AAVE, Black English, Creole Experts

You can forget words, but not the language: Children learn languages much more readily than adults, but if contact with the language is lost, knowledge will completely fade. But it turns out the capacity to recognize it won't . Hindi and Zulu have some basic phonetic components that don't appear in English, making it difficult for English speakers to recognize some words. Researchers tested some people in the UK that had contact with these languages when young, but hadn't seen it in so long, they flunked basic vocabulary tests. It turns out they could still pick up the phonetic differences that their peers would miss.

Professor
John Rickford

LINGUISTICS | EXPERTS | AAVE

Dr. Rickford has worked on AAVE since the early 1970s and he is also a creolist and speaker of Guyanese Creole

Creole Expert,Dr. John Rickford

Book Reviews

RINGLEADER DR. JOHN RICKFORD

BOOKS BY JOHN RICKFORD

Writings On The " Ebonics " Issue

Dialect Speakers & Reading Dialect Readers Curriculum

Written Creole: Genuine or Hoax ?

Dr. Rickford Speaking on this Video Dr. John Rickford Video

Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English by John R. Rickford, Russell J. Rickford (Contributor)
American Book Award for 2000 from the Before Columbus Foundation.

"That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable . . . but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music."
~ John R. Rickford and Russell J. Rickford ( 2000)

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LINGUISTICS | EXPERTS

AMERICAN VIRGIN ISLANDS

Dr. Sabino's Website

Dr. Gilbert A. Sprauve E-mail: gsprauv@uvi.edu
(Off.) 340-693-1342 U.S.V.I.

Dr. Gene Emanuel E-mail: gemanue@uvi.edu
(Off.) 340-693-1348 U.S.V.I.

Language and Literature : Virgin Islands (U.S.) picked by Library of congress subject experts .
A listing of web sites that provide links to resources relating to the U.S. Virgin Islands. The most important source for bibliography of books and articles concerning the U.S. Virgin Islands.

There is more information available about early language in the Cul De Sac under the American Virgin Islands Curriculum

Professors

  • PROF. JOHN BAUGH POLICY EXPERT
    (Stanford U.) (Baugh is a leading educational and sociolinguist with a lifetime's experience of AAVE)
  • PROF. Salikoko S. Mufwene
    My research of the past twenty years has been primarily on morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics of Gullah, African-American Vernacular English, Jamaican Creole, and English . However, in recent years I have focused more on the development of " Atlantic creoles " (lexified by European languages), Kikongo-Kituba, Lingala, and on questions of language evolution .
  • Professor David Sutcliff
    "Situating United States African American Vernacular English in Linguistic Space" see Fabula Software and The Voices of Living History
  • Fabula can be used to create stories in any pair of languages
  • Professor Jeff Siegel
    Stigmatized and Standardized Varieties in the Classroom: Interference or Separation? ARTICLE
  • PROF. JIM WILCE
    linguistic anthropologist at Northern Arizona University collects references to AAVE literature with comments
  • PROF. WILLIAM LOBOV
    Professor of Linguistics and Psychology [p] 215.898.4912
    Director of the Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. Labov, more than any linguist, started the scientific study of African American urban speech in a sociolinguistic manner:
    Coexistent systems in African-American English
  • PROF KENN HARPER
    Lived in the Arctic for over thirty years in Inuit communities in the Baffin Region and in Qaanaaq, Greenland. He has worked as a teacher, development officer, historian, linguist, and businessman. He speaks Inuktitut, the Eskimo language of the eastern Canadia Arctic and has written extensively on northern history and the Inuktitut language. He presently lives in Iqaluit, capital of the new Arctic territory of Nunavut, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Listen to an exclusive excerpt of Harper reading from "Give Me My Father's Body."
  • PROFESSOR CECILE MCHARDY Independent Scholar Gullah Culture
  • PROF. ANNA CELIA ZANTELLA
    Spanish and English = Spanglish
  • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER DEREK WALCOTT
  • MICHEL DEGRAFF
    Associate Professor of Linguistics
    Linguistic theory; syntax; morphology; language change/creation; "Creole" studies; linguistics-ideology interface.
    Morphology in Creole Genesis A prolegomenon PDF To appear in: Michael Kenstowicz, ed.,_Ken Hale: A Life in Language_ Cambridge MASS.: MIT Press
    The paper evaluates widely believed received notions about Creole morphology. These notions span the entire course of Creole studies and a variety of theoretical approaches. The paper also revisits some of the historical foundations of Creole studies and their relationships to contemporary sociological concerns in, and about, Creole communities.
  • Dr. Roger Abrahams - Roots of Rap
    Abrahams, Roger D. "Black Talking on the Streets." Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Eds. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer. London: Cambridge UP, 1974. 240-62.
    1. Abrahams, Roger D. "The Training of the Man of Words in Talking Sweet." Language in Society 1 (1972): 15-29.
    2. Abrahams, Roger D. Rapping and Capping: Black Talk as an Art. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
    3. Abrahams, Roger D. Talking Black. Rowley MA: Newbury, 1976.
    4. Abrahams, Roger. "Negotiating Respect: Patterns of Presentation among Black Women." Women and Folklore. Ed. Claire Farrer. U of Texas P, 1975.

The Interagency Language Roundtable is an unfunded Federal interagency organization established for the coordination and sharing of information about foreign language-related activities at the Federal level. Dr. Frederick H. Jackson, I.L.R. Coordinator, Foreign Service Institute, Tel: 703-302-7064; Email: jacksonfh@state.gov.

PROF. JOHN FIGUEROA (Deceased)
A poet, teacher and champion of Caribbean culture

EXPERT MIKE CASSERLY - DEPT OF EDUCATION

LINGUISTICS European Creole Expert

Dutch Antilles in the Dutch Caribbean has the Papiamentu SpellChecker

Trini Talk by Miguel Brown

Anna Celia Zantella

azentell@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu

Puerto Rican Children in New York
Hardback $54.95
Paperback $24.95
Blackwell Publishers 1-800-216-2522

This book provides an inside view of the social construction of bilingualism in one of the largest and most disadvantaged Spanish=speaking groups in the United States. It walks readers through a New York Puerto Rican community and describes the five varieties of Spanish and English that constitute the community's bilingual and multi-dialectal repertoire, the four major communication patterns that predominate in the homes of twenty families with children, and the syntactic features and discourse strategies of the so-called "Spanglish".

Growing up Bilingual describes the individual code-switching styles of five childhood friends, the development of their English and Spanish as they went separate ways as teenagers, and the socialization of their infants to and through oral and literate uses of language when they became mothers. Confronting issues concerning the relationship between bilingualism and linguistic, cognitive and educational development , this book provides and insight into the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of modern communities.

Minik the New York Eskimo

Inuktitut, the Eskimo language of the eastern Canadia Arctic

1897 Robert Peary, Arctic explorer, took 6 Eskimos from Greenland back to NYC as living museum specimens. In 2000 Ken Harper authored "Give Me My Father's Body," the story of Minik, one of the 6 Eskimos, who died in 1918 in a New Hampshire lumber camp at age 28.

Kenn Harper has lived in the Arctic for over thirty years in Inuit communities in the Baffin Region and in Qaanaaq, Greenland. He has worked as a teacher, development officer, historian, linguist, and businessman. He speaks Inuktitut, the Eskimo language of the eastern Canadia Arctic and has written extensively on northern history and the Inuktitut language. He presently lives in Iqaluit, capital of the new Arctic territory of Nunavut, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

"Give Me My Father's Body" by Kenn Harper which tells the story of Minik, the "New York Eskimo," a young boy from northwestern Greenland, brought to New York by explorer Robert Peary in 1897.

Harper's book is a harrowing biography of Minik's devastating experiences, including being presented to the American Museum of Natural History as one of sixm Eskimo "specimens," being stared at by the paying public, and other horrors of his twelve years as the only Eskimo in New York City. See Review

David Sutcliff

Contact David Sutcliffe

"Situating United States African American Vernacular English in Linguistic Space" PDF FILE
Chapter 8 by David Sutcliffe Copyright Used with Permission.
This is a draft version that will be updated, improved in due course.

The Voices of Living History : by David Sutcliffe used with permission.
A review of accounts given by 12 former slaves and one white woman - of the antebellum plantations, the Civil War and the post-war period. Taken from Sutcliffe 1998 African American Vernacular English: Origins and Issues (pages 68-95 slightly abridged). Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading, England.

Evaluation Organisations
-- David Sutclife
University Pompeu Fabra La Rambla 30-32,
08002 Barcelona, Spain