Historical Databases of African American English and Gullah

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During the 1930s and 1940s two sizable groups of African Americans were interviewed with the work sheets of the American Linguistic Atlas Project: 1) in 1933 Lorenzo Turner conducted 21 interviews among Gullah speakers in seven South Carolina and Georgia counties; 2) Guy Lowman and Raven McDavid completed a total of 32 interviews from Maryland south to Georgia. The responses of these speakers were transcribed impressionistically in fine IPA phonetics. This project will enter the responses for these informants, plus the responses of nine more African Americans interviewed for the Linguistic Atlas in the 1 960s and 1 970s, into a computer database. Access to the database will be enabled on the existing Linguistic Atlas Web site, which is already receiving over 10,000 `hits` per month. The general public and scholars alike will be able to browse and search the African American and Gullah materials in the same way that they now can access data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States; they will also be able to make maps of `who said what where` within the database. Ready access by scholars to this large, consistent corpus of historical African American English should make possible new analyses of the lexicon and pronunciation which can comment on the origins and nature of contemporary African American Vernacular English.