The evolutionary development of the written language now known as African American Vernacular English is vital in understanding how written forms of dialect in the 1930s were represented in literature In 1908, John Bennett completed the earliest study of Gullah, also known as Sea Island Dialect, a Creole blend of Elizabethan English and African languages (McDavid 7). Bennett’s conclusions reflected assumptions concerning the differences in language based on “the inferiority” of one race in comparison to another. Bennett claimed that African Americans speaking Gullah were physically unable to make English sounds. He noted that:
To express other than simplest ideas, plain actualities, is, however, difficult…
Intellectual indolence, or laziness, mental and physical, which shows itself in the shortening of words, the elision of syllables, and modification of every difficult enunciation…
It is the indolence, mental and physical, of the Gullah dialect that is its most characteristic feature…(qtd. in McDavid 7)
Today, this sort of research would quickly be dismissed due to its obvious pre- existing bias, yet similar ideas were repeated in studies carried in 1922 (Gonzales) and again in 1940 (Crum). These researchers seemingly ignored the whites who also spoke versions of Gullah (Rickford 90-111). It is clear from Joel Chandler Harris’ writings that dialects other than Gullah were in existence, since Harris claimed he was not writing in “the lingo in vogue on the rice plantations and Sea Islands of the South Atlantic States” (Harris viii). Yet very little research was conducted in the field of African American dialects at that time.
Writers of children’s literature in the 1930s would not be privy to research revealing standardisation rules of African American dialect since such rules were not established until twenty to thirty years after their work was published in the 1930s. Research printed in such journals as American
Speech and The Journal of Negro History on AAVE did not appear until the
late 1950s and 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement was in full motion. AAVE as a field of research had late beginnings as seen by the publication dates of the earliest papers and books discussing AAVE or African American dialect.2 As research continued, a understanding of the syntax of the
2
Although there is no “declaration date” of AAVE gaining the status of a language, most cited studies are from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Creolists’ studies include Dalby, 1971; DeCamp, 1971; Dillard, 1973; Taylor, 1969. Dialectologists’ studies include Baratz, 1970; Labov, 1971; Shuy 1971;
language started to emerge, confirming AAVE as not just a random, slang, or inferior way of speaking, but as a dialect with a historic evolution and governed by grammatical rules.
Even today, there are various debates as to how and when AAVE developed. If such debates exist today, writers in the 1930s had less information at hand to authorise their representation of African American dialect. Today different researchers focused on different aspects of the language, drawing confusing and conflicting conclusions about the genesis of AAVE. According to the present body of research, there are two accepted ways of thinking about the origins of AAVE. In 2000, Mark L. Louden noted that Creolists claim that "modern AAVE is a descendant of originally pidginized, and subsequently creolized varieties of English which developed among African slaves from differing linguistic backgrounds who lacked a common language," while Dialectologists "hold that first-generation African- American slaves...were in much the same linguistic situation as non-English speaking immigrants...they came to learn forms of English spoken by co- territorial whites." Dialectologists examine "the structure similarities between AAVE and Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE)" (223). They propose that African Americans and Caucasian Americans had more social interaction whereas Creolists would opt for greater separation.
Yet others, continues Louden citing Donald Winford of the Ohio State University, have combined these perspectives, "charting a middle course between the two extremes" arguing that AAVE “is not simply a variety of SWVE spoken by African-Americans, neither is it the direct descendant of a plantation creole” (224). Winford uses sociohistorical evidence to support his
claims yet neither he, nor the author of the article (Louden) "label" this middle course.
Some of the latest research rectifies this oversight. Ernie A. Smith’s chapter “The Historical Development of Ebonics” (2003) clearly labels and defines the three present views of AAVE from a linguistic perspective. Like Louden, Smith starts with the Creolist position, noting that “[a]ccording to Creolists..linguistic similarity is evidence of a genetic kinship and linguistic continuity in these dialects…[which] resulted from English and African linguistic convergence” (50). Smith uses the term “Transformationalist” to discuss the group Louden identifies as Dialectologists. This group supports the theory that “the differences in Black and Anglo-American linguistic behaviour are superficial and mainly in the surface structure. In the deep structure they are the same” (50). Finally, Smith labels the third view as the Ethnolinguists who believe “the linguistic and paralinguistic features… represent the speech communicative continuation of the African Hamito-Bantu tradition in Black America” (Smith 51). This group rejects and accepts various aspects of the first two groups mentioned and is the “middle course between the two extremes” (ibid). In looking back at the dialect used in the 1930s, these various positions are of interest in determining how authors’ inventive dialect compares with such contemporary linguistic perspectives.
If the focus of this chapter were purely linguistic, it would be of greater importance to detail the linguistic differences between the three prevailing views of the history and origins of African American Vernacular English. What is paramount to the focus of the chapter, as it relates to the children’s literature under consideration, is that none of these views claim that AAVE is
not a language. Smith states, “As linguists, their proponents all agree that when compared with Standard English, Ebonics is different, and they assert that Ebonics is not a deficient language system” (54). It is noteworthy to view the development of AAVE on a continuum; clearly perceptions have shifted since Bennett’s 1908 claim that Gullah, and in general all forms of dialect spoken by African Americans, stems from a lazy speech deficiency. Today’s multiple views of AAVE as a language are based on thorough linguistic studies.
In order to understand dialectic writings from the 1930s, one must consider where African American speech representations were located along the historical continuum of AAVE development. Because the validity of AAVE was not standardised until the late 1960s/early 1970s, the ways in which authors wrote dialect in their stories for the child audience are variable and numerous. The success or failure of the use of dialect was often determined by the way in which dialect constructed the African American character speaking the dialect. Written language is merely a representation of the sounds made by living humans. It is the way in which that representation is constructed that is of importance in determining a complete construction of character and in determining the “correctness” in dialect.
This representation of sounds is considered ‘written dialect’ which is read as any other language. Defining the difference between ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ is a complicated task, even for those in the field of linguistics. According to Charles J. Fillmore, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkley, “The words ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ are confusingly ambiguous. These are not precisely definable technical terms even in the field
of linguistics, but linguists have learned to live with the ambiguities” (Fillmore). In tracing the development of AAVE, many researchers claim that language development starts from pidgins, which occur when peoples with different languages form a new language in order to communicate. There is a dominant language that contributes most to the vocabulary of the pidgin. Once the pidgin has evolved and acquired native speakers, it is then called a Creole. This minimal description is concerned with the development of the spoken language. There is no mention of the development of the language in a written form.