The English History of African American English (review)

The eight essays in this volume deal with the reconstruction of African American vernacular English and the determination of its possible origins in an earlier ‘plantation creole’. All make use of contemporary evidence from vestigial speech communities representing the African American diaspora of the nineteenth century, in Nova Scotia, Liberia, and the Samaná Peninsula of the Dominican Republic, as well as the WPA ex-slave recordings, and attestations of earlier AAE. Taking different paths and applying different methodologies, all converge on a single conclusion, that AAE was never a creole, and while intersecting with pidgins and creoles throughout its history, it always drew more heavily on British roots. Many of the relevant features have disappeared from modern standard British English while some divergences between contemporary AAE and other American and British dialects are relatively recent, with the divergence continuing to increase. The volume begins with an extensive introductory chapter by the editor, in which the debate over the origins of AAE is summarized and critiqued, the various AAE diaspora varieties are presented, and relevant linguistic variables are introduced. Poplack stresses the tenacity of enclaves in resisting contact-induced linguistic changes which makes these diaspora communities ideal candidates in the reconstruction of AAE. This essay and the remaining contributions are predicated on the feasibility of using the diasporic communities as essentially undistorted specimens of earlier AAE, a task to which P devotes considerable attention.

The following two chapters form a section of morphophonological variables. James Walker’s ‘Rephrasing the copula: Contraction and zero in early African American English’ uses AAE diaspora data to question the creole origins of modern AAE copula deletion. Walker isolates prosodic factors that condition both copula contraction and deletion and calls for a finer-grained approach to the historical reconstruction of the copula in all earlier forms of English. Shana Poplack, Sali Tagliamonte, and Ejike Eze offer ‘Reconstructing the source of early African American English plural marking: A comparative study of English and creole’. Using data from Nova Scotia, Samaná, and the ex-slave recordings, the authors find plural marking to be more variable than in contemporary AAE and present disambiguation and phonological context as criteria for maintaining English plural marking. Comparative data from Nigerian pidgin English reveal no phonological conditioning. The authors claim that early AAE inherited a variable plural marking from English, to which phonological conditioning was added.

Darin Howe and James Walker make the first contribution to the section on morphosyntactic variation with ‘Negation and the creole-origins hypothesis: Evidence from early African American English’. Howe and Walker also examine data from Afro-Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and the slave recordings to demonstrate common patterns which in turn differ from negation patterns found in most English-based creoles. The authors dispute the creole-origins theory of AAE while pointing out parallels between early AAE negation and nonstandard white English dialects; they trace both AAE and nonstandard white English negation to colonial English antecedents.

Sali Tagliamonte and Jennifer Smith compare isolated British English dialects and earlier AAE varieties in ‘Old was, new ecology: Viewing English through the sociolinguistic filter’. Invariant was (I was, we was, etc.) occurs not only in AAE but also in other English dialects; as an example, an isolated Scottish dialect is compared with Afro-Nova Scotian and white Nova Scotian dialects. After tracing the historical demographics of the three communities, the authors conclude that invariant was in AAE is more likely to stem from earlier (in this case, Scottish) English dialects rather than from an AAE-internal development. In their view, the study casts doubt ‘about the extent to which ethnicity is the basic underlying factor which best accounts for linguistic differences between AAVE and other varieties of North American English’.

The first study of syntactic variables is Gerard Van Herk’s ‘The question question: Auxiliary inversion in early African American English’. Using data from Samaná, Nova Scotia, and the...