{"id":1234,"date":"2017-06-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-13T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwordmuseum.org\/talking-black-in-america-q-a-with-walt-wolfram\/"},"modified":"2023-08-25T13:27:24","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T17:27:24","slug":"talking-black-in-america-q-a-with-walt-wolfram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwordmuseum.org\/talking-black-in-america-q-a-with-walt-wolfram\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking Black in America: Q&A with Walt Wolfram"},"content":{"rendered":"

African American English is one of the most controversial language varieties in the United States. Its speakers are often criticized as speaking “bad English,” but its rappers, musicians, poets, and performers have driven countless musical innovations and pop culture trends in the United States. A new documentary, Talking Black in America<\/em>, tells the complicated story of African American English through interviews with linguists and conversations with native speakers. We asked the film’s executive director,\u00a0linguist and Planet Word advisor Walt Wolfram, some questions about the influence of African American English and the most common misconceptions surrounding the language variety.<\/p>\n

Q: The documentary,\u00a0Talking Black in America<\/em>, tackles the biggest misconception about African American English: that it\u2019s simply \u201cbad English.\u201d People point to sentences like \u201che crazy\u201d or \u201cshe be talking\u201d as \u201cmistakes,\u201d but the film\u2019s experts show that such phrases follow sophisticated grammatical rules. What other misconceptions do people have about this language variety?<\/h4>\n

A: <\/strong>Though the impression that African American language is just a \u201ccollection of speech errors\u201d is probably the most widely-held misconception, we try to confront a number of other ones, too. For instance, one common misconception is that all African Americans speak alike\u2014the homogenization myth. There is as much regional, social, educational, stylistic, and individual diversity in African American speech as there is in any of the dialects of European Americans in the United States, notwithstanding some common features shared by vernacular speakers because of the peculiar history of African American speech.<\/p>\n

The history of African American speech shows its orderly progression from a contact-based variety of English that developed in West Africa and the Caribbean during the Middle Passage to its systematic development in the rural South and its contemporary development in segregated urban enclaves of the North. One of the most surprising aspects of African American speech in the twentieth and twenty-first century, however, is the fact that the vernacular variety has been diverging from, rather than converging with, neighboring white varieties. This is due to persistent demographic segregation in urban regions and the role of language as a marker of black identity.<\/p>\n