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  • Spoken Soul: The story of Black English by John Russell Rickford, Russell John Rickford
  • Carolyn Temple Adger
Spoken Soul: The story of Black English. By John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford. New York: Wiley, 2000. Pp. 268.

The title of this book suggests what it is and what it is not. It is not a scholarly exegesis of African American Vernacular English (AAVE)—John Rickford already has that to his credit (Rickford, 1999). It is a story told by a scholar (JR) and a journalist (Russell Rickford) with roots in the speech community and deep, broad knowledge of the language variety that is essentially connected to the heart and soul of African American people in the United States. While structural accounts of AAVE are well-known in linguistics, this story has not been recounted this fully to any audience before. The parts that have been told have been misunderstood, reviled, ignored, or simply overlooked by the general audience this book addresses. Thus a trade book on AAVE seems like a risky venture for a popular press—but one that has turned out well. The book has won an American Book Award, and a paperback version has been released.

In starting off with two of the alternative terms for the dialect (‘Spoken Soul’ and ‘Black English’), the choice of which is never neutral, the authors signal the bold, even audacious stance they maintain throughout. They manage the politics of reference for a variety whose evolving name reflects the history of race in the United States, from Nonstandard Negro English to today’s uneasy coexistence of AAVE, Ebonics, and African American Language, at least. They do so by naming the conflicts and eschewing a narrow stand. Anyone looking for an Afrocentric slant will find it in the contrast of Spoken Soul with English, but that is not the spirit of the book. Rather, all terms used respectfully and/or lovingly (‘Spoken Soul’ comes from Claude Brown) get play.

Throughout the book the Rickfords—father and son—step calmly and firmly into many a minefield in need of clearing. Predictably they chronicle the ‘Ebonics firestorm’, their term for the uproar that followed the Oakland California School District’s policy statement expanding their Standard English proficiency program that uses children’s competence in AAVE for teaching the standard dialect. But this account comes after they describe the sociocultural functions, contrastive features, and history of AAVE so that the Ebonics affair can be reviewed from an informed perspective. Ch. 9 presents and explicates the school district’s original resolution as well as a revision that followed. Ch. 10 summarizes and critiques the role of the media in this episode, and Ch. 11 reports on the often racist ‘humor’ based on Ebonics that circulated publicly.

Some readers will judge the chapters on AAVE structure too technical for general readers—Ch. 6, ‘Vocabulary and pronunciation’, and Ch. 7, ‘Grammar’—despite the pains taken to define linguistic terms, explain the field’s perspectives on language, and connect them to what a general audience could be expected to know. For example, in discussing third-person singular present-tense [s] deletion, the authors invoke the high school English teacher as the one to care about such things, and in discussing plural [s] deletion, they mention nouns in terms of person, place, or thing. Some linguists may object that these associations reinforce the misguided and simplistic [End Page 590] views of language that they have tried to override. But those who see this as a pragmatic tactic might argue that efforts to upgrade public knowledge about language ought to acknowledge what people believe about it, as Preston suggests (1996). Some of the techniques for explaining structural details to a general audience may seem jarring (e.g. synonyms for ‘delete’, include ‘ditch’ [110], ‘snub’ [111], and ‘get rid of’ [111]), but the Rickfords are to be congratulated for daring to incorporate an extensive technical outline into an otherwise highly engaging description of the dialect’s social function. Omitting or foreshortening the structural description would have left unchallenged the view that AAVE is just bad grammar.

The Rickfords’ stance toward AAVE’s sociocultural function is bold as well. Among their...

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