Quotes from "When Worlds Collide"

Observations about African American speech have never been far removed from the politics of race in American society, so that it is hardly surprising that the status of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been—and continues to be—highly contentious and politically sensitive.

Neo-Anglicist position, however, argues that AAVE has diverged from European American varieties over the years, so that current-day AAVE is now quite different from contemporary benchmark European American dialects.

In Appalachia, older African Americans and European Americans share characteristic regional features such as the pronunciation of fire as far, the use of the prefix uh- in He was a-huntin’ and a-fishin’ and the use of –s on verbs in People goes there all the time. In fact, when we play excerpts of speech from these older speakers to outside listeners, they are often unable to identify the ethnicity of the speaker.

In the process, AAVE has become a trans-regional variety that is more ethnically distinct today than it was a century ago. The fact that ethnicity now usually trumps region in African American speech is one of the great stories of modern dialectology.

At the same time, the pattern of persistent segregation in American society served as a fertile social environment for developing and maintaining a distinct ethnic variety. Many Northern urban areas are, in fact, more densely populated by African Americans today than they were several decades ago, and the informal social networks of many urban African Americans remain highly segregated. Population demographics, however, do not tell the only story. Over the past half-century, there has been a growing sense of ethnic identity associated with AAVE, supported through a variety of social mechanisms that range from community-based social networks to stereotypical media projections of African American speech. In the process, regional dialects—and Standard English—have become associated with “white speech.”