The Creole Origins of African American Vernacular English (628 hits)

 

 

8. 2 Relevant questions and evidence in relation to AAVE. From the point of view of the creolist/dialectologist debate, the fundamental question is whether a significant number of the Africans who came to the United States between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries went through processes of pidginization, creolization and (maybe) decreolization in acquiring English (the creolists' position), or whether they learned the English of British and other immigrants fairly rapidly and directly, without an intervening pidgin or creole stage (the dialectologists' position). 

Although linguists who address the creole issue typically concentrate on one kind of evidence, or at most two, there are at least seven different kinds of evidence which could be brought to bear on the primary question of whether AAVE was once a creole, each of them involving secondary questions of their own.

8.2.1. One could ask, first of all, whether the sociohistorical conditions under which Africans came to and settled in the United States might have facilitated the importation or development of pidgins or creoles. With respect to importation, Stewart (1967), Dillard (1972), and Hancock (1986) favor the hypothesis that many slaves arrived in the American colonies and the Caribbean already speaking some variety of West African Pidgin English (WAPE) or Guinea Coast Creole English (GCCE). Rickford (1987a:46-55) and Schneider (1991:30-33), among others, feel that such slaves were probably not very numerous. However, the case for significant creole importation from the Caribbean in the founding period has been bolstered by recent evidence that "slaves brought in from Caribbean colonies where creole English is spoken were the predominant segments of the early Black population in so many American colonies, including Massachussetts, New York, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and Maryland in particular." (Rickford 1997:331). 

With respect to conditions for the creation or development of contact varieties on American soil, low proportions of target language (English) speakers relative to those learning it as a second language favor pidginization and creolization. The frequency of small US slave holdings and the relatively high proportion of whites to blacks in the US--in contrast with Jamaica and other British colonies in the Caribbean (Parish 1979:9, Rickford 1986:254)--are thought by some to make it less likely that these processes took place in the US, particularly in the founding period (Schneider 1989:35, Mufwene 1996:96-99, Winford 1997). However, as Schneider (ibid.) points out, "just because a majority of plantations was small does not necessarily imply that a majority of the slaves lived on small plantations"; he cites Parish's (1979:13) observation that "the large-scale ownership of a small minority meant that more than half the slaves [in the mid 19th century US] lived on plantations with more than twenty slaves." 

Moreover, there were striking differences from one region to another. A creole is much more likely to have developed in South Carolina, where "blacks constituted over 60% of the total population within fifty years of initial settlement by the British" (Rickford 1986:255) than in New York, where blacks constituted "only 16% of the population as late as the 1750's, one hundred years after British settlement" (ibid). When one considers that from 1750 to 1900, 85% to 90% of the Black population lived in the South, and that African Americans in other parts of the country are primarily the descendants of people who emigrated from the South in waves beginning with World War I (Bailey and Maynor 1987:466), it is clearly the demographics of the South rather than the North or Middle colonies which are relevant in assessing the chances of prior creolization (Rickford 1997). 

To variation by region must be added considerations of variation by time period. For instance, both Mufwene (1996) and Winford (1997) are more sanguine about the possibilities of creole-like restructuring in Southern colonies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century than in the seventeenth century, as the proportions of Blacks to Whites increased. Finally, as Rickford (1977:193) has noted, "Questions of motivation and attitude must also be added to data on numbers and apparent opporunities for black/white contact." We have striking contemporary examples of White individuals in overwhelmingly Black communities (Rickford 1985) and Black individuals in overwhelmingly White communities (Wolfram, Hazen and Tamburro 1997) who have not assimilated to the majority pattern because of powerful cultural and social constraints. This is likely to have been equally if not even more the case two or three hundred years ago, when the constraints against assimilation were more powerful. _Constraints like these might have been sufficient to provide the "distance from a norm" which Hymes (1971:66-67) associates with the emergence of pidgin/creole varieties. 

Although sociolinguists have recently begun to do substantive research on the sociohistorical conditions under which Africans came to and settled in the American colonies, and the possibility that they imported or developed pidgin-creole speech in the process, there is still need for more research at the levels of individual colonies or states, counties and districts, and plantations or households. 

8.2.2. The second kind of evidence one might consider is textual attestations of AAVE from earlier times, or "historical attestations" for short. The known evidence of this type can be divided into two broad categories: (a) Literary texts, including examples from fiction, drama and poetry as well as those from travellers' accounts, records of court trials and other non-fictional works (Brasch 1981); and (b) Interviews with former slaves and other African Americans--many born in the mid nineteenth century--from the 1930s onward, including the two subcategories distinguished by Schneider (1993b:2): "the so-called ex-slave narratives" published by Rawick (1972-1979) , and the tape recordings made for the Archive of Folk Songs (AFS), published and analyzed by Bailey et al. (1991)." A third source of early twentieth century data are the interviews with 1605 African Americans concerning "hoodoo" which were recorded by Harry Hyatt between 1936 and 1942 on Ediphone and Telediphone cylinders and subsequently published (Hyatt 1970-1978) and analyzed (Viereck 1988, Ewers 1996). 

In general, the literary texts--the primary data sources for Stewart (1967) and Dillard (1972)--take us back much further in time, to the early eighteenth century, at least; but they tend to be relatively brief and open to serious questions of authenticity (Viereck 1988:301, fn 1, Schneider 1993b:1-2). Of the early twentieth century interviews, the AFS materials--the data source for the analyses by various researchers in Bailey at al (1991)-- are generally considered the most reliable, but the audible recordings consist of only a few hours of speech from a dozen former slaves, and like the other nineteenth century materials, these represent a relatively late or recent period in African American history (cf Rickford 1991a:192, Wald 1995). Moreover, as Bailey et al note, in their introduction (p. 18-19), "the recordings and transcripts often lend themselves to a variety of interpretations" and their representativeness is limited both in terms of speaker type and time-period (cf. also Rickford 1991). The reliability of the ex-slave narrative materials--the primary data sources for the studies by Brewer (1974) and Schneider (1989), among others--has recently been questioned by Maynor (1988), Wolfram (1990) and Montgomery (1991) on the grounds that errors were introduced by field-workers who set down the texts by hand and by editors who subsequently over-represented certain stereotypical dialect features. However, Schneider (1993b) has made a spirited defense of these materials, arguing that their errors and distortions are detectable from comparisons with the AFS materials and by other means. The reliability of the Hyatt recordings--especially the early Ediphone recordings which required the interviewer to "repeat into a speaking-tube every word or phrase spoken by the informant" (Hyatt 1:xx)--is open to question. But the later Telediphone recordings (made with a microphone) and tape-recordings are better, and Ewers (1996:27) assumes that despite drawbacks, the Hoodoo material :is in principle a sufficiently reliable basis for carrying out morphological and syntactic studies." ³

8.2.3. The third source of evidence is modern-day recordings from the African American diaspora or "diaspora recordings" for short. These consist of audio recordings with descendants of African Americans who left the United States for other countries in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and who, because of their relative isolation in their new countries, are thought to represent an approximation to the African American speech of their emigrating foreparents. The first diaspora data to be examined in relation to the creole issue came from the Samaná region in the Dominican Republic, where the descendants of African Americans who emigrated there in the 1820s constitute an English-speaking enclave in a Spanish-speaking nation (Poplack and Sankoff 1987, Poplack and Tagliamonte 1989, Tagliamonte and Poplack 1988, DeBose 1988, 1994). The second source of diaspora data was Liberian Settler English, the variety spoken by the descendants of African Americans who were transported to Liberia by the American Colonization Society between 1822 and 1910 (Singler 1991a:249-50). The third and most recent source of diaspora data is African Nova Scoatian English, the English spoken by the descendants of African Americans who migrated to Nova Scotia, Canada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Poplack and Tagliamonte 1991). Attractive though these diaspora varieties are as sources of extensive tape-recorded data on which quantitative analysis of selected variables can be performed, the significant question which they leave unanswered is whether they can indeed be taken as reflecting late eighteenth or early nineteenth century English, unaffected or only minimally affected by internally or externally motivated change (e.g. from contact with neighboring varieties of English or Spanish), and also unaffected by the Observer's Paradox (Labov 1972b:209). 

8.2.4. The fourth type of evidence is similarities between AAVE and established creoles, or "creole similarities" for short. The theoretical justification for considering this type of evidence, which has been widely applied to other cases, is provided in Rickford (1977:198): "If a certain set of clear cases are agreed upon by everyone to constitute pidgins and creoles in terms of the standard theoretical parameters, and these cases display certain characteristic linguistic features, then other cases that also display these characteristics can be assumed to belong to the same type or class, unless evidence to the contrary is shown." The primary creole varieties to which AAVE has been compared are the English-based varieties spoken in Barbados (Rickford and Blake 1990, Rickford 1993), Guyana (Bickerton 1975, Rickford 1974, Edwards 1991), Jamaica (B. Bailey 1965, Baugh 1980, Holm 1984, Rickford 1991c), Trinidad (Winford 1992a, 1992b), and the South Carolina Sea Islands ("Gullah"--Stewart 1967, Dillard 1972, Rickford 1980, Mufwene 1983) and Liberian Settler English (LSE, Singler 1991a, 1993). The importance of attending to intermediate or mesolectal creole varieties rather than basilectal ones has been stressed by several researchers (Rickford 1974, Bickerton 1975, Winford 1992a), and quantitative analysis of selected features has, for the last two decades at least, become the standard comparative method. Mufwene (personal communication) has suggested that connections of AAVE to Caribbean mesolectal varieties might be informative typologically, but not historically, since "there has been no historical connection established between those varieties and AAVE." But recent sociohistorical evidence indicating the importance of Caribbean slaves in the early settlement of many American colonies (Rickford 1997) helps to provide precisely this connection.

8.2.5. The fifth type of evidence is similarities between AAVE and West African languages or "African language similarities" for short. Although the existence of lexical Africanisms might be considered of little significance, no matter how extensive, the demonstration that contemporary AAVE parallels West African languages in key aspects of its grammar might be taken as evidence of the kind of admixture or substrate influence which is fundamental to pidginization and creolization (Rickford 1977:196). Alleyne (1980), Holm (1984) and DeBose and Faraclas (1993) have provided such evidence for copula absence in AAVE, a variable to which we return in more detail below.

8.2.6. The sixth type of evidence is differences from other English dialects, especially those spoken by whites, which we might refer to as "English dialect differences" for short. As Rickford (1977:197) notes, "The question of prior creolization [of AAVE] has been frequently defined in terms of how different it now is from other English dialects and how different we can presume it to have been in the past . . . " The theoretical assumption for this is that dialects involve linguistic continuity with earlier stages or other varieties of the language, while pidgins and creoles involve "a sharp break in transmission and the creation of a new code" (Southworth 1971:255). The principal dialects to which AAVE has been compared with respect to this criterion is white vernacular dialects in the US (Davis 1969, Labov 1972a, Wolfram 1974, Bailey and Maynor 1985), although British varieties thought to have influenced AAVE through contact in the US (Schneider 1983) have also received some attention. As we will see below, this type of evidence has been more fundamental in discussions of the divergence issue than in discussions of the creole issue, with Fasold (1981) and others warning that contemporary difference might mask earlier similarities, or vice versa. Nevertheless it is still of relevance to the creole issue.

8.2.7. The seventh and final type of evidence is that which is potentially available from comparisons across different age groups of African American speakers, or "age group comparisons" for short. Such evidence could provide fundamental indications of decreolizing change in apparent time (Labov 1972b:275), but it has virtually never been invoked in relation to the creole issue. Indeed, Stewart (1970) and Dillard (1972), the principal proponents of the creole hypothesis, have argued that because of age-graded avoidance of creole forms by adults , African American children in fact use the significant creole forms more often, the exact opposite of what a theory of prior creolization and ongoing decreolization would predict. Age group data have, however, been considered more often in relation to the divergence hypothesis.

 

http://web.stanford.edu/~rickford/papers/CreoleOriginsOfAAVE.html

 

Posted By: Steve Williams
Friday, January 16th 2015 at 7:18AM
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