Renée Blake

AAE and Variation in Teachers’ Attitudes: A Question of School Philosophy?

Abstract Linguists and other social scientists have identified school curriculum, teacher education, language policy and testing as pedagogical domains in which to address issues and develop tools that foster greater academic achievement of African American English-speaking students, and nonstandard English speakers more generally. This article focuses on the intersection between teachers’ attitudes toward African American English and language policy, or lack thereof, at the secondary school level. The analyses are based on questionnaires completed by teachers from several public schools located in the New York metropolitan area. This study includes teachers with large populations of students for whom English is a second language or whose primary language is a dialect of English other than that spoken by the mainstream. Thus, we inquire to what extent teachers are sensitized to the educational needs of these students. The results point to the importance of school policy in affecting teachers’ sensitivity towards AAE.

The /ay/ diphthong in a Martha's Vineyard community: What can we say 40 years after Labov?

This article revisits Labovs (1962, 1972a) germinal sociolinguistic work on Marthas Vineyard speech, providing a synchronic analysis of the /ay/ diphthong in words like right and time , and, in turn, a diachronic perspective on a sound change in progress. Labov observed that the first element of the /ay/ diphthong was raised in the speech of Marthas Vineyarders, particularly fishermen, and he correlated it with social factors like identity (i.e., local heritage) and resistance to summer visitors. The present authors provide a sociolinguistic analysis of /ay/ from a new set of data collected in a Marthas Vineyard speech community. The outcome suggests a change in the linguistic pattern observed by Labov, which the authors argue is linked to socio-economic restructuring and resulting ideological changes taking place on the island. The acoustic and social factors are analyzed using VARBRUL to show how /ay/ variation today patterns with various internal and external factors found to be salient in Labovs earlier study.

Diachrony and AAE: St. Louis, Hip-Hop, and Sound Change outside of the Mainstream

In this article, the authors provide a diachronic analysis of the urr variable as it appears in African American English (AAE) spoken in St. Louis. While many believe that this linguistic feature is a product of hip-hop, invented recently for creative purposes, the authors provide linguistic evidence that shows it to be a prevalent feature of dialects of AAE spoken in St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois, at an earlier time. The authors suggest that the increase in vowel centralization that evolved in St. Louis is similar to that found in Memphis, Tennessee, along an s-curve pattern. Finally, the authors theorize about how the use of the urr variable by hip-hop artists correlates with its increased usage in present-day local communities. They employ notions of indexicality, meaning making, acts of identity, and accommodation to argue for linguistic convergence between St. Louis rappers and local communities. They argue that the increased usage and acceptance of vowel centralization in local communities is supported by hip-hop language as opposed to innovated through it.