The Development of African American English - Language in Society by Walt Wolfram & Erik Thomas Paperback

Book Synopsis

This book focuses on one of the most persistent and controversial questions in modern sociolinguistics: the past and present development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

From the Back Cover

This book focuses on one of the most persistent and controversial questions in modern sociolinguistics: the past and present development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

Despite intense scrutiny of the historical and current development of AAVE, a number of issues remain unresolved. Most prominent among these is the development of African American English during the antebellum period and the trajectory of change in twentieth-century AAVE. This book addresses both of these issues by examining an unparalleled sociolinguistic situation involving a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina. This unique environment provides a venue for dealing with questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English.

The conclusions drawn challenge the Creolist, Anglicist, and neo-Anglicist positions with respect to the history of AAVE and offer insights into the development of African American speech in the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

"The Development of African American English is a masterpiece. The authors systematically examine linguistic and historical evidence from an area (Hyde County, North Carolina ) that has not figured in earlier discussions of African American Vernacular English . The result is a more complex and intricate picture of Black/White sociolinguistic relations, both now and in the past, than we have had to this point, with rich implications for how research on language variation and change should be conducted more generally." John R. Rickford, Stanford University

"Wolfram and Thomas's investigation of language in a biracial Southern enclave has much to tell us. Their attention to key issues of theory and methodology informs their research and bolsters a set of carefully argued conclusions about the history of African American English. The authors' work takes on a broader significance by their willingness to tackle vexing questions, whether the issue is how to assess differences in intonation patterns between African Americans and European Americans or how to relate individual differences to community variation." John Singler, New York University

"Specialized but of the utmost importance to dialectologists and sociologists, this volume is exhaustive, accurate, provocative, and compelling. Recommended enthusiastically for graduate students, researchers, and faculty." Choice, December 2002, Vol 40 No. 04

About the Author

Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University. He has pioneered research on a wide range of American vernacular dialects and authored or co-authored 15 books, including American English (Blackwell 1998, with Natalie Schilling-Estes) and over 200 articles.

Erik R. Thomas is Associate Professor of Linguistics at North Carolina State University. He is author of An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English (2001), and has published widely in journals such as Language Variation and Change, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, and Journal of Phonetics.