Coming of Age in African American English: Descriptive, methodological, and theoretical issues

Monday, 22 March 2010, Colloquium

Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University.

Abstract

Although the structures of African American English (AAE) have been scrutinized in great detail over the last half-century, there remain a number of questions about the development and use of these structures during the lifespan:

  • Is there a period in the life cycle when vernacular structures are most likely to be evidenced, and if so, when?

  • How much variation in vernacular usage may be demonstrated from childhood through adolescence, and do children show similar or different trajectories of vernacular dialect development and change over time?

  • What social and structural linguistic factors influence these trajectories?

Primary hypotheses about vernacular AAE optimization include the “childhood basilectal hypothesis” (AAE use is optimal during early childhood as an ontocyclic reflection of the creole-origin hypothesis (Stewart 1965; Dillard 1972)), the “preschool optimization hypothesis” (vernacular AAE use is optimal before schooling begins, when the prescriptive effect of schooling reduces vernacular features (Craig and Washington 2006)), and the “adolescent peer hypothesis” (vernacular AAE use plateaus during adolescence and the teen-aged years when peer influence is heightened (Labov 1965, 1972)).

This presentation empirically addresses these issues about the development of AAE in childhood and adolescence based on an unparalleled database in which the language development of a cohort of 70 African American children in the North Carolina piedmont were progressively followed for 17 years, starting in 1990 when the children were 6 to 12 months old. Language samples were collected from the children at one or two-year increments, along with the administration of a battery of standardized and nonstandardized language and school tests. Measurements were also made of the youths’ home and childcare/school environments and a host of measures were administered in order to assess a variety of background social and educational variables. The collection of language sample recordings from infancy through secondary school, the parental and peer interaction interviews, and the data from tests, as well as school records and other social background data collected as a part of this project, constitutes the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset on language and school achievement ever compiled in the study of AAE.

Following up on an incipient analysis by Van Hofwegen and Wolfram (forthcoming), this study more fully addresses some of the critical linguistic, social, and educational variables that affect the trajectory of AAE development over the first 17 years, including descriptive, theoretical, and methodological issues related to the longitudinal study of AAE.