"The African-American Speech Community: Reality and Sociolinguists."

In Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations, ed. Marcyliena Morgan. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA: 121-148.

Morgan’s essay extends a point raised elsewhere by creolist Mervyn Alleyne: for sociolinguistic research to benefit U.S. African American (AA) speakers, it must fairly represent them. Morgan argues persuasively that crude, overgeneral descriptions of the AA speech community which ignore changing class dynamics, exclude women, and stereotype sexual attitudes in presenting linguistic data, reinforce the image of African-American English (AAE) as a sign of poverty and oppression and only help marginalize its speakers.

She reviews the well-known 1978 King school case in Ann Arbor, which focused on whether AAE differed substantially from Standard English, and William Labov’s research on the divergence of AAE from white vernacular speech. The AA press responded to such research with rejection, distortion and suspicion, Morgan writes, partly because linguists (white and black) failed to incorporate African-American values and beliefs about language and education into their research and reform plans. In-group attitudes to AAE vary, depending on context of use. In settings where AAE is normally spoken, it is positively valued as symbolizing community membership across class lines; in the "dominant sphere," it represents solidarity and resistance to Standard English, yet is itself seen by some African-Americans as indicative of a "slave mentality."

Morgan’s study has obvious relevance for Caribbean creole situations and sociolinguistics n general, and is convincingly argued, though few sociolinguists will recognize her depiction of their field as one that routinely ignores language attitudes and privileges standard languages over vernacular.