Gullah in the diaspora

The status of Gullah and Bahamian Creole English (BahCE) within the Atlantic English creoles and their historical relationship with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have long been a matter of discussion. It was assumed that Gullah and BahCE are ‘sister’ varieties sharing an immediate ancestor in the eighteenth-century creole English spoken on plantations in the American South. We present historical and linguistic data, including a statistical analysis of 253 phonological, lexical, and grammatical features found in eight Atlantic English creoles, to show that Gullah and BahCE are indeed closely related — so closely in fact that BahCE must be considered a ‘diaspora variety’ not of AAVE but of Gullah.

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3. The relationship between African American Vernacular English and White Vernaculars in the American South

Varieties of English Around the World - Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English ◽

10.1075/veaw.g27.08bai ◽

2001 ◽

pp. 53 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

Guy Bailey

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American South ◽

African American Vernacular English ◽

Vernacular English ◽

American Vernacular ◽

The American South ◽

The Relationship

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Counting and coding the past: Circumscribing the variable context in quantitative analyses of past inflection

Language Variation and Change ◽

10.1017/s0954394508000033 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 127-153 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Stephanie Hackert

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Data Extraction ◽

African American Vernacular English ◽

Temporal Reference ◽

The Past ◽

Vernacular English ◽

Quantitative Analyses ◽

Cross Variety ◽

American Vernacular ◽

Creole English

AbstractAccurate circumscription of the variable context is crucial to any quantitative analysis of linguistic variation. Investigations of past inflection in African American Vernacular English and Caribbean English creoles thus generally include a more or less detailed section concerning the inclusion or exclusion of particular forms; the theoretical grounds on which these decisions are made, however, are not always spelled out. Consequently, there still does not seem to be agreement on what precisely constitutes the envelope of variation in such investigations—a fact that not only complicates data extraction and analysis but also hampers cross-variety comparisons. This article summarizes and evaluates previous definitions of the scope and relevant contexts of the variable (ed), providing internal (linguistic) argumentation supporting or contraindicating the inclusion or exclusion of particular tokens. My data stem from a larger study of past temporal reference in the urban variety of Bahamian Creole English (Hackert, Stephanie. [2004].Urban Bahamian Creole: System and variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins), an intermediate creole with close historical links with Gullah as well as relations with African American Vernacular English, Trinidadian Creole, and Barbadian.

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Slavery and Class in the American South

10.1093/oso/9780190908386.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

William L. Andrews

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

American South ◽

Frederick Douglass ◽

Harriet Jacobs ◽

Slave Narrative ◽

William Wells Brown ◽

The American South ◽

Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

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Defining the envelope of linguistic variation: The case of “don't count” forms in the copula analysis of African American Vernacular English

Language Variation and Change ◽

10.1017/s0954394500001794 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 57-79 ◽

Cited By ~ 30

Author(s):

Renée Blake

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

African American Vernacular English ◽

Linguistic Variation ◽

Final Position ◽

Vernacular English ◽

Quantitative Analyses ◽

American Vernacular ◽

Variable Analysis

ABSTRACTEver since Labov, Cohen, Robbins, and Lewis's (1968) pioneering study, it has been commonplace to set aside certain tokens in analyzing variability in the English copula as “don't count” (DC) forms. These cases are most often occurrences of the copula that exhibit categorical behavior (as with the full copula in clause-final position), as well as those that are ambiguous or indeterminate. In this article, I propose a set of copula forms that should be set aside from variable analysis as instances of DC forms to allow for systematic comparisons among studies. I review the major alternative descriptions of DC copula cases in the literature and analyze the behavior of the traditional DC categories. New data are presented to support the exclusion of particular DC cases from analyses of copula variability. Among the conclusions are that [was], [thas], and [is] should be excluded from quantitative analyses of variation in the copula because of their invariant status, and that a number of tokens commonly included (e.g., questions) should be excluded on various grounds.

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