructural diversity. The aim of this article is to analyse the gastronomic vocabulary of Nigerian English influenced by the Nigerian worldview and culture. The research is focused on borrowings from African languages (mainly Yoruba and Igbo) that play a vital role in forming the culturally important lexicon of Nigerian English. The sources of the research material are dictionaries, as well as books by Nigerian writers composed in English. The analysis carried out in the course of the research allowed us to discover secondary nominations that denote Nigerian flora and cuisine, to reveal their metaphorical usage and to study corresponding figurative comparisons, idioms, proverbs and sayings. The investigation of gastronomic symbols in Nigerian speech shows universal processes of employing common gastronomic lexical units from real-life discourse as a basis for symbolization. The results of the study show that the gastronomic vocabulary and the images it creates constitute one of the most impressive Nigerian cultural codes. The knowledge of this vocabulary is instrumental in understanding those codes.
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Mesthrie, Rajend. "Where does a New English dictionary stop? On the making of the Dictionary of South African Indian English." English Today 29, no. 1 (2013): 36–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026607841200048x.
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This paper reflects on the recently published Dictionary of South African Indian English (Mesthrie, 2010, henceforth DSAIE) in terms of the decisions that have to be made over content in a New English variety. ‘New English’ is used in the commonly accepted sense of a variety that has arisen as a second language in a multilingual context, mainly under British colonialism, but which has gained an identity of its own on account of its characteristic linguistic features which differ from those of the erstwhile target language, viz. educated British English. Dictionaries of English outside of England and the United States of America are no longer novel: well-known efforts include the Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English (Butler et al., 2009) and The Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (Silva et al., 1996). In the same vein Hobson-Jobson (Yule & Burnell, 1886) recorded the lexis of colonial India, concentrating more on the vocabulary of the British there, though usage characteristic of Indians is also cited. Post-colonial India is still served by lexicographers of British origins: Hanklyn-Janklin (Hankin, 1994) and Sahibs, Nabobs and Boxwallahs (Lewis, 1991) are both true to the Hobson-Jobson tradition in feel and style, whilst being fairly up-to-date. I am unaware of any systematic dictionary work treating of the more colloquial words of Indian English, this 30 years on from Braj Kachru's (1983) article ‘Toward a Dictionary’. The popular guidebook series Lonely Planet has stolen a march on the lexicographers in producing a vibrant, popular book Indian English: Language and Culture (2008), with an emphasis on vocabulary amidst other culture lessons. The new internet era has also provided online dictionaries, the most sophisticated in my experience being the Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English launched in 2004 (www.singlishdictionary.com).
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Wolfram, Walt, and Clare Dannenberg. "Dialect Identity in a Tri-Ethnic Context." English World-Wide 20, no. 2 (1999): 179–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.20.2.01wol.
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This study examines the development of a Native American Indian variety of English in the context of a rural community in the American South where European Americans, African Americans and Native American Indians have lived together for a couple of centuries now. The Lumbee Native American Indians, the largest Native American group east of the Mississippi River and the largest group in the United States without reservation land, lost their ancestral language relatively early in their contact with outside groups, but they have carved out a unique English dialect niche which now distinguishes them from cohort European American and African American vernaculars. Processes of selective accommodation, differential language change and language innovation have operated to develop this distinct ethnic variety, while their cultural isolation and sense of "otherness" in a bi-polar racial setting have served to maintain its ethnic marking.
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Vaid, Jyotsna, Hyun Choi, Hsin-Chin Chen, and Mike Friedman. "Perceiving and responding to embarrassing predicaments across languages." Emotion words in the monolingual and bilingual lexicon 3, no. 1 (2008): 122–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ml.3.1.08vai.
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The experience of embarrassment was explored in two experiments comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers from cultures varying in the degree of elaboration of the embarrassment lexicon. In Experiment 1, narratives in English or Korean depicting three types of embarrassing predicaments were to be rated on their embarrassability and humorousness by Korean-English bilinguals, Korean monolinguals, and Euro-American monolinguals. All groups judged certain predicaments (involving social gaffes) to be the most embarrassing. However, significant group and language differences occurred in judgments of the intensity of embarrassment and amusement judgments evoked. Euro-Americans exhibited higher overall levels of amusement than the two Korean groups who, in turn, reported higher levels of embarrassment, particularly for certain predicament types and contexts (ingroup members present). Further, for the bilinguals, inept performance predicaments in English were judged more embarrassing than those in Korean, whereas all predicament types were judged more amusing when framed with English emotion labels. Bilinguals also appeared to show a heightened embarrassability relative to both monolingual groups. Experiment 2 found lexical selection differences in open-ended responses to embarrassing predicaments depicted in each language, with Euro-Americans preferring to give justifications or use humor to minimize the embarrassment and Korean-English bilinguals preferring to give apologies or say nothing. The findings are interpreted to reflect the influence of culturally-mediated schemas guiding the activation and processing of emotion vocabulary.
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van Hofwegen, Janneke. "Apparent-time evolution of /l/ in one African American community." Language Variation and Change 22, no. 3 (2010): 373–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394510000141.
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AbstractIn the wake of numerous analyses of vowels in African American English (AAE), this study examines acoustically the phonetic production of a consonant—the word-initial lateral /l/—across several generations of speakers from a long-standing African American community in central North Carolina. The results of the study show that /l/ is darker in younger AAE speakers than in older ones, independent of phonetic context. Comparisons with ex-slave recordings suggest that a light variant of /l/ may be a substrate feature of AAE that has changed in recent decades. Additional comparisons with regional European Americans suggest that the darkening may be due to convergence with majority American English dialects.
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Wolfram, Walt, and Kellynoel Waldorf. "Talking Black in America." English Today 35, no. 1 (2019): 3–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078418000500.
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African American Language (AAL) is the most widely recognized – and controversial – ethnic variety of English in the world. In the United States national controversies about the speech of African Americans have erupted periodically for more than a half-century now, from the difference-deficit debates in the 1960s (Labov, 1972) to the Ebonics controversy in the 1990s (Rickford, 1999) and linguistic profiling in the 2000s (Baugh, 2003, 2018). Further, the adoption of performance genres from AAL into languages other than English, such as hip-hop and rap, has given the speech of African Americans even wider international recognition and global status (Omoniyi, 2006). The curiosities and controversies about African American speech symbolically reveal (1) the depth of people's beliefs and opinions about language differences; (2) the widespread level of public misinformation about language diversity; and (3) the need for informed knowledge about language variation in public life and in education.
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MEWADEV, BRAJESH KUMAR GUPTA “., and MORVE ROSHAN. "The Proficiency and Familiarity of English in Indian Context." International Journal of English Language Studies 2, no. 3 (2020): 25–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijels.2020.2.3.3.
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The position of Indian English in the three-way section can also be read by looking at the definitions presented by the authors of each section. Because this language is part of the country's leading institutions. It plays a second language role in the multilingual society (E.g. India, 55 other places). Recognition is acknowledged and efforts are being made to find common features of Indian Indians. As a result of such English variants, it complies with what is acceptable in English for native speakers according to the terms' vocabulary 'and' morph syntax. One should definitely be able to speak in English for having good English vocabulary. If one wants to cross the country for educational or career goals, while the government has intensified its efforts to improve the quality of higher education institutions in India. The number of Indian students seems to prefer to study abroad. Not only is English, which is why but it is also the most spoken language and lingua franca. It is a brilliant language that comes from the interaction of native English and Indians, who spoke their native languages. Nevertheless, right-wing organizations are still trying to promote Hindi, while leaders in other provinces (especially South African regions) are promoting their vernaculars. However, English has a castle in India. In the context of the identification of English as a foreign language, we refer only to the source of the language.
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Blake, Renée, and Cara Shousterman. "Second generation West Indian Americans and English in New York City." English Today 26, no. 3 (2010): 35–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078410000234.
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Within American sociolinguistics there is a substantial body of research on race as a social variable that conditions language behavior, particularly with regard to black speakers of African American English (AAE) in contact with their white neighbors (e.g., Wolfram, 1971; Rickford, 1985; Myhill, 1986; Bailey, 2001; Cukor-Avila, 2001). Today, the communities that sociolinguists study are more multi-layered than ever, particularly in a metropolis like New York City, thus warranting more complex analyses of the interaction between race and language. Along these lines, Spears (1988) notes the sorely underestimated social and linguistic heterogeneity of the black population in the U.S., which needs to be considered in studies of the language of black speakers. This critique is addressed in work of Winer and Jack (1997), as well as Nero (2001), for example, on the use of Caribbean English in New York City. These two studies broaden our notions of the Englishes spoken in the United States by black people, particularly first generation immigrants. The current research goes one step further with an examination of the English spoken by children of black immigrants to New York City.We focus on second generation Caribbean populations whose parents migrated from the English-speaking Caribbean to the United States, and who commonly refer to themselves as West Indians.
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Winford, Donald. "On the Origins of African American Vernacular English — A Creolist Perspective." Diachronica 14, no. 2 (1997): 305–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.14.2.05win.
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SUMMARY This article is the first of a two-part study of the origins of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). It examines the sociohistorical background to the emergence of AAVE with a view to establishing that this variety resulted initially from a process of language shift by African-Americans toward the white settler dialects of the colonial south during the 17th to 18th centuries. These dialects included southern and southwestern regional English, Northern English and Northern Hiberno English, especially Ulster Scots. Varieties of English spoken by earlier African-Americans in turn became the target of continuing shift by later generations and new arrivals. The evidence presented here refutes the traditional 'creolist' hypothesis that AAVE resulted from decreolization of a previously wide-spread Creole. At the same time, it argues that West African languages and creole varieties of English exerted a certain degree of substratum influence on AAVE, giving it much of its distinctive character. This part of the study concentrates on the demographics and contact settings of the southern colonies, particularly Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, to establish that the shift scenario proposed here is the most feasible explanation of AAVE origins. RÉSUMÉ Cet article est la premiere de deux parties d'une etude sur les origines de l'anglais vernaculaire des afrio-americains (AVAA). On y examine l'arriere-plan socio-historique de la naissance de l'AAVA, ce dans le but de demontrer que ce parler est d'abord ne lorsque les africo-americains ont appris les dialectes paries par les colons blancs dans le sud des États-Unis aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles. Parmi ces dialectes on trouvait l'anglais regional du sud et du sud-ouest de l'Angleterre, l'anglais septentrional d'Angleterre et d'Irlande, et plus particulairement l'anglo-ecossais d'Ulster. Ces varietes d'anglais qu'avaient acquis ces premieres generations d'africo-americains devinrent a leur tour la langue-cible qu'apprirent les generations suivantes et les esclaves nouvellement arrives. Les preuves presentees ici refutent l'hypothese 'creoliste' traditionnelle, selon laquelle l'AAVA serait ne de la 'decreolisation' d'un creole autrefois parle sur une vaste aire. En meme temps on soutient que les langues d'Afrique occidentale et divers Creoles anglais, comme langues de substrat, ont influences l'AAVA dans une certaine mesure, contribuant grandement a son aspect distinct. L'actuelle moitie de l'etude se penche sur la demographie et la situation de contact dans les colonies du sud (plus particulierement la Virginie, la Caroline du Nord et du Sud et la Georgie), afin de demontrer que le scenario d'acquisition que nous proposons est l'explication la plus vraisemblable quant a l'origine de l'AAVA. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Dieser Artikel, der erste einer zweiteiligen Studie uber die Ursprünge des einheimischen Englisch der Afro-Amerikaner (EEAA), untersucht den sozio-historischen Hintergrund dieser Sprache. Er versucht nachzuweisen, da8 EEAA sich aus einem Prozeß der Sprachverschiebung bei den Afro-Ameri-kanern zu den Dialekten der Siedler des kolonialen Südens der Vereinigten Staaten wahrend die 17. und 18. Jahrhunderte ableite. Diese Dialekte enthal-ten Englisch des Siidens, Sudwestens und Nordens Englands wie auch Hiber-no-Englisch, ganz besonders das 'Ulster Scots'. Die Sprachverschiebung zum Englischen der fruhen Afro-Amerikaner setzte sich unter nachfolgenden Generationen und Neuankommlinge fort. In diesem Aufsatz wird die Hypo-these der Kreolisten widerlegt, derzufolge EEAA sich aus einem 'Entkreo-lisierungsprozess' entwickelt habe; statt dessen wird der Nachweis geführt, daß EEAA von Sprachen Westafrikas und einigen Varietaten von kreolisier-tem Englisch als Substatum beeinflußt wurde. Um den Ursprung des EEAA zu erklaren, fallt unser Hauptaugenmerk hier auf die demographische Um-gebung und die Moglichkeiten für Sprachkontakt in den Siidstaaten Ame-rikas, hauptsachlich in Virginia, Nord- und Sudkarolina und Georgia.
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MALLINSON, CHRISTINE, and WALT WOLFRAM. "Dialect accommodation in a bi-ethnic mountain enclave community: More evidence on the development of African American English." Language in Society 31, no. 5 (2002): 743–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404502315021.
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The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation – a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina – to further understanding of the role of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in the historical development of African American English. The examination of a set of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for several of the remaining African Americans in this community supports the conclusion that earlier African American English largely accommodated local dialects while maintaining a subtle, distinctive ethnolinguistic divide. However, unlike the situation in some other African American communities, there is no current movement toward an AAVE external norm for the lone isolated African American teenager; rather, there is increasing accommodation to the local dialect. Contact-based, identity-based, and ideologically based explanations are appealed to in describing the past and present direction of change for the African Americans in this receding community.
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Leimgruber, Jakob R. E. "The trouble with World Englishes." English Today 29, no. 3 (2013): 3–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078413000242.
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Ever since the 1980s, when research interest in the field of ‘World Englishes’ began to gather speed, the view of the English language around the world has been largely dominated by the construct of so-called ‘varieties’ of English. These varieties are usually given a geographical label (‘Singapore English’, ‘Welsh English’, ‘South African English’, ‘Fiji English’, etc), and are described in terms of their pronunciation, their grammar, and their vocabulary. The resulting anthologies (see e.g. Wells, 1982; Trudgill & Hannah, 1982; Kortmann et al., 2004) have contributed a lot to our understanding of how English varies globally, as well as to raising the profile of non-inner circle (Kachru, 1985) varieties, which had previously not benefited from as much attention.
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Adika, Gordon Senanu Kwame. "English in Ghana: Growth, Tensions, and Trends." International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication 1 (January 1, 2012): 151. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/ijltic.17.
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<strong><strong></strong></strong><p align="LEFT">T<span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;">his paper provides snapshots of the growth of English in Ghana by reviewing </span></span>the debates that have characterised its usage, recapitulating the distinctive features of Ghanaian English (GhaE), and examining current directions of its growth. From its fi rst implantation in Ghana, then the Gold Coast, in the early part of the 16 <span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: xx-small;">th </span></span><span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;">century to date, English in Ghana, like in other West African countries </span></span>has shown formidable resilience as the language of formal education, and a medium for cross-ethnic communication in a predominantly multilingual environment. The tensions attendant upon which language to use as a medium of instruction at the lower levels of education appear to be yielding to the logic of complementarities and bilingualism within the local language ecology. English in Ghana, as an outercircle phenomenon, has been travelling the delicate expansionist path of innovation, adaptation, and maintenance of standards over the years. The distinctive Ghanaian linguistic and cultural colouration continues to permeate the English language on all levels, including vocabulary, idiomatic usage, and pronunciation.</p>
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Goatley-Soan, Sean, and John R. Baldwin. "Words Apart: A Study of Attitudes Toward Varieties of South African English Accents in a United States Employment Scenario." Journal of Language and Social Psychology 37, no. 6 (2018): 692–705. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0261927x18800129.
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This study investigates Americans’ attitudes toward the four major accents of South African English (SAfE) and several of their subvarieties in a hypothetical U.S. employment scenario. Participants perceived that SAfE accents possess positive language personality traits in comparison with standard American English; however, respondents identify SAfE speakers as foreign and perceive specific SAfE-accented varieties to be superior and more dynamic (e.g., General/Cultivated White SAfE and Indian SAfE) in relation to other SAfE-accented speakers (e.g., Mesolect Black SAfE and Cape Flats SAfE), even when they do not correctly identify the speaker’s country of origin.
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Kalinde, Bibian, and Dorette Vermeulen. "Fostering children’s music in the mother tongue in early childhood education: A case study in Zambia." South African Journal of Childhood Education 6, no. 1 (2016): 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/sajce.v6i1.493.
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The influence that the use of a familiar language has on learning has long been explored with suggestions that a child’s mother tongue is the most suited initial language of instruction in school. In Zambia, however, this is not the case as the majority of people think that young children should learn to speak in English as soon as possible because this is the language of education. As a result, songs in English dominate the singing repertoire in pre-schools even when children have not mastered sufficient English vocabulary. Singing songs in English, just as teaching children in a language they do not understand, has been shown to hamper learning. The theoretical lens of indigenous African education underpins the study in order to investigate how music in the mother tongue in a cultural context can foster educational aims. Research participants included an expert in Zambian indigenous children’s songs who also acted as resource person and led 18 children aged between 5 and 6 years in sessions of music in their mother tongue. The findings of the study revealed that educational implications of children’s participation in music in the mother tongue can be found in the way in which they are organised, the activities they involve and in the music elements that characterise them.
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Bucholtz, Mary. "Styles and stereotypes." Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 14, no. 2-3 (2004): 127–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/prag.14.2-3.02buc.
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The article examines how two Laotian American teenage girls in a multiracial California high school take divergent pathways through two contrasting stereotypes of Southeast Asian Americans: The model–minority nerd and the dangerous gangster. The two girls, both first-generation immigrants, each draw on contrasting linguistic and youth-cultural practices to align themselves to some degree with one of these stereotypes while distancing themselves from the other. The absence of an ethnically marked variety of Asian American English does not prevent the construction of Asian American identities; instead, speakers make use of locally available linguistic resources in their everyday speech practices, including African American Vernacular English and youth slang, to produce linguistic and cultural styles that position them partly inside and partly outside of the school’s binary black/white racial ideology. The article argues that linguistic resources need not be distinctive either between or within ethnic groups in order to produce social identities.
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José, Brian. "Kirk Hazen. Identity and ethnicity in the rural South: A sociolinguistic view through past and present Be. Durham, NC: Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society, 2000. Pp. xii, 178. Pb $20.00." Language in Society 32, no. 3 (2003): 442–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404503293052.
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This book is the revised version of Hazen's 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). In it, Hazen investigates the linguistic behavior of three ethnic groups in Warren County, North Carolina, both individually and collectively, with respect to copula absence and leveling of past be, with the aim of ascertaining the linguistic boundaries that delineate the ethnic groups. These ethnic groups are African Americans (comprising 57% of the overall population in the 1990 Census), European Americans (38%), and Native Americans (4%). In addition to ethnicity, Hazen considers the influence of age, sex, and cultural identity. He situates his data and findings in the broader sociolinguistic context by discussing, for example, the contributions that they make to the origins debate and the divergence/convergence debate surrounding African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Perhaps the two most significant contributions of the study, however, are the discussion of wont as an innovative variant descended from wasn't, a past-tense corollary of present tense ain't (cf. Hazen 1998), and the discussion of the influence of cultural identity on sociolinguistic variation (cf. Hazen 2002).
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Björk, Ulf Jonas. "Race War Flares Up: Chicago’s Swedish Press, the Great Migration, and the 1919 Riots." American Studies in Scandinavia 51, no. 1 (2019): 3–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.22439/asca.v51i1.5788.
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This study of the three large Swedish-language weeklies in Chicago examines how they covered the city’s African-American community during the latter half of the 1910s, a time when blacks migrated to the North in huge numbers. In Chicago, the result was that the African-American population almost tripled between 1910 and 1920. Little of that was visible in the columns of the weeklies, however, with only a handful of items telling readers that blacks were arriving in record numbers. What news there was about African-Americans, moreover, tended to portray them as criminals. Consequently, the riots that shook Chicago in late July 1919 seemed to take the editors of the weeklies by surprise. A major explanation for the Swedish weeklies’ coverage was that they relied almost exclusively on the city’s English-language dailies for news that did not concern their own ethnic group and thus mirrored the negative way the dailies portrayed African-Americans.
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Vatvedt Fjeld, Ruth E., Elsa Kristiansen, Marianne Rathje, et al. "The worldwide use and meaning of the f-word." Intercultural Pragmatics 16, no. 1 (2019): 85–111. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ip-2019-0004.
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Abstract This article documents the increasing use of the English curse word fuck worldwide, as well as its degree of adaption into the host language, its syntactic function, and its meaning and its strength as taboo. Comparing the use of fuck with a special focus on the Nordic countries (Norway, Denmark, and Iceland) with its use in Eurasia and Africa (with different alphabets, namely Cyrillic in Russia, Devanāgarī in India and Ge’ez script in Ethiopia), we found some similar developmental patterns, but also differences, for example to what degree the English loan word has replaced local curses and in what ways among social groups within a country. Comparing the terms used for the same concept was challenging because some countries have better text corpora and more research on written languages and especially on taboos, and those without such resources required additional minor investigations for a baseline. Findings revealed that fuck has spread worldwide from English, and it is commonly used in Nordic languages today. In Russian fuck is also adopted into the heritage language to a relatively high degree, and it has further gained importance in the vocabulary of India, where English has become the most used language by the higher and middle classes, but less so by lower classes. In contrast, the study of Amharic language in Ethiopia shows that the f-word is rarely used at all, and only by youngsters. We found a pattern starting from the outer North with Icelandic having adapted and adopted the word fuck the most, a slight decline in use in Norwegian and Danish, with less adaption and use in Russian, even less in Indian-English or Hindi, and being more or less absent in the African language Amharic. Formally though it is used conceptually both in Hindi and Amharic.
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Crossland, M., and C. Lonigan. "Relations Between Acculturation and Cognitive Outcomes in a Sample of Latino Preschool Children." Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 34, no. 7 (2019): 1247. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/arclin/acz029.14.
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Abstract Objective Culture and ethnicity significantly affect cognitive test performance of adults and children. However, no prior studies have examined the effect of acculturation on the cognitive test performance of toddlers. This study examined the relationship between parental acculturation and cognitive test scores among Latino preschoolers. Participants and Method In this study, 1300 Latino toddlers (50% F; M age = 53.7 months, SD = 5.2) completed the Definitional Vocabulary subtest of the Test of Preschool Early Literacy (TOPEL), the Revised Get Ready to Read Screening Tool (GRTR) and, if they spoke Spanish, the Definitional Vocabulary subtest of the Spanish Early Literacy Assessment (SPELA) pre-intervention. Parents completed the Acculturation Scale for Mexican Americans (ARMAS) for a measure of acculturation. Results Exploratory SEM of the ARMAS revealed 4 factors: 2 language preference factors and 2 cultural identity factors. All factors were significantly related to cognitive outcomes (ps &lt; .001) - except for the Latin Identity factor’s relation to the GRTR. English Language Preferences (ELP) and Anglo Identity (AI) factors showed positive associations to tests administered in English; as test scores increased along with ELP and AI. For SPELA, as test scores increased, ELP and AI decreased. For Spanish Language Preferences and Latin Identity factors, relations with test scores were the opposite of those for ELP and AI. Multiple regression analyses showed that both ARMAS language factors uniquely predicted SPELA scores (R2 = .17), and the ELP factor uniquely predicted TOPEL (R2 = .30) and GRTR (R2 = .16) scores. The ARMAS identity factors did not uniquely predict any test score. Conclusions Acculturation does impact performance on cognitive measures. Importantly, language preferences have a larger effect on cognitive outcomes than identity factors. Findings support the need to consider cultural variables when interpreting outcomes on cognitive tests in toddlers, particularly language preferences.
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Barry, Betsy. "'It's hard fuh me to understand what you mean, de way you tell it': representing language in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 10, no. 2 (2001): 171–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963-9470-20011002-04.
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In this article I wish to focus on Zora Neale Hurston's dialectal writing, specifically looking at what particular features characterize the language portrayed in Their Eyes Were Watching God via phonetic respellings; and whether or not these features are incorporated into the language of the text in an authentic and consistent manner. Thus I consider whether or not the respellings convincingly capture features of southern American English and AAVE, or if they simply represent stylistic devices employed by Hurston to mark the speech of her characters in a purely fictional manner. With respect to the text under consideration here, I will argue that the majority of Hurston's respellings do, in fact, indicate important phonetic and phonological differences in pronunciation that reflect features typical of both southern American English and AAVE. Furthermore, her use of 'nonstandard' grammatical constructions reinforces the linguistic authenticity of her representation of a dialectal variety particular to African-Americans living in the Southern United States.
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Moody, Simanique. "New Perspectives on African American English: The Role of Black-to-Black Contact." English Today 31, no. 4 (2015): 53–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078415000401.
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One of the most widely researched language varieties in the field of sociolinguistics is African American English (AAE), a term used to describe a range of English dialects, from standard to vernacular, spoken by many (but not all) African Americans as well as by certain members of other ethnic groups who have had extensive contact with AAE speakers. Most linguists agree that AAE developed from contact between enslaved Africans and predominantly English-speaking Europeans (who spoke a range of English vernaculars) during the early to middle period of colonization of what is now known as the United States of America. Consequently, research on the development of AAE is traditionally framed in terms of the degree of contact with white English vernaculars, both during and after AAE genesis, with white vernaculars playing a primary, if not exclusive, role (McDavid & McDavid, 1951; Mufwene, 1996; Poplack, 2000; Poplack & Tagliamonte, 2001). Though some analyses of AAE allow for substrate influence from creole and/or African languages in its development (cf. Winford, 1997, 1998; Rickford, 1998, 2006; Wolfram & Thomas, 2002; Holm, 2004), many studies place a particular focus on Earlier African American varieties or Diaspora varieties, such as the Ex-Slave Recordings, Samaná English, and Liberian Settler English rather than contemporary AAE varieties spoken within U.S. borders (cf. Rickford, 1977, 1997, 2006; DeBose, 1988; Schneider 1989; Bailey, Maynor, & Cukor-Avila, 1991; Hannah, 1997; Singler, 1998, 2007a, 2007b; Kautzsch 2002). This research has helped further linguists’ understanding of AAE yet does not reflect its full history in the United States.
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Levin, Amy K. "The Land without the Canon Wars: Language, Literature, and New Freedoms in Myanmar." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 131, no. 5 (2016): 1535–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2016.131.5.1535.
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Landing in Yangon (Formerly Rangoon) in February 2013, Less Than Three Months After President Barack Obama's Historic trip to Myanmar (Burma), I wondered what I would encounter. Serving as the first Fulbright specialist at a Myanmar public university in thirty years forced me to alter my approach to teaching the literature of the United States that appeared during the time Myanmar isolated itself. It also compelled me to reconsider the relations among literature, human rights, and language. Locals who taught literature of the United States and Britain never experienced the “culture wars” of the 1980s and the expansion of the literary canon. Keats was on the syllabus in every undergraduate English course, while African American authors were absent, and some of my students were surprised that Americans no longer enslave Africans.
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Jenkins, Sulaiman. "Examining the (im)mobility of African American Muslim TESOL teachers in Saudi Arabia." Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration 3, no. 2 (2019): 157–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/tjtm_00005_1.
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Abstract Through the lens of raciolinguistics, this nascent study examines the mobility/immobility of two African American Muslim TESOL teachers (AAMTT) working in the Saudi Arabian higher education (HE) context. The data were collected through interviews and autobiographies in order to examine the participants' lived experiences and their stories. It also explores the paradoxes, tensions and duplicities in treatment experienced by these two TESOL teachers while teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in Saudi Arabia. These teachers moved to the Gulf region with diverse forms of cultural, symbolic, linguistic, economic and social capital, including being 'native speakers' with excellent command of the English language, identifying (and being identified) with the culture of hip hop and Hollywood (which is replete with famous African Americans), and representing American ideals of individualism, freedom of expression, open mindedness and upward mobility. Conversely, navigating through Saudi Arabia, these AAMTT have also experienced marginalization by consistent questioning of their national origins, failure to secure employment or being flatly rejected due to colour, and scepticism by students and administrators about the level of linguistic competence, accent, rhetoric and accuracy in delivering English lessons. Likewise, subscribers to the Islamic faith, their lofty expectations of what life would be like in the Gulf have been further complicated by experiences of direct and indirect racism (a direct contradiction of Islamic teachings of universal inclusion), and they have also striven to learn the Arabic language to gain religious and social capital while simultaneously fending off perceptions that Arabic speakers cannot be 'native speakers' of English. Therapeutically, the researcher reflects on his own experiences with transnationalism as well as the experiences of these two TESOL teachers and their struggles with constantly re-conceptualizing identity and self as new challenges present themselves in the Saudi Arabia. The paradox of possessing the cultural tools for mobility while also having features that hinder mobility is explored and the researcher discusses the strategies ultimately adopted and employed to navigate living in the Gulf.
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McClave, Evelyn, Helen Kim, Rita Tamer, and Milo Mileff. "Head movements in the context of speech in Arabic, Bulgarian, Korean, and African-American Vernacular English." Gesture 7, no. 3 (2007): 343–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/gest.7.3.04mcc.
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A previous study among European-Americans (McClave, 2000) observed that particular forms of head movements occur in specific communicative environments. The present study investigates whether any of the form–function relationships observed in the original study are cross-cultural. The database consists of seven hours of videotaped spontaneous conversations in Arabic, Bulgarian, Korean, and African-American Vernacular English. This study suggests that head movements are used for semantic, discourse, and interactive functions in these four languages from three genetically unrelated language families.1 Identical head movements occur in three environments across all four cultures: lateral movements co-occur with expressions of inclusivity, the head changes position for each item on a list, and the head orients toward a specific location selected by the speaker when referring to non-present or abstract entities. Head movements function as speaker backchannel requests in each culture as well, but the particular form of movement corresponds to the culture’s head motion for affirmation.
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Makoni, Busi. "Beyond Country of Birth." Heritage Language Journal 15, no. 1 (2018): 71–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.46538/hlj.15.1.4.
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This article reports the results of an exploratory study on how third-generation American-born Africans (ABAs) (i.e., descendants of African immigrants born and raised in the United States) construct their identities in and through learning African languages as heritage languages. Drawing from qualitative data in the form of in-depth interviews, the article argues that while ABAs contest and negotiate their identities through learning African languages and through other, multimodal semiotic practices such as clothing, there is a prevalent valorization of African identity indexed by proficiency in an African language irrespective of whether this is a heritage language. The impetus for this valorization of heritage identity is a feeling of dislocation and delocalization resulting from erasure of ABAs’ English native-speakerhood and constant misidentification as non-Americans by the dominant culture. Learning heritage languages fosters a sense of belonging and connection with an “imagined” home located “there” as distinct from “here.” Thus, through heritage language learning, ABAs construct an “identity of resistance.” The article concludes by pointing out how positive heritage identity metamorphoses into an awareness of not only the cultural and symbolic value of heritage languages but also the potential of translating proficiency in one’s heritage language(s) into economic capital in the global market.
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Чугунова, Светлана Александровна. "SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN RISSIAN AND AMERICAN SOCIOPOLITICAL WORLD IMAGES ON THE BASIS OF FREE-ASSOCIATION TEST RESULTS." Вестник Тверского государственного университета. Серия: Филология, no. 4(67) (November 24, 2020): 98–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.26456/vtfilol/2020.4.098.
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С опорой на положения психолингвистических теорий, предложенных в разное время А.А. Залевской, анализируются результаты свободного ассоциативного эксперимента у испытуемых - русских студентов факультета иностранных языков с хорошим уровнем подготовки по английскому языку и молодых людей - носителей американского английского в возрасте 22-24 лет на материале стимулов - семантических коррелятов, объединяемых абстрактностью значения, высокой частотностью употребления и политической тематикой. Based on the psycholinguistic theories proposed and developed by A.A. Zalevskaya in different years, the article presents a free-association test results in two groups of Russian foreign languages faculty students with intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced levels of foreign language proficiency and in a group of North Americans aged between 22 and 24 years. The stimuli included semantic correlates (or equivalents) in Russian and English, representing political vocabulary characterized by frequency of occurrence and abstract meaning.
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Donlon, Anne, and Evelyn Scaramella. "Four Poems from Langston Hughes's Spanish Civil War Verse." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134, no. 3 (2019): 562–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.562.
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Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1937, during that Country's Civil War. He saw the Republic's Fight against Franco as an international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers' Order (Rampersad, Life 236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from around the world to fight against Franco's forces; these volunteers, the International Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their experiences for the Baltimore Afro-American, VolunteerforLiberty, and other publications. Much of Hughes's writing from Spain sought to explain to people at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes's work from the Spanish Civil War has been collected in anthologies. However, so prolific was Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach his collection at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate the dynamic range of Hughes's literary production during his time in Spain.
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Rickford, John Russell. "Unequal partnership: Sociolinguistics and the African American speech community." Language in Society 26, no. 2 (1997): 161–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500020893.
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ABSTRACTAmerican quantitative sociolinguistics has drawn substantially on data from the African American speech community for its descriptive, theoretical, and methodological development, but has given relatively little in return. Contributions from the speech community to sociolinguistics include the development of variable rules and frameworks for the analysis of tense-aspect markers, social class, style, narratives, and speech events, plus research topics and employment for students and faculty. The contributions which sociolinguistics could make in return to the African American speech community – but has not done sufficiently – include the induction of African Americans into linguistic, the representation of African Americans in our writings, and involvement in courts, workplaces, and schools, especially with respect to the teaching of reading and the language arts. This last issue has surged to public attention following the Oakland School Board's “Ebonics” resolutions on Dec. 18, 1996.The present unequal partnership between researcher and researched is widespread within linguistics. Suggestions are made for establishing service in return as a general principle and practice of teaching and research in our field. (African American Vernacular English, Ebonics, applications of sociolinguistics, community service, dialect readers, variation theory)