This study sheds light on the socio-economic factors determining the (re)location of sociolinguistic prestige in postcolonial environments. It uses the case of Namibia, an ethnolinguistically diverse African country that replaced Afrikaans -- an established lingua franca -- with English as its official language to weaken the hold of the formerly…

One African-centered linguistic paradigm argues the primary language of most descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States is not English but an African language. The language is called "Ebonics." Clinical linguist Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith (1938-) is the most conspicuous figure in the history of the paradigm. The reconstructed…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

In discussions of cross-linguistic influence (also known as language transfer), the focus is usually on the influence of a particular structure in a particular instance of language contact, for instance, the negative transfer of serial verbs by Vietnamese learners of English: "She has managed to rise the kite fly over the tallest…

The Curriculum and Pedagogy book series is an enactment of the mission and values espoused by the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group, an international educational organization serving those who share a common faith in democracy and a commitment to public moral leadership in schools and society. Accordingly, the mission of this series is to advance…

This work addresses the politics of speech and language communication with respect to Africans in the Diaspora in Jamaica and in the United States of America. Language hegemony is an expression of the power and control sustained by means of institutions such as schools. Depending on their linguistic choices or situational language use, post…

The loss of the copula in Black English Vernacular (BEV) is demonstrably traceable to norms of pidginization that have their roots in West African languages and in contact among those languages. An extensive examination of the verb systems of a number of West African languages reveals that in every case a variety of verbal forms serves the many…

The African concept of time is reinterpreted, emphasizing aspect rather than tense. Examples are taken from Black English. (MC)

The extension of the progressive aspect to stative verbs has been identified as a characteristic feature of New Varieties of English across the world, including the English of black South Africans (BSAfE). This paper examines the use of the progressive aspect in BSAfE, by doing a comparative analysis of three corpora of argumentative student…

Takes issue with some conclusions by J. L. Dillard in his article Principles in the History of American English--Paradox, Virginity, and Cafeteria,'' Florida FL Reporter (Spring/Fall 1970) p32-33, 46. Special issue on Black Dialect: Historical and Descriptive Issues'' edited by William A. Stewart. (RS)

The present text on Gullah, a dialect of a large number of Negroes in South Carolina and Georgia, is a reprint of the original volume published in 1949 by the University of Chicago Press. (Publication of the original was aided by a subsidy from the American Council of Learned Societies.) In the first preface, the author remarks on the current…

This article surveys the literature on Ebonics that was published from 1865 to 1975. The linguistic features of Ebonics are categorized into phonological, systactical, and lexical groupings. (Author)

Is Black English a true language form? A history of its development was discussed with suggestions for language teachers and school systems in meeting the language needs of the black student. (RK)

Proposes the study of Gullah as a means of discovering the African roots of Black English. (AM)

The value of teaching Standard English as the language of school and mainstream middle class culture is undisputed, yet Black English, as a non-standard English dialect, has great potential as an instructional tool in the composition classroom. The use of the black dialect can help expand black students' intellectual potential by de-stigmatizing…