Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

by John McWhorter

So what is the function of this up? Up what? In this instance, up signifies that the place you’re in is familiar and comfortable.

the reason done can mark things in both the recent and the distant past, but only in certain sentences in either case, is that its function is more specific than it seems. It marks counterexpectation. That is, whether it’s used in a sentence about 1973 or last week, a sentence with done is always about something the speaker finds somewhat surprising,

Second, notice that two hands and two feet is twa handa and twegen fet. Why twa for some words and twegen for others? Because in Old English, as in any normal European language, things had genders for no real reason.

Modern English chucked most of what made Old English complicated, in fact. It happened when the Vikings invaded England, learned Old English badly because as adults they picked it up imperfectly, and then passed their rendition on to the kids they conceived with English-speaking women.

However, in the grand scheme of things, it bears mentioning that what Black English shaved away from Standard English is but a dribble compared to what Modern English dumped from Old.

Gender can also condition the extent to which one sounds black and when. Studies of Black English have often found that black men tend to sample the dialect in their speech to a higher degree than black women.

but conforms to a worldwide pattern linguists have discovered, according to which women are more proper in their speech in more contexts than men are.

as the wonderful map by Rick Aschmann that appears online shows (aschmann.net/AmEng

Since, especially, commercial radio and sound films in the 1930s—plus the explosion in college degrees after the GI Bill of the 1940s—Americans have come to speak more like one another than they used to. Warnings that dialects are disappearing

Black English, then, is America’s manifestation of something that happens all over the world.

In the same vein, McKay uses am as a marker of what we might call vernacular affection.

Boston Blackwell, ninety-eight, and born in Arkansas, was interviewed around

Jonah’s Gourd Vine

The Emergence of Black English: Text and Commentary

George T. Dorrill, Black and White Speech in the South: Evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States

Lisa Green, African-American English: A Linguistic Introduction

158 Court transcriptions of statements by London prisoners: Laura Wright, “Eight grammatical features of southern United States speech present in early modern London prison narratives,” in English in the Southern United States