The Origin of American Black English: Be-Forms in the Hoodoo Texts (Topics in English Linguistics, 15)

Book info: The Origin of American Black English: Be-Forms in the Hoodoo Texts (Topics in English Linguistics, 15) (Hardcover, 327 pages) – de Gruyter Mouton, 1995. Language: English.

No detailed description available for "The Origin of American Black English". Editorial Reviews From the Author In the past three decades hardly any linguistic topic has been discussed as emotionally as the status of Black English in the United States. The discussion revolves around two main issues, namely the historical origin of this variety and its relationship with American White English. The essential question is whether Black English is derived from a creole language or from British and American dialects.

Whereas the great majority of early publications on this variety represented the traditional dialect position, the creole theory received a strong impetus through the Black Power Movement in the 1960s. Arguments in favour of one or the other hypothesis have at times triggered polemical discussion in the United States in which socio-historical motives have always played a major part.

To shed some light on the diachronic development of Black English, it is necessary to take an unbiased approach, which I have endeavoured to do in this study. The investigation is concerned with the use of be-forms and is based on a collection of interviews carried out by the white priest Hyatt with black hoodoo doctors in the North and South of the United States in the 1930s and in 1970. It was only in the 1970s that these interviews were published in the five volumes of Hoodoo - conjuration - witchcraft- footwork.

The corpus, which has hardly been drawn upon for linguistic research, offers the rare opportunity of studying linguistic change in real time.

I shall argue that a priori assumptions of the creole and dialect theories have often led to circular reasoning and prevented an objective analysis of Black English. Therefore this variety should first of all be studied in its own right.

An earlier version of this book was accepted by the University of Giessen as my doctoral thesis. I am grateful to Prof. W. Viereck, who suggested the topic to me, and to my advisors, Prof. D. Stein and Prof. A. Jucker, who constantly supported my studies. I also wish to thank Mouton de Gruyter and the editor of the series, Prof. H. Wekker, for accepting this work for publication.