From down South to up South: The language behavior of three generations of Black women residing in Chicago

An intergenerational study was conducted on three generations of Black women who were either born in Chicago or migrated there from Southern states. The purpose of the study was to explore and examine the nature of the Black Speech Community in terms of discourse styles and the use of the copula/auxiliary. The three generations of women were determined by age and year of arrival to Chicago. The Black Speech Community was defined according to the social, historical and political contexts in which it emerged. These contexts represented the historical periods of slavery, rural tenancy and urban dwelling. The study found that during slavery, a counterlanguage developed with the African substrate as its source. Evidence of the counterlanguage appears in indirect speech and various levels of syntax. Its influence is also apparent in communication maxims used by the speech community which are different from those found in other English dialects. The study also found that the syntactic environments where \u27to be\u27 is deleted differed in frequency from previous studies of Black English. These differences in frequency were attributed to a high incidence of past deletion in Generation I and changes in the social reality of the speech community for Generations II and III. Finally, the educational implications of the findings were discussed as they relate to issues of learning in the classroom

From down South to up South: The language behavior of three generations of Black women residing in Chicago

An intergenerational study was conducted on three generations of Black women who were either born in Chicago or migrated there from Southern states. The purpose of the study was to explore and examine the nature of the Black Speech Community in terms of discourse styles and the use of the copula/auxiliary. The three generations of women were determined by age and year of arrival to Chicago. The Black Speech Community was defined according to the social, historical and political contexts in which it emerged. These contexts represented the historical periods of slavery, rural tenancy and urban dwelling. The study found that during slavery, a counterlanguage developed with the African substrate as its source. Evidence of the counterlanguage appears in indirect speech and various levels of syntax. Its influence is also apparent in communication maxims used by the speech community which are different from those found in other English dialects. The study also found that the syntactic environments where \u27to be\u27 is deleted differed in frequency from previous studies of Black English. These differences in frequency were attributed to a high incidence of past deletion in Generation I and changes in the social reality of the speech community for Generations II and III. Finally, the educational implications of the findings were discussed as they relate to issues of learning in the classroom