AAVE and the Creole Hypothesis: Reflections on the state of the issue

John Rickford

Fri. 4:25-5:40 B

The hypothesis that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) had its origins in a creole language (the so-called "creole hypothesis") has been around for thirty years (since Bailey 1965), but research and debate on it show no signs of abating. In this paper I will reflect on the current state of the issue, taking into account the most recently available evidence and the most recently articulated positions.

Evidence to be considered includes quantitative data on copula absence and other variables in contemporary samples from US cities, compared with similar data from textual attestations of AAVE in earlier periods, from diaspora varieties in Liberia and Samana, Dominican Republic, and from Caribbean mesolectal creoles in Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. These data derive partly from my own research and partly from the work of others, including (but not limited to) John Baugh, John Holm, William Labov, Shana Poplack, David Sankoff, John Singler, Sali Tagliamonte, Don Winford and (most recently) Renee Blake on Barbadian and Dawn Hannah on Samana English.

Positions to be reviewed include, in addition to the traditional "pro" and "con" positions, a new class of intermediate positions which assert either that AAVE was a "semi-creole" (Holm 1992) or that AAVE emerged as a result of "language shift" (rather than "decreolization) from an earlier creole (Winford 1992). The extent to which these newer hypotheses might affect debate on the the older positions will be considered, and the ways in which existing and future evidence (might) bear on them will be assessed.

References

Bailey, Beryl. 1965. Toward a new perspective in Negro English dialectology. American Speech 40.3:171-77.

Holm, John. 1992. A theoretical model for semi-creolization. Paper presented at the 9th bi-ennial conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics, University of the West Indies, Barbados.

Winford, Don. 1992. Back to the past: The BEV/Creole connection revisited. Language Variation and Change 4.3:311-357.