Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans (review)

In the 1970s, scholarly debate elevated the discussion of Black English from the historically presumed inferiority of Black English to a conceptual framing known as the "different vs. deficit" hypothesis. In Word From the Mother noted linguist and scholar, Geneva Smitherman, clearly situates herself on the side of the different-but-not-deficient view of Black English, which she refers to as African American Language (AAL). Her thesis is revealed in her descriptions of the richness and creative impetus of African American Language and in her positioning AAL in a theoretical space of the role played by language in any culture. She writes: "African American Language (AAL), like all languages, is a tool for ordering the chaos of human experience. AAL gives shape, coherence, and explanation to the condition of U.S. slave descendants and functions as a mechanism for teaching and learning about life and the world" (64).

Smitherman shows that the richness of AAL is consistent across contexts, from the classroom to the rap music stage, and she posits that African languages are the ancestral linguistic base linking all forms of AAL. While boldly demonstrating that AAL is different than Standard English, Smitherman argues that AAL is a complete system, in and of itself, and she cites noted linguists, such as William Labov and John Dillard, whose studies have validated AAL as its own complete language, with consistent principles, rules, syntax, and grammar, rather than being unsystematic, illogical, and ungrammatical, as is often believed.

Beyond a common origin in African language, African American Language, in Smitherman's view, is also rooted in African Americans' shared experiences of racism and discrimination, resulting in their developing a counter-cultural discourse of resistance against the dominant American culture and its language, historically known as Standard English, but which Smitherman calls the Language of Wider Communication (LWC). She sees the shared experiences of being black in America as also having gender implications, as well, and argues that the linguistic bond shared between black women and men compels black women to form a cultural alliance with black men, at the expense of diminishing black women's identification with the tenets of the mainstream feminist movement. Black women hip-hop artists, for instance, empower themselves to appropriate the meaning of feminism, by referring to themselves as "hip-hop feminists" (104). An example that Smitherman cites is that of writer, Joan Morgan, who presumes to speak for black women (sistahs) who want a feminism that allows them to erotically embrace black men, being attracted by the masculine instinct of dominance, protectiveness, and eroticism (104-105).

In her own identification with African American Language (AAL), Smitherman capriciously and seamlessly weaves AAL phrases and sentences into the text of her composition, perhaps, also in an attempt to demonstrate the facility with which educated blacks, like herself, are bilingual, able to master both AAL and LWC and to blend them or to code switch unceremonially. The drama of Smitherman's linguistic alternation is far from lost, however, as the reader notices the colorfulness of AAL phrases, such as "sho nuff" and "hoes and tricks." And the colorfulness of AAL, especially in hip-hop music, is what attracts black males and females, alike, as gender lines are sublimated, in favor of the captivating, performative, bravado essence of hip-hop.

And Smitherman lays bare all of the secular language of hip-hop, in particular, and AAL, in general, by reflecting the profanity lacing that seems natural in everyday African American street talk and in much of hip-hop culture. After all, black culture, in the true African way, blends the sacred and the secular, as Smitherman writes elsewhere with Jack Daniel in a 1976 Quarterly Journal of Speech article titled, "How I Got Over: Communication Dynamics in the Black Community," an article which I have referenced for years in my teaching. In Word From the Mother Smitherman labels the two cultural contexts as the "sacred and the profane" (67). On the sacred end of the continuum, lies the discourse...