The Regional Development of African American Vernacular English

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Walt Wolfram will conduct three years of research on the regional development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This research addresses the issues of persistent substrate influence, regional accommodation, and language change in earlier and present-day AAVE by comparing language variation in three remote African American communities in regionally distinct areas of North Carolina: Roanoke Island, a coastal community located between the mainland and the Outer Banks; Texana, a mountain community located in Southern Appalachia; and Princeville, a Coastal Plain community located in the rural region of the eastern third of the state. Each community has been the site of a stable and continuous African American population dating from the antebellum South, though the three communities represent different regional settings, disparate sociohistorical circumstances, and varied sociocultural and sociolinguistic contact situations. Sociolinguistic interviews will be conducted with at least three generations of speakers in each community. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses will be used to describe phonological, morphosyntactic, and syntactic variables that represent regional features as well as structures associated more generally with AAVE.The project is significant on descriptive, theoretical, and practical levels. Descriptively, the project provides a sociolinguistic account of African American speech in different communities in the rural South to determine the balance between the regional and the supra-regional dynamics. Theoretically, the research furthers the understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie language contact, language innovation, and language variation in time and space. Practically, the study contributes to public understanding of language diversity and offers a new perspective on national debate associated with AAVE. The project also provides educators with important data on the use of AAVE in different settings.