African American Vernacular English Conference
Peter Smagorinsky (smago who-is-at peachnet.campus.mci.net)
Tue, 25 Aug 1998 10:12:08 -0400
> State of the Art Conference
>
> Sociocultural and Historical
> Contexts of
> African American Vernacular
> English
>
> University of Georgia
>
> 29-30 September 1998*
>*This conference will immediately precede NWAVE (1-4 October
>1998) at the University of Georgia.
>
>The University of Georgia, the Department of English, the
>Institute for African American Studies, the College of Education,
>and the Center for Humanities and Arts are pleased to host a
>State of the Art Conference on the Sociocultural and Historical
>Contexts of African American Vernacular English. This
>conference will enable:
>
> Scholars to gain a broader, more interdisciplinary
> understanding of language use in the African American
> community which includes the linguistic and historical
> aspects of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as
> well as the ever more needed educational, sociocultural, and
> ecological aspects of AAVE.
> Scholars of language variation in American English and
> scholars in language variation in the Americas to look at
> AAVE more globally in order to understand the dynamic
> and still uncertain relationship between AAVE and other
> varieties of language in the Americas, and Africa, and
> England.
> Members of the academic community and the general
> public who attend the conference to understand the
> importance of language use in not only the African
> American community but also other communities of
> language variation based on demographic and historical
> differences such as Southern American English, Louisiana
> French Creole, and Haitian Creole.
> Linguists and scholars in general to find ways to better
> disseminate scholarship to the public.
>
>
>If you would like more information about this conference, please
>contact the conference organizer:
>Sonja L. Lanehart Sonja L. Lanehart
>University of Georgia
>Department of English
>Park Hall
>Athens, GA 30602-6205
>Phone: 706-542-1261
>E-mail: lanehart who-is-at arches.uga.edu
>http://www.linguistics.uga.edu/AAVE/home.html
>
>
>
> Tuesday, 29 September 1998
> 8:00-9:00
> Registration
> 9:00-9:30
> Opening Remarks
> 9:30-10:30
> Session A: The Existence of AAVE and Its Importance
> Salikoko Mufwene, University of Chicago
> "What is African-American English?"
> Mary Zeigler, Georgia State University
> "African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a linguistic
>treasure?"
> 10:30-10:45
> Coffee Break
> 10:45-12:00
> Session A, continued
> John Baugh, Stanford University
> "Affirming the significance of research regarding the
linguistic
> consequences of the African slave trade"
> 12:00-1:15
> Lunch
> 1:30-3:15
> Session B: AAVE and Education, Part 1
> Michele Foster, Claremont Graduate School
> "What is the role of AAVE in schools and education?"
> Toya Wyatt, California State University, Fullerton
> "The role of family, community and school in children's
>acquisition and
> maintenance of AAVE"
> 3:15-3:30
> Coffee Break
> 3:30-5:15
> Session C: AAVE and Education, Part 2
> William Labov, University of Pennsylvania
> "How can we apply our knowledge about AAVE to the teaching of
> reading?"
> Lisa Delpit, Georgia State University
> "How can we apply our knowledge about African American
>Vernacular
> English to help students learn and teachers teach?"
> 6:00-7:30
> Dinner
> 8:00-9:30
> Session D: Town Meeting on AAVE, Ebonics, Linguist(ic)s,
> and the Public--Day One Topics
>
>Wednesday, 30 September 1998
> 8:00-9:00 Registration
> 9:00-10:00
> Session E: AAVE and Other Varieties of English
> John Rickford, Stanford University
> "Relationship(s) between AAVE and the Creole Englishes of the
> Caribbean"
> Guy Bailey, University of Texas, San Antonio
> "Historical relationships between AAVE phonology and the
>phonology
> of Southern White Vernaculars"
> 10:00-10:15
> Coffee Break
> 10:15-11:30
> Session E, continued
> Patricia Cukor-Avila, University of North Texas
> "What is the relationship between AAVE grammar and the
>grammar of
> American English dialects?"
> 11:30-12:45
> Lunch
> 1:00-2:45
> Session F: AAVE in the Community, Part 1
> Denise Troutman, Michigan State University
> "What are some discourse features of African American women
>who use
> AAVE?"
> Arthur Spears, City University of New York, City College
> "Directness in African-American English"
> 2:45-3:00
> Coffee Break
> 3:00-4:45
> Session G: AAVE in the Community, Part 2
> Geneva Smitherman, Michigan State University
> "What is the relationship between hip hop and AAVE?"
> Marcyliena Morgan, University of California, Los Angeles
> "'Ain't Nothin' but a G thang': Grammar, variation, and
language
> ideology in hip hop identity"
> 5:30-7:00
> Dinner
> 7:30-9:30
> Session H: Special Session--"Where Do We Go from Here?"
> Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University
> "Reconsidering the Sociolinguistic Agenda for AAVE: The Next
> Generation of Research and Application"
> Roundtable: All conference participants
>
>
>
>Guy Bailey: "Historical relationships between African American Vernacular
>English phonology and the phonology of Southern White Vernaculars"
>
>This presentation will compare the phonology of African American Vernacular
>English
>(AAVE) to the phonology of White Vernacular English in the American South,
>the region where AAVE first emerged. Although phonology has long been the
>neglected stepchild of research on AAVE, recent work by Baugh (1996) and
>Bailey and Thomas (1997) suggests that phonology is crucial to
>understanding both linguistic discrimination and the history of AAVE.
>Phonology also provides a useful guide to the complex evolution of
>black-white speech relationships. To explore these developing
>relationships, the presentation builds upon the work of Thomas and Bailey
>(forthcoming), Bailey and Thomas (1997), and Pollock et al. (1997) to
>examine not only the consonsant features treated in traditional discussions
>of AAVE, but also vowel features, including the use of vowel space. The
>perspective is both historical and comparative, looking at how phonological
>changes in AAVE and in Southern
>White Vernacular Enlgish (SWVE) have altered the relationships between
>these varieties over time. The primary source of data for the presentation
>comes from mechanically recorded interviews with African Americans and
>whites from the Brazos Valley area of Texas, but this data will also be
>compared to other parts of the South. The dates of birth of both the
>African American and the white informants range from the mid 1840s to the
>early 1980s. This data suggests a complex history that reflects the unique
>origins, the shared history, and the continuing independent development of
>these two varieties.
>
>John Baugh: "Affirming the significance of research regarding the
>linguistic consequences of the African slave trade"
>
>The social, political, and economic turmoil that erupts whenever the
>general public or
>politicians ponder stereotypes associated with vernacular African American
>speech patterns receive primary attention in this paper. Although scholars
>who study the linguistic consequences of the African slave trade, including
>the presenters at this conference, have contributed essential basic
>research that should dispel racist myths about black speech, vast amounts
>of this research have either been ignored or devalued by pundits,
>educators, politicians, and policy makers. The Oakland Ebonics controversy
>amplified this trend, and serves as a basis to illustrate future strategies
>to bring empirical evidence and more objective scholarship regarding the
>linguistic legacy of the African slave trade to the attention of decision
>makers who do not yet understand the unique linguistic history of slave
>descendants in the United States, or corresponding educational and economic
>consequences. A combination of linguistic evidence and uninformed
>linguistic opinions will be surveyed to illustrate how scholars might help
>to challenge harmful linguistic stereotypes that have been detrimental to
>African Americans and, by extension, the public at large.
>
>
>
>Marcyliena Morgan: "'Ain't nothin' but a G thang': Grammar, variation and
>language ideology in hip hop identity"
>
>This talk explores the values, norms, beliefs and practices that constitute
>and mediate the hip hop community/nation and converge around African
>American urban youth culture and language. Previously, the African American
>speech community was characterized by linguistic homogeneity (e.g. Labov
>1972, Smitherman 1977, Baugh 1983) that resisted most political, social,
>historical and geographical divisions and policies that normally lead to
>significant language change toward the dominant variety. The introduction
>of hip hop language ideology and values has resulted in an acceleration and
>significant re-appropriation and restructuring of language practices by
>African American youth who have, for the first time in urban African
>American communities, intentionally highlighted and re-constructed regional
>and local urban
>language norms. These norms essentially partition the urban community,
>thereby constantly marking people - young African Americans - as cultural
>insiders or outsiders. The emergence of a new urban language ideology that
>is consciously and often defiantly cultural, rather than constructed
>against dominant cultural norms, relies on the use of African American
>English (AAE) linguistic features and principles of grammaticalization.
>This process, which has been operating in this fashion since the late
>1970s, did not have far sweeping consequences until the middle 1980s when
>technology shifted and intimate friendship networks or "crews" , based on
>hip hop artists became prominent outside of the east coast. The drive to
>distinguish and articulate linguistic characteristics which represent major
>cities on the east and west coasts have resulted in the marginalization of
>the "Eastwest" or middle regions (e.g. Chicago, Detroit). It has also
>resulted in a new increase of widespread yet locally marked lexicon and an
>awareness of the importance of phonology, especially the contrasts between
>vowel length, consonant deletion and syllabic stress, in representing urban
>cultural space. This talk will examine AAE grammaticalization in hip hop
>with particular focus on three regional artists: Aceyalone, Common Sense
>and Jay-Z and freestyle (spontaneous) rapping.
>
> Salikoko Mufwene: "What is African-American English?"
>
>The debate on "Ebonics" left Gullah out in the cold, certainly not without
>the complicity of linguists. Yet many of the education-related problems
>that were discussed apply as much to AAVE-speakers as to Gullah-speakers.
>Part of the problem lies in fact in the monopolization of the term
>"vernacular" for the varieties of English spoken by African Americans
>outside Gullah-speaking communities, as if Gullah was not a vernacular.
>While the distinction between creole and semi-creole has been disputed and
>the structural boundaries between Gullah and AAVE may also be questioned,
>it is useful to reopen the books on the traditional distinction. The debate
>on "Ebonics" also revealed that several African Americans themselves,
>especially those we associate with AAVE, did not have a clear sense of the
>variety linguists, journalists, and education specialists were discussing.
>It is debatable whether the experts themselves have a common denominator in
>their discussions. I have started a survey of the
>American population designed to reveal whether "Ebonics" is considered
>synonymous with "African-American English," whether there is variation and
>what the pattern of variation is in the way Americans conceive of them, and
>what the findings entail for questions that underlie the debate on
>"Ebonics." Among other things, the layperson's and the linguist's notions
>of African-American English will be be contrasted, in part to determine
>what linguists can learn from lay people and how in turn they can educate
>the lay people. There should certainly be some more efficient ways of
>sharing less technical aspects of our scholarship with nonexperts!
>
> John Rickford: "Relationship(s) between AAVE and the Creole Englishes of
>the Caribbean"
>
>I will consider relationships between the Englishes of African-derived
>peoples in the United States and the Caribbean from two perspectives: (1)
>Development and (2) Education. With respect to "Development," my primary
>focus, the questions I will address are what were the similarities and
>differences in the development of the respective Black vernaculars in the
>Caribbean and the United States, and to what extent can we presume that
>AAVE was influenced by creole varieties similar to those which emerged in
>the Caribbean? Recent sociohistorical and other evidence has shed a great
>deal of light on these issues. With respect to "Education," I will argue
>that the problems which AAVE speakers experience in learning to read and
>write successfully in standard or mainstream varieties of English are
>paralleled in Creole-speaking communities, and that some of the
>linguistically informed solutions proposed
>for AAVE speakers recently have interesting precursors in the Caribbean.
>
> Arthur Spears: "Directness in African-American English"
>
>The concern of this investigation is how we might globally characterize
>African American language use. It presents a characterization that
>describes a wide range of verbal behavior if certainly not all. I begin
>with Kochman's (1981) notion of "high stimulus" speech, go on to consider
>the grammar of disapproval marking (Spears 1982, 1990), then on to the main
>section of the paper covering uncensored language and "uncensored mode," in
>which language considered profane and/or abusive by many has been
>normalized. Normalization has also been witnessed outside the African
>American community, suggesting that it may be a symptom of postmodern
>society. I conclude in suggesting, nonjudgmentally, that African American
>speech overall, and relative to that of many other speech communities, has
>a high level of directness (i.e., candor, dysphemism, etc.), which might
>conceivably one day be
>related to the African American historical experience.
>
>Denise Troutman: "What are some discourse features of African American
>women who use AAVE?"
>
>Scholars focusing on women's language have worn blinders of "monolithic
>womanism" (Troutman 1995), supporting the idea that only one style of
>women's speech behavior exists for all women, without regard for
>sociolinguistic factors, such as race, class, or age. In her work on the
>Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearing, Mendoza-Denton (1995) writes that ". .
>. If acting like a Black woman and capitalizing on Black speech style is
>seen as masculine and verbally (and implicitly sexually) aggressive, then
>the only recourse is to speak like a white woman" (p.62). This view bemoans
>"monolithic womanism." As West, Lazar, and Kramarae (1997) indicate, "much
>of what we 'know' about gender and discourse is really about white, middle
>class, heterosexual women and men using English in Western societies" (p.
>137).
>This paper presentation focuses on describing features of African American
>women's
>language that have not been previously discussed. As well, the presentation
>aims to highlight the social construction of African American women's
>language, particularly as established in historical contexts and in films.
>
>Walt Wolfram: "Reconsidering the sociolinguistic agenda for AAVE: The next
>generation of research and application"
>
>Three major issues have dominated the consideration of AAVE in the last
>half century: (1) the synchronic relation of AAVE to comparable
>European-American vernacular varieties; (2) the historical roots and donor
>dialects which gave rise to AAVE; and (3) the nature of language change
>currently taking place within AAVE. I review each of these issues in terms
>of current empirical sociolinguistic evidence, showing points of agreement
>and disagreement. For disputable cases, such as the continuing debate over
>the donor sources of AAVE, I propose a set of principles for admitting
>evidence for or against competing hypotheses that might guide future
>research. The presentation also introduces new data from a longstanding
>insular African American community on the coast of North Carolina to
>demonstrate how data from such communities can provide essential evidence
>for determining the historical roots of AAVE and
>the changing relation of AAVE to localized dialect varieties over the last
>century.
>
>Toya Wyatt: "The role of family, community and school on children's
>acquisition and maintenance of AAVE"
>
>This paper will address the multiple sources of language input and various
>sociocultural factors that help to shape the communicative patterns of
>African American children. This includes factors such as: A) the family's
>community of residence, dialect status, educational background, SES, and
>social history; B) the child's community affiliations (e.g., peer
>networks); and C) community, educator, and wider society attitudes toward
>nonstandard dialects. Implications for the educational instruction of AAVE
>child speakers in the regular classroom setting and the clinical management
>of AAVE child speakers who are enrolled in speech therapy programs due to
>communication difficulties in AAVE as well as Standard American English
>will be discussed.
>
>Mary B. Zeigler: "African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a
>linguistic treasure"
>
>A linguistic treasure has a different existence from the notion that is
>generally ascribed to the concept of "treasure." In fact, it seems to
>function in counter distinction to that notion of accumulated, stored-up
>wealth. First, in general considerations, a treasure is an entity or an
>accumulation of entities which have value or worth because they are
>precious, rare, desirable, and sought after. The accumulated valuables are
>then stored away: removed from general use, locked in a box secure from
>prying hands, available only to a privileged few, But in seeming
>contradiction to that notion, a language is treasurable perhaps because it
>may be desirable or sought after, but certainly not because it is rare, nor
>because it is removed from general use. Language dies when it is put away.
>Language thrives with everyday use. It grows and accumulates precious
>entities as it is being handled by more and more prying hands. A linguistic
>treasure is a language which has accumulated a storehouse of valuables for
>the speakers as it is used in the growth and nurturing of its community.
>The everyday users of this treasure, the vernacular speakers of that
>community, keep it phat and growing, mounting in value as it serves their
>needs. A similar sort of treasure serves the African American
>community, for AAVE has always been one of its most valuable resources. It
>is a resource that grows with use. A resource whose value increases with
>the volume of trade among its speakers within a community. Its value
>exceeds that of monetary treasures which can be horded or misspent. It is
>stored in the cultural consciences of an American community, it is the
>storehouse of the African American culture. This paper examines the
>contribution of AAVE to the African American community. AAVE is the
>linguistic resource which has given Africans in America a code by which to
>retain remnant ties with their homeland. It's the linguistic resource which
>has given African Americans a code by which to maintain community identity,
>through the Word -- the word of story. song and ritual. AAVE is the
>linguistic resource which has passed along the cultural consciousness of
>its people -- the counter language of freedom and survival, the secret code
>which masked revolution.
>
>
>
>
>
>