The origin of American Black English: Be-forms in the HOODOO texts By Traute Ewers. Ed. by Herman Wekker (review)

382LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) Trudgill, Peter. 1992. Dialect contact, dialectology and sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics today: International perspectives, ed. by Kingsley Bolton and Helen Kwok, 71-79. London & New York: Routledge. Department of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 The origin of American Black English: Zte-forms in the HOODOO texts. By Traute Ewers. Ed. by Herman Wekker. (Topics in English 15.) Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. xii, 327. Reviewed by Ronald R. Butters, Duke University Traute Ewer's book analyzes data from the so-called 'Hoodoo texts' (Hyatt 1970-78), five published volumes ofthe transcripts ofmechanically recorded interviews conducted with approximately 1,600 African Americans in 1936-40 in the eastern United States by Harry Middleton Hyatt (13 more were also carried out in 1970 in St. Petersburg, FL). Hyatt's research goals were folkloric, not linguistic; moreover, he destroyed all but one of the original 1936-40 sound recordings after the transcriptions were completed. Thus his data are useless for phonological analysis. However, because the interviews were transcribed by a person whom Hyatt termed an 'expert' transcriber (27), they do appear to offer court-reporter-quality data on the morphology, lexicon, and syntax of relatively spontaneous African-American Vernacular English from a part of the twentieth century for which a paucity of hard evidence exists. Indeed, the Hoodoo data are on the whole probably more reliable than the far more famous texts known as 'The WPA ex-slave narratives' (Rawick 1972-79), 41 volumes of interviews variously and inconsistently conducted and transcribed by numerous persons in the 1930s—texts which nevertheless have served as the basis for a number of important studies of Early African American English (e.g. Brewer 1973, 1974, 1986; Schneider 1989). Moreover, the interviewees in the Hoodoo texts are a generation (or more) younger than the subjects of the ??-slave narratives', thus providing virtually unique data for this set of AAVE speakers. Similarly, the thirteen subjects Hyatt interviewed in 1970 must have been younger than those he interviewed in 1936-40—just how much younger cannot be determined since Hyatt recorded very limited sociological data for his informants, but the thirteen would appear to belong to a cohort that is amply represented in the sociolinguistic literature. As E acknowledges, the foregoing information was thoroughly discussed in Viereck (1988). E repeats it again in useful detail in the opening parts of the book, a version of E's doctoral dissertation at the University of Giessen, Germany. The linguistic focus of the book likewise overlaps somewhat with Viereck's (1988) article: Both Viereck and E analyze invariant be in the Hoodoo texts, and E looks at the distribution of other forms of be as well, i.e. the conjugated and zero forms of the copula and the auxiliary be that follows will/would. Viereck did not analyze the 1970 data, however, and in fact suggests in a footnote (301, n7) the very comparison that E has expanded into this book. In addition, E summarizes at great length the history of the scholarly debate on the origins of African-American Vernacular English in the United States and Canada; she also gives a synopsis of the 'divergence controversy' of the 1980s (see e.g. Bailey & Maynor 1989, Butters 1989). Furthermore, E attempts to make her analysis of be in the Hoodoo texts shed light on those very discussions of theories of origins and convergence/divergence. For all these goals, E meets with varying success. The book is most useful in outlining the Origins' debates. E frames the discussion in familiar terms—'dialectologists' on the one hand, 'creolists' on the other. Her handling of this dichotomy, though, is simplistic and severe. On the one hand, the historically and theoretically extreme position of Krapp (1924) is presented as the typical 'dialectologist' position; an equally extreme andjejune paraphrase ofthe 'creolist' position is represented by Dillard (1972). E does cite a wealth of material that has been written on the REVIEWS383 Origins' topics in the past 75 years, and readers are thus rewarded with what amounts to an extensive annotated bibliography of the secondary literature. Even so, few (if any) scholars today are identifiable as either of the two...