"Is This Negroish or Irish?" African American English, the Antebellum Writings of Francis Lieber, and the Origins Controversy

THERE ARE TWO MAJOR COMPETING VIEWS regarding the origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). These have been labeled by McWhorter (2000) as the Creolist Hypothesis and the Dialectologist Hypothesis and are discussed by him and a variety of other researchers, including Schneider (1982), Montgomery and Bailey (1986), Holm (1991), Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1998), and in detail by Winford (1997-98). One can discern a strong version and a weak version of the Creolist Hypothesis. The strong version (e.g., Dillard 1972; Rickford 1977; Smitherman 1977) holds that a Gullah-type creole was widespread throughout the plantation South in the antebellum period, not limited just to the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia as it is today. Under this view, many of the features of current AAVE are viewed as remnants of this creole reflecting the incompleteness of the decreolization process. The weak version of the Creolist Hypothesis, advanced by Holm (1991) and developed in the more recent work of John Rickford (1997, 1998), holds that while there may not have been a widespread creole throughout the plantation South, "some pidgin/creole speech—whether home-grown or imported—was an element in the formative stage of African-American Vernacular English" (Rickford 1997, 331). To the contrary, the Dialectologist Hypothesis maintains that the speech of African Americans is rooted in the varieties of English spoken in the British Isles and brought over by white immigrants to America. The assumption is that, as we find out more about the nature of these mostly nonstandard varieties spoken by whites, we will be able to trace the features of AAVE to them (excluding some changes due to recent divergence). The Dialectologist Hypothesis is expressed in Poplack (2000), Poplack and Tagliamonte (2001), and in various works of Michael Montgomery, such as Montgomery, Fuller, and DeMarse (1993).

Rickford (1997) and Bailey (2001) summarize the different types of evidence bearing on the origins controversy. Taken together, these include the following: the sociohistorical conditions of the various colonies and states in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America; historical attestations from literary texts and ex-slaves, letters and other documents written by barely literate African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the diaspora or settler English recordings from such places as Nova Scotia, Liberia, and Samaná (in the Dominican Republic); the contemporary study of the speech of older African Americans who are lifelong residents of insular (rural) communities in the South; and comparisons with Caribbean creoles, African languages, and earlier English dialects, as well as cross-generational age studies. One potential type of evidence that has not been discussed that could be considered a type of historical attestation is academic observations made by linguistically aware individuals in antebellum America on the nature of slave speech or early African American English. For such observations to be meaningful, the person making the observation not only would have to be linguistically informed, but also would have to be familiar enough with slave society and be relatively unbiased within the context of the prevailing racial ideologies concerning black people at the time. Probably the person who comes closest to fitting this profile is Lieber, the originator and first editor of the Encyclopedia Americana (1829-32), professor of history and political economy at South Carolina College (present-day University of South Carolina) in 1835-56, and professor at Columbia College (present-day Columbia University) in New York in 1857-72. He left South Carolina in 1856 largely because of his antislavery views. A detailed biography of Francis Lieber has been written by Freidel (1947), though it does not focus on his linguistically oriented writings. Lieber was known primarily as a legal scholar and one of the earliest political scientists in the United States. His linguistic interests are overviewed to some extent by Heath (1982) and Andresen (1990), with the...