What is African American English?

In her 2002 book African American English: a linguistic introduction, Lisa Green says that African American English is a “linguistic system that is used by some African Americans.” Nowhere in her book, however, does she outline criteria which would establish what is to be included or excluded from this system. Nor does she give precise definition to the terms “linguistic system” or “African American.” As for the latter, let us assume that African Americans are the descendants of slaves living in the United States. This definition is of course debatable and not wholly precise, but it is probably not too far off from Green’s intentions.

As for “linguistic system,” Green’s failure to provide a precise definition represents an apparently widespread tendency in linguistics. If we turn to a general textbook, Victoria Fromkin et al.’s An Introduction to Language, 8th ed., “languages” and “dialects” are apparently countable items that “reflect the underlying rule systems—grammars—of their speakers.” These “underlying rule systems,” supposedly, represent “unconscious knowledge.” But what exactly is this unconscious knowledge, and how do we access it?

The tradition of using such concepts as unconscious knowledge is generally attributed to the work of Noam Chomsky, which is fair, I think. Nevertheless, linguists have done some serious cherry picking, it appears. For instance, if we look at p. 8 of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, one of Chomsky’s foundational theoretical texts, we find the following passage:

Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate. Any interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental processes that are far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness; furthermore, it is quite apparent that a speaker’s reports and viewpoints about his behavior and his competence may be in error. Thus a generative grammar attempts to specify what the speaker actually knows, not what he may report about his knowledge.

This last sentence, above, thus seems to offer an impossible task. But texts such as Fromkin et al.’s and Green’s (among many, many others) do not show how the impossible is to be made possible. Nor is there generally any attempt to flesh out what “knowledge” is, exactly.

Chomsky himself, however, has dealt with this problem in a more recent publication. In Problems of Knowledge & Freedom, he suggests, “terminological debate about the concepts of ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief,’” is “likely to be fruitless,” and in the study of language, “we need not (to a first approximation, at least) make the distinction between knowledge and belief.” Continuing, he concludes, “There is no objective external standard against which to check the system of rules and principles relating sound and meaning—the grammar—constructed by the mind.”

Apparently, our “unconscious knowledge” and “linguistic systems” are products of belief. It is therefore to Fromkin et al.’s credit that they cite the dictum attributed to Max Weinreich: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. If linguistic systems come down to belief, then they may come down also to politics.

Nevertheless, another option remains. That is, we can consider linguistic systems to be abstractions. Allow me to explain.

We may begin with interpretations over whatever we consider to be linguistic events, as they occur in time and space. For example, if I say “hello” to you as we pass each other on the street, that “hello” can be isolated as an event. We can then choose to consider other events to be in the same class as that “hello.” (Note that whether or not a “what’s up?” falls into the same class cannot be determined a posteriori).[1]

In any case, however we choose to regard events, we can build up classes of them, and we can call those classes linguistic features. These may include what we consider to be words, phonetic and grammatical details, etc. We can then choose to classify a collection of features as belonging to a linguistic system (or language, dialect, etc.), organizing those features however we wish.

This generalized method is not rocket science. But for some strange reason, standard texts in linguistics allow students to go through their undergraduate (and even graduate!) educations in the field without ever questioning a belief in language varieties as preexistent things “out there.” And although linguistics has had a long and intricate relationship with evolutionary biology, students of the latter field are not treated analogously. For example, a textbook on evolution[2] cites the taxonomist George Gaylord Simpson:

Classification […] is an artifice with no objective reality. It arises and exists only in the minds of its devisers, learners and users.

With this perspective, we can return to the issue of African American English.

If African American English is a linguistic system that is used by some African Americans, as Green contends, then we can’t simply be dealing with an abstraction over the linguistic events of African Americans. And as Word: the Online Journal of African American English suggests, “not everybody who speaks AAE is African American.”

It appears, then, that African American English is being used to refer to linguistic features that are associated with African Americans. Nothing is necessarily wrong with this usage, but we must understand the subjectivity that underlies it. That is, if Green (or whoever) associates feature X with African Americans, it does not follow that anybody else does, or should, necessarily. Nor does it mean that anybody else must recognize feature X as a feature, or recognize African Americans as a group, for the purposes of analysis in the pursuit of specific goals.

Quickly, things get complex. For the moment, I will simply wrap up with a statement from Juanita Williamson: the features used to identify Black English are “neither black nor white, but American.”[3]

Now, if Williamson’s point was to suggest that there are no potentially discernible differences between the speech patterns of Blacks and those of White Southerners, research from the past several decades would suggest this to be false, when considering the groups as wholes (although the research also recognizes a good deal of overlap between the patterns of Blacks and White Southerners).

Still, even if this is false, it does not mean that linguists are forced to categorize language along racial lines.[4] There may be good reasons to do so for certain purposes, but there may also be good reasons to follow Williamson’s lead and classify the language of Blacks - or African Americans - as “American.” The ramifications are myriad. For one, these two (or three?) alternatives suggest different political strategies for confronting educational issues. I will return to this in a later posting.

Meanwhile, thanks for reading.


notes

1 See also Chomsky, 1955, “Logical Syntax and Semantics: their linguistic relevance,” Language, 31, 36-45. Also, note that to classify two “hello”s as the “same” is not decidable a posteriori, either. (This is not to say that such classificatory decisions are not necessarily justifiable for certain purposes).

2 Hall & Hallgrimson, 2008, Strickberger’s Evolution, 4th ed, p. 240, citing Simpson, 1980, Why and How: some problems and methods in historical biology, p. 110.

3 Williamson, “A look at Black English,” The Crisis, 78, 169-76, as cited by Labov, 1982, “Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science: the case of the Black English trial in Ann Arbor,” Language in Society, 11, 165-201.

4 For an excellent and more general argument along these lines, see Brubaker & Cooper, 2000, “Beyond ‘identity,’” Theory & Society, 29, 1-47.