DOCUMENT RESUME AL 001 504 ED 022 184 By- Walker, Ursula Genung STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF NEGROENGLISH IN NATCHITOCHESPARISH. Pub Date Jan 68 Note-112p.; Masters Degree Thesis,Northwestern State College,Natchitoches, Louisiana. EDRS Price W-S050 HC-S456 ENGLISH CURRICULUM,*ENGLISH DescWors- AFRICAN LANGUAGES,COLLEGE LANGUAGE PROGRAMS, EDUCATION. *NONSTANDARDDIALECTS. INSTRUCTION, LANGUAGE PATTERNS,*NEGRO DIALECTS, *NEGRO SCHOOLS, STANDARD SPOKENUSAGE. PIDGINS. REGIONAL DIALECTS,SOUTHERN COMMUNITY, *SOUTHERN STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS, TENL Identifiers-Natchitoches Parish Louisiana,*Northwestern State College In order to testwhether certain structurescharacteristic of WestAfrican the Negro Englishdialect of NatchitochesParch. languages are also present in students Louisiana, 355 shortautobiographical papers writtenby Negro high school analyzed. Another 355 paperswritten by white highschool students wereused were non-standard as controls.The papers were analyzedfollowing an outline of expected from Turner's *Africanisms inthe GuNah Dialect:* Resultsseemd to structures adapted both indicate that there is a definiteAfrican substructure in thisNegro dialect which is survival of certain archaicforms. the simplificationsof the masked and reinforced by a found in pidgin English first used bythe slaves, and normalsimplifications of language that 95 percent of theNegro students were any 'folkspeech." The study showed It was affected by these factors ascompared to 58 percentof the white students. Negro dialects may havehad a perceptibleinfluence on the also suggested that English to structure of whitesouthern dialects. In discussingthe teaching of standard non-standard dialect speakers, itis proposed that:(1) teachers receivetraining in be given to Negroand other dialects, (3)both linguistics, (2) recognition and respect (4) linguistics and literature coursesbe used to teach awarenessof standard usage. a writingapproach to English teachingbe investigated. (JD) k b

1

STRUCTURAL FEATURES OP MR0 ROUSH

IN NATCHITOCHES PARISH

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE

OFFICE OF EDUCATION

THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE

PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT.POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS

STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION

POSITION OR POLICY.

vit4

by Ursula Genung Walker

AL 001 504 (iOrPENTS

Chapter I: The Special Troblme of the netgro Student . I

Chapter II: Africanisms in the Structure 25

Chapter III: Levels and Learning. . 53

Chapter IV: A Challenge and an Opportunity for

northwestern State College 16. al :.larnreirT noKi

Footnotes Ey)

Pibliography 98

Appendix .102

Acknowledgements 110

Master's Degree Thesis

Approved January, 1963, by Dr. WILLIA!. A. TORNWALL, Eajor Professor E. P. DOERING, Committee Member. Dr. GEORGIA CLIFTON, Committee Member Dr. LEO T. ALLBRITTLN, Dean, Graduate School Northwestern State College Natchitoches, Louisiana STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF VIIIRO IN NATCHITOCHES PARISH

A Thesis submitte.1 to

The Gradnate Faculty of the Department of Linvngem of Northwentern State College

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

January 1968

by

Ursula Genting Walker B. A., University of issouri, 1934 CHAPTER T

srEGIAL PROBLEMS OF THE NEURO STUDENT

Eleven yearn after the Supreme Court decision directing the desegregation of schools in the United Stotes, the first Negro students were admitted to Northwestern State College; there were fourteen of them. Two years latør, ip Abe, fall, of 10967, there were four hundred ninety,three colored fstudents or the rolls of the

College for the regular fallsession.1 This number was a little less than ten perceUt of the total student body; projections into the future 'indicate that 'within ten years an enrollment at least half

Negro is not unlikely.

As the number of colored students has increased, the English teacher in the college has become conscious of a new dimension to his perennial problem of trying to inculcate a little style and grace--or at least a degree of coherence--into the speech, and more particularly into the writing, of students in whose language non-standard forma abound. For the colored teachers in the area's elementary and high schools there has arisen a new problem, also: how better to prepare their c:oldents to compete linguistically in the formerly all-white colleges Which more and more of them will be attending.

How is the language of these cOlored students different?. Why is it different?And what can be done to enable them to acquire that standard English which is a tool vital to them if they are to compete, not merely in the collegee, but also in the business and professional world? 2

These are questionswhose importance notlimited to the con- fines of NatchitochesParish nor tothe-abademic purlieus of

Northwestern State College. OutmintionsOrnouthernlai4oes'inio

the nation's great citieshave madeihe problem 4 tarlAings'tand'ard

speech to theculturally.'6141fV4eVpfggirWAnalfir4NeW iOrk, Chicago,

Detroit, St. Louis, LosAnife1e6--td ilam; only a iew of the metropolises J.0,31 nal where this item is atthe top of the eleemosynaryagenda. TheNatio(4

Council dT Teachers ofEnglish has formed a taskforceoU-i;aalilp*IT

publications English to the disadvantaged,and is producing numerous

% Linguistics in Washington, %C., on the subject. The Center for Applied a;d'its Urban is also activelyengaged inreseardPon this topiC, resources for Language Series andLanguage Information Series nre

at New Orleans has students in the field. Louisiana State University

established a LanguageArts Center to studyand work with the problem 2 EVary program, and is urging localschool boards to followsuit.

disadvantaged finds itself,and every agencyconcerned with the by the problem of usually sooner ratherthan later, confronted

language. be worked out in However, the conplexitiesof that problem can

investigation of the situationin that any communityonly after an its present particular community:its-background as well as

the problem in NatchitochesParish characteristics. The background of reviewing the history ofNegro education can perhapsbest be given by

in both state and Parish. tc? ts.t,w 104 (0-1 3

The first Negro slaves werebrought to Louisiana perhaps as enrly ns1712.3 "Itwits more than ahundred yearn later that their education "first became amatter for legislativeattention, and that attention was negative inthe extremes the statelawgivern in 1830 mnde it a prison offense(not less than one month nor morethan twelv) to "teach, or permit or causeto be taught" any slave toread

4 or write.

The settlement which grewto become the City ofNatchitoches

from the first, in the was establishedaround 1714, and almost

Natchitoches area, there werefree people of color, onwhom rmhstan-

their former French tial holdings of arableland had been settled by wrote in masters. Some of these mulattopeople, of whom byle Slaon ate Joyeux Children of Strangers,had extensiv plantationnalong the

presumably among those of what is now known asCane River, and were

tnxed when the first freepublic schools were organizedin 1841 and

Negroes, even free supported by a tax on allproperty owners; but all

schools as thenexisted.5 people of color, werebanned from such public Negroes were It was 1915 beforefifty percent of the state's

6 it was 1925 before the enrolled in school. In Natchitoches Parish

reached fifty percent;in everage dailyattendance of Negro children 7 in the public schools, that year there wereonly 2,993 Negroes enrolled colored children of though there were inthe neighborhood of 5,on0 8 school me living in theParish. child of In 1930 the Louisianaeducational expenditure per child.9 school age was $40.64for the white,$7.84 for the colored 4

Soon afterward *the provision by the state of free school books gave a

decided impetus to school attendance, for the poor whit AO for the

Negro. Shoes and clothing were another lack; even in 1958 the (white)

Visiting Teacher in a poor rural parish bordering Nitchitoches was

spending much of her time begging clothing for colored children to

enable them to go to school.

In 1937 Natchitoches Parish hod 67 colored schools: one- and

two-room schools, many in churches. By 1955 the number of schools was

down (there are only nine today), but the number enrolled was up to

4,324, while daily attendTice,for the first time, appro7imated ninety

10 percent of the colored educables.

As late as 1957, the calendars of certain of the rural colored

schools were still arranged so as to release the children during

cotton picking time; the lost days were "made up" on Saturdays and during the Christmas season. By 1966, when the first colored chil- dren began Attending white schools in the Parish, there were 4,384

colored school children with an average daily attendance of ninety-

fourpercent)1 There is no estimate as to how many of these were in nnly the second generation of liternny; nor, indeed, on to how many were in the firnt.

The state itself, to be sure, ranked "dead last among the fifty

12 states" In Its literacy level as recently as 1965. To the low

educational standards of the state Natchitoches Parish, located in the northern and poorer tier of parishes, has made its contribution. The

Parish, which is largely rural, is not affluent. Its income from

1 5 agriol1t re, estimnted nt 37,532,000 in 1964,13ben been surpansed by the annualebudget of the Parish's formerly seg-ond greetent ennomin asset, Northwestern State Gollegel. which is requesting a leginlative appropriation of$7,605,789 for196049.14The Parish snhool system ($4,4('91622 in1967-68)15and Welfarti(about $3,500,000

16 in grants in 1967) are the valer principal economic props. More than one person ip,every seven--5,539 of the population of 35,653 in

1960--recetves public assistance. Forty-three percent of the Perish population inNenro."

Poverty end low ednentionnl stenderds o hand in bend, and

ench nausea the other. i t, some progress is being mnde. The median income in the Parish in 1950 wan 31,159, compared to $2,122 in the state. In 1960 the comparable figures were S2082 and 14,272: a 100

Parish gain compared tO a state gain of101%. In 1940, 46.5% of the adults (over 25) had less than five years' schooling; in 1960 the figure was down to 32.0, while in the same period the percentage of those who 'had completed high school nearly doubled, from 12.7 to 25.3.

Still, in the ten years from 1950 to 1960, medien snhool years in- ereased only from 5.9 to 7.4.

There is a small Negro middle class, inclnding a handful of

planters, a few businessmen, and the numerous teaehers who,in recent years, have been paid on the samescale as the Parish's white teachers.

But the great majority of the Parish's colored peoplehave lived for

generations in conditions of. deep poverty and of almost complete

cultural isolation. The finger of wonder may properly be pointed not 6 nt their poor command of thelanguage, but at the fact that, under such circumstances, so many havemastered the standard dialect, while the rest have learned tospeak and to write English not less wellthan many of the poorwhites who are also a large element ofthe Parish population.

Now the barriers whichimposed that cultural isolation are beginning to fall. They will be generations indisappearing. The really grave problems ofcommunication butween the races cannotbe undertaken--cannot even be approachedin awork of thin sort; and yet it is perhaps fitting tocall attention to them. Sociologist

Etnest A. T. Barth has a relevantwarning on thin snbject:

To the extent that academicperformance is also a product of linguistic differences, if thereis failare to understand the teacher because of these linguisticbarritrs to communication, then the provision of "equaledncational opportunities for minority children" would seem to be afar more difficult task than it has thus far been considered. It will involve far more than a simple equating of physicalfacilities and a mechanical social integration in the classroom. Far more attention will have to be directed to the problemof facilitating effective interpersonal cJmmunication. There is a second implicationin this approach to the study of Negro-white relations. It may be helpful in advancing our understandinlof cliquing behavior in certain typesof situations. Repeated notice has been made ofthe fact that Negroes and whites tend to formracially segregated cliques in settings relatively free of the mornobvious forms of racial prejudice and where participants inthe situations are actively interested in promoting more friendly'relations. Examples of such behavior have been observedin integrated housing develop- ments, churches, and among thestudent bodies of integrated schools. It seems likely that the typeof linguistic barriers to effective communicationhere discnssed could producefeelings of uneasiness and frustrationfor both Negroes and whites when they interact. Because ihey appear to share a commonlanguage, members of both groups tendto explain that the socialstrains they experience in interaction are aresult of racial differ- ences--"theylre just different fromus." This leads to a with- drawal into racialcliques.19 7

language," Barth hassaid. "They appear toshare a common United States actuallldo share a Whether Negroes andwhites in the superficial aspects ofthat lang commonlanguage, evenin the more extent, was neverbrought into question uage; and,if so, to what long the darling ofthe until the presentcentury. Negro speech, phonemic andstructural divagations litterateure becauseof its rich little scholarlyattention from the standardAmerican forms, had 20An Allen Walker before the work ofJe-ws A. Harrisonin 1884. speech are to befound Read wrote in 1939,"The records of Negro fantasticallyinaccurate."21 chiefly in dialectfiction, much of it asked, it was usually. When the almostimpossible question was indeed, in answered with astrong affirmative. "The Negroes, thoroughly that theyhave acquiring English havedone.their work so speech," said GeorgePhilip retained not a traceof any African

transferred anythingof importance Krapp in 1924. "Neither have they

language. Generalizations from their nativetongues to the general reasonably safe to saythat not a are alwaysdangerous, but it is of Negro syntax canbe single detail ofNegro pronunciation or

proved to hnve anyother than an Englishorigin."22 by the Louisiana Cleanth Brooks, in awork which was published

must occasionallyrise to State University Pressin 1935, and which th3 specifically Negro hamt him, declared:"In almost every case, which the Negro must have forms turn out to beolder English forms

and which he hasretained after taken originallyfrom the white man, .For the purpose ofthis tho white man hasbegun to lose them . . 8

study the speech ofthe Negro andof the white will be considered an one."23 Itmidkt be noted that Brooke apparently used no Negro Negro informants,reifying On "the'rworks of Joel Chandler Harris for speech; he is not the onlyscholar who has used literary sourcesin this wey and thus observedthe dialect in vitro; rather thanin vivo.

The approach is reminiscentof the Chinese ladies of long agowho took tiny female figurines whenthey went to see the doctor, in order to be able, without disrobing,to point to the place that hurt.

The Linguistic Atlas, as itpenetrates into the Deep South, is also shy of Negro sources. Gordon Wood says, in an article entitled

"Atlas Survey of the Interior South(U.S.A.)," that of 2,000 24 informants, none was Negro or Indian. Nary Lucile Pierce Polk, in her "Word Atlas of NorthLouisiana" (1961), states in her prefatory abstract that the purpose of herinvestigation was to study the 25 vocabulary of the white peoPle ofNorth Louisiana.

Hans Kurath, founder and firstdirector of the Atlas, in another who affirms that the Negro andwhite languagps are the same.

"By and large," he says in A WordGeography of the Eastern United

the white States (1949), "theSouthern Negro speaks the language of man of his locality or areaand of his level of education. But in some respects his speechis more archaic and old-fashioned; not un-

English, but retarded because of lessschooling. As far as the speech of uneducated Negroes isconcerned; it differs little from that of the illiterate white; thatis; it exhibits the same regional 26 and local variations as that ofthe simple white folk." Kurath 27 still holds this point of view, accordingto one of his students. ;

9.

'Indications that there might be another concept of theNegro

dialect beg:+n appearing in the literature at-10'MARO early as 1933,

whet' the late C. M. Wise of Louipinna State-University noted certain

structural differences between Negro English and the standard variety.

He also wrote that the vocal quality of Negro speech might well be tho

result of a tongue position inherited from the original African

211 nreech.

Over'in another corner of the world the Negro scholar Lorenzo

Dow TUrner had already embarked on the years of study of the African

languages which were to bear such interesting fruit. His mind and

that nf the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits were running in the

same channels; in 1915 Nerskovits wrote: "The curious turns of phrase

in NegroFrench. . .can clearly be shown to have resulted from a

process of placing European words in an African grammatical frame.

Whether in French, in Spanish, or in English, the turns of phrase

2c) 'employed by Negroes are the

Not long afterward a member of the Speech Department at

Prigham Young University in Utah appeared on thJ campus at L.S.U. as a

candidate for the Ph.D. His reason for the long journey was simply

that he wanted to study the Negro dialect, and thought Louisiana the

bent place for such an undertaking. The result was a monumental

dissertation in which he Rot only quoted extensively from many authors,

both white and colored, who had attempted to reproduce the Negro dialect,

but also established a precedent by making phonograph recordspof the

speech of live Negro informants and making careffil phonetic trans 10

nixty-nine page criptions of these--notto mention including a vocabulary of Negro Englishwith phonetic spellingel

to familiarise himself . In addition, Pardoewent to some trouble

(He was, with the phonetics andstructure of Africanlanguages. He contended incidentally, familiar withthe wnrk TUrnerpwasdoing.) stronglyas TUrner waslater to do--thatphonetically Negro speech

somewhat guarded :my reflected the Africanheritage; he suggested in a Phglish; he even that African grammaticalstructures persisted in Negro influenced white speech. went so far as to suggestthat Wwgro speech bed

Ekeerpts follow:

This thesis revealsthat the Negro did morethan assimilate the dialects, that he in errors andvariants of the early Britinh more than animPortant repository or Britishspeech evolutions: he definitely used his ownnative langnage equipmentand adapted the corruptEnglish tanght him to fithis own phonetic concepta.

speech of the We miv reasonablybecome convinced that the Southern Negro has beengreatly conditioned bynntive language forms, and that theNegro's soeial isolation hascontributed first used to his preserving of theforms of speech which he in America. . . In presenting thevariants of Negro-Ehglishdialectri, we from may safelyconclude that they arothe result of teachings the many British overseers andAmerican masters, who reflected combined types of speech divergenciesof the slave-trading eras, with native Africanelements, phonctic andArammatical."

After defending histhesis (and Pardoe saystoday thst he MAO

commitment of the forced to defend it quitevigorously, in view of the

University's scholars to theview of CleanthBrooks), he went quietly

back to Utah to head theSpeech Department atBrigham Young University,

and the dissertation, a mineof information, sankunpublished beneath

the waters of the sea ofscholarship. 11

/n 1941 wefind.fierekovits again, in The Ark of the Negro

Past, contending thatNegrc;es'we4i 'not unliie iefiiple of other nationalities in theirstrugglei With'the English' language:

mutual The Sudanietanguages'of West Africa, despite their unintelligibility and apparentvariety of form, are fundamen i- tally similar in those traitswhich linguists emploY in classifying dialects, as isto be discerned when thenot . inconsiderable number ofpublished grammars of native languages spoken throughoutthe area from which the slaves were taken, arecompared. This being the case, and since grammar ami *dtomharethe last aspects of a newlanguage to be learned, the Negroeswho reached the New World'acquired as much of the vocabulary oftheir masters as they initially - needed or was later taught tothem, pronounced these words as best they were able, butorganized them into their aboriginal speech patterns This emphatically does not implythat these dialects are without grammar, orthat they represent an inability to master the foreigntongue, as is no often claimed. If this hypothesis is true,certain results should follow when these modes of speech areanalyzed. In the first . place, Negro linguistic expressionshould everywhere manifest greater resemblance in structureand idiom than could be accounted for hy chance. Deviations from the usages of Etropean languages, ftrthermore,should all take the same direction, though the amount ofdeviation from accepted usage should be expected to vary withthe degree of acculturation

experience by a given group. Finally, not only should these . deviations be in the same direction,but they should be in accord with the conventions thatmark the underlying patterns of West Africanlanguages.32

Indeed, hints about structuraldissimilarities between Negro

Ehglish and white English, andstructural similarities between Negro

English and the languages ofAfrica, seemed to come from almost every

1,, r. 4ft;A 0: source except thelinguists. EVen Marguerite and Lewis Herman, whose

useful Manual of American Dialectsfor Radio, Stage, Screen and

Television was published in 19471state that rather than simply

reflecting white tolonial speechforms, the Negro may have made a :11e44LtiataMWaili.:Mlgton------.21.4111ya.r....,./

4111 .1 i 12.

e: major contrilaution iriler,o,,Aorern 0000.,The.authors mention- thertendency to use present tensaurprpOn vasybuctiims calling for the past tense; the tendency to yse thion#140Nrept singular form for the first person singulart the,omission of auxiliary

33 verbs; and general "confUsion" of prepositions, among other things.

In another:two years TUrner's book Africanisms in,the Gullah

Dialect, finally appeared. For the first time, in addition to the, phonetic resemblances, the syntactical and morphological similarities between certain African languages and a Negro dialect were

34 systematically considered. Perhaps because his study was devoted to the fascinating Gullph which itself sounds like a foreign language, few students of dialect seem to have perceived the connec tion between TUrner's work and the more familiar Negro speech. Yet

.it was at the time his book appeared that Negro speech ways began to emergias a matter for serious concern.

With technological developments coming, after. World War II, faster than they could be assimilated, the United States suddenly looked around and found itself in an era which had no work for hewers

-of.wood and drawers of water. Jobs requiring highly skilled men were proliferating--and were going begging. The schools, olreaty A."4.1 fimLs:f:J )114t staggering under their private population explo,sion, were,being called upon to train students for jobs that did not exist: and such students must be the most literate of all. " , Wfidinttn ,illViI1?371 To aggravate the situation, angry rumbles began coming from those many whose ducaiions had fittad them only to be the hewers of 13 wood and the drawers ofwater. At the tame time, theAmerican Negro,

backed by Ciil Rights legislation, wasknocking at every door; and

there were three ratheralarmed realitations inconnection 'with this

demand by the black men for*larger role in Amerioan society..One

was that Olean nolinger enough for the Negro to,be able tounder-

stand such phrases as"tote that barge" and "lift thatbile."

Another was that his help ieneeded if the machine is to bekept.

running.As for the third, it was thatnot Only did the black man

not have the linguistic equipmentthat he needed (end was needed to

have), but also that no one knew how to giveit to him.

The new era in Negro dialectstudies opened in 1951with an

article by RavenIooriMoliiiid, Jr., and hie wife, Virginia Glenn

McDavid (both long associated withthe Linauistic Atlas), titled

"The Relationship of the Speech ofAmerican Negroes to the Speech

of American Whites."Taking cognisance of Turner's significantwork,

and pointing out that"vocabulary and phonology are not matters of

skin pigmentation but of the socialcontacts and economic

opportunities of the informant," theyoutlined new studies of the

Negro dialect that needed(many of which still need) to be done. On

the side of a persistence of Africanforme in Negro English, the

MODivide observed: "Moreover, the comparativework in African

languages has revealed a high degree ofstructural similarity between

the languages of tits area from'whiohmost of the slaves were taken,

so as to maks for commontrends in the speech of AmericanNegroes,:

regardless of the mutualunintelligibiliti of thefr .oriini languages."35 14

1.cPavid, once at the Universityof Southwestern Louisiana, liter at Cornell, ia now at theUniversity of Chicago and remains the concerned, witty, and wisedean of the dialectologiats. Other names ere graduallybecoming *miner in the field ofdialectology* valliam'llabov of Columbia University, Einar Hnugenof Harvard,

Hobert A. Ball of Cornell, RogerW. Shuy and William A. Stewart of the Center for AppliedLinguistics, Beryl Bailey of Hunter College,

Lee A. Pederaon of EMoryUniversity, Walter Loban of the University of California, Charlotte K.Brooks of the District of Columbia

Public Schools, JuanitaWilliamson of Leboyne College, San-su Linof

Southern University.

Another voice sometimes heard isthat of Douglas Taylor, currently associated with theDepartment of Anthropology at George

Washington University.His explanation of the development,not only of Negro Englishor NegroAmericanbut of all the Negro creole

languages, in a particularly lncid one:

At first "pidgins" or jargonsemployed only between African and European, and betweenAfricans of different provenance, all of them later became"creolized"--adopted, that in to say, as the firstand in general onlylanguniTof whole communities; and with the exceptionof Negro Dutch(formerly spoken in the Virgin Islands,but probably nowextinct),.they remain that to thin day. These languages are peculiarin com- bininj rather similargrammatical structures of anon-Indo- Diropean and seamingly WestAfrican type with vocabularies that are preponderantly ofEnglish; Fortngese or Spanish, Dutch and French ancestriesrespectively - All creoles are therefore"regu.lar" languages in that each hasits own pattern of distinctive unitsof sound, its own grammatical signs and conventions,and a vocabulary adequatefor the cultural demands of its nativespeakers. Moreover, such languages evolve, oncecreolization has taken place, inmuch 15

filo -lame, way!: as do nthrw idiomn,nnd in nnrnrdnnne with their srATern' ehnnf;ing needs ofeommnniention. Put thsz differ from larmaces. with a12mer tradition in hazina basic whoso sonroe cannot cicarlx1:n identified With that of thrir lutsic vocahnlarirs,and in being nompnrntivnly free or curb fornilit,.ed historicaldebris an revnit in our own irregular noun p1urala andverbalconjugations.36

Few linguists werereading work of this nort or taking

Turner's hint. Hill came close in hisbookPidgin pnd Creole

Larymatzes (1960, in whichhe states that "even thenineteenth-

centnry stage of Negro speech. ..shown A good many structural

features characteristic ofcreoles, such an the use of a le...mple

uninflected verb in allpersons."However, he later says that what

he calls the "AmericanNegro (eole English" has largelydisappeared

throughassimilation.37

There are other scholarnwho have not yet "got themennage"

which was so clearly setdown by Turner: W. NelsonFrancis, for

example, who writes(in The Structure of American English,1958)

that of the many dialectsto be found in any language,all share "a

the common core ofstructure."38This sounds reasonable; but

essenne of TOrner'smessage is simplythat users of Negro English of and users of StandardEnglish do not share a common core

ntructure: that they arenot speaking quite the samelanguage.

importance to the If thin in true,it is of the utmost

teacher who is trying toinstill Standard Englinhin those members

that dialent, for it of the Negro race whodo not already command

item by item: it c4n be .means that the problemcannot be approached

It means, approached only in termsof a different structuralsystem. 16

S. mnroovoar, that teachers,both white and cnlored, must regii7e that ch...11 are dealin, not with the fruitssimply of poverty and isolation, but with the remnants of alangnage system acquired by these children and yonng people, through along process of cultnral transmission, from the homeland of their forebears.

In order to investigatethe hypothesis that standard English and the Negro dialect arestructnrally different, and that this difference caMe about because ofthe Negro's continued use or those

structnral features which so manyAfrican langnages have in common,

on analysis of the Ilseof the language by colored students,in terms

of the structural elementsmentioned in Turner's book, was planned as

the sore of this thesis. Toward thin end, the cooperation of the

Natchitoches Parish school system wasobtained in securing brief

autobiographies, written in class,of 355 colored juniors and seniors

attending Parish schools, andincluding thirteen Negro juniors and

seniors now enrolled in formerlyall-white schools. The papers

written by these students formedthe corpus of the dialect study

presented in Chapter II.

A lingnistic study based onwritten material is so almost

radical in the present era that somejustification of this procedure

may seem in order. Speech, of course,followed.on the heels of the

-runt and the gesture.Written language came later,perhaps by a

millennium or so. It rendered communicationpermanent and portable,

and freed it from thelimitations of proximity and otheracoustical

of speech and of the considerations. The lexicon and the structure 17

0 written lan:tuage are similar, but this fact does not seem wholly to jnstify repeated qtatements by some ling nints to the effect that

"writing wag devised to represent the sounds of speech" (raid Roberts,

who mi!:ht be hard pnt to apply thin dictnm to the written Chinese);39

nr that "only speenh is langnage"(Trager and Smith, cited by

Moseoni;, 4oor that "writing in net language and language is not

% 41 writing" (W. Nelson Francis).

Millions upon millions of words which have appeared in

letters and manuscripts and in print have never been spoken or even

"thought aloud" by either writer or reader. The detachment of the

written word from phonology (which, in the case of English, verges , on thesublime) has often been the subject of comment. Spelling

reform, probably fortunately, founders sgain'and again on the

problem of having to represent such a simple word as "the" in such

diverse ways as Mia, AIV,/417, and occasionally PIA/, not to

mention the Prooklynite's/da/,the Frenchman's /d.5.t/ or/d5t/

Rnd other variations which are clear enough to the ear but could be

baffling to the eye. To call writing "graphemics," as is sometimes

done, emphasizes the theory that our letters nre the representations

of sound, and so they are, in a way; but of what sound is the "e" in

"the" representative? It is obvious that the written nnd spoken

language can hardly be said to share the samelexicon on a one-to-one

basis, and the snme is true of strncture.

A water color and a. painting of the samemonntain scene'.

share the blue of the sky, the white of the snow,the green of the the penk, but they nreexecuted in trees imd thetrinngulnr shape of only the 'minting, or two very differentmerlin. Msll we ray that

Speech is even morenearly comparable only the watercolor, is art? box camera that o R colorphotograph of themountain taken with n pushed: all the techniqueis has only to bepointed And a button of speech is storedin that stored in the box, esall the technique

human skull. Until it becomes wonderful computerhoused inside the conscious skills which Are orstory, speech doesnot require the Writing, like needed for writing RRthey Are neededfor painting. information and speech, is a device, nmedium, for communicating

not by any meanssimply represent ideks and statesof mind; it does

speech as notes on astaff representmusic. of R morning newspaper Furthermore, anyreasonably avid reader

second cup of coffee,ingested more has, by the timehe finishes his speRk or hear spokenall day and words in printedform tilan be will school teacher, acarnival barker, a perhaps all weekunless he is a (in session) or a steadyauditor tourist guide, aU. N. interpreter write, or read, ordo both, well or of one of these. He himself may these considerationsis that he may ill: what is muchto the point of write with the penof an angel. When be a miserablespeaker and yet words on paper,they are all, to people addressthemselves to putting they writing a languageother than the one a greater orless degree,

speak. giving primacy tospeech, puts Roberts, despitehis statement

squarely behind adifferent view, saying the transformationalists 19 that they deny "that the morphology and syntax mint he built on a prior description of the sound structure. They would rather begin, 4

in the traditional way, with the syntax. There are many theoretical reasons for this preference and onepowerful practical argument:

ofter decades of effort, structural lingumtics hasproduced rather

thorough descriptions of Pnglish sounds and extensiveinventories of

morphemes but very little in syntax. It is at least a plausible 42 hypothesis that thin failure reflects a weakness in thetheory itself."

But it is H. A. Ileason, Jr., wh.', in hisvaluable book

Linmuistics and English Grammar, most tellinglyputs speech in its

place, in part by very effectively pointing outwherein writing has

its equivalents of the paralanguage of gesture, pitch,tone, juncture

AAA so on. As for shared structure, "Written Ebglish has its own

"4 grammar, 3he says.

Psychologists Milton W. Horowitz and John B. Newman,in a

comparative analysis of spoken and written expression,have found

that "Spoken expression produces morematerial, more ideas, more

signals. Spoken expression is more repetitious and moreelaborative

in all aspects of analysis. These differences between the two modes

are related to thefacility of utterance both biologically and

psychologically. The psychological factors inclndeinhibition,

deliberateness, memory for what issaid, and a drive to prevent

silent intervals."14 Speech also has an uninhibitingfactor in that

it does not usually become apermanent record which might latercall

the utterer to account. 20

The written lahrsar:e has a number of qualities whinh lend them- selven ortivnlarly to a study or this kind. For one thing, writinf: lies still under the dissenting knife, by night as by day. No damage

in done to living tissue; nor is there any distorting efrect through what Erving aoffman has called "the neglected sitnation."Goffman points ont that jnst as are, sex, class, country of origin, schooling, nmd no on, are social vnriablen which have an effect on speech, so

45 also is the situation in which the speakers find themselves. The

situation in which a white observer finds himself attempting to

investigate black speech is one which mnst almost always distort

results; indeed, McDavid has stated that it iR diffinnit even for

46 Ferro investirators to win the confidence of colored informants.

Since the papers used in this study were written iv the children in

their regular classroom environment, this complication was obviated.

Also, use of written material, simpler to obtain and to handle, made

it possible to use a much larger group of informants. More

importantly, written material shows n grPater conformity to a more

nearly universal pattern. As Gleason has said, "It is one of the

very significant features of all written langunges that they tend to

be relatively nniform over areas within which speerh ifaries

appreciably."47This seemed a marked advanta(m, since one of the

edljectives of the study Was to observe how nearly the unbjects would

approach Standard American English under the most favorable circum-

stah7es possible. It in axiomatic that everyone is on his best

linguistic behavior when writing. Thus it seemed that if putative

Africanisms emerged in the students' writing, this must be the case 21 wur.11 more frequently in their speech.

Most sompelling of all was the fict Mit writing is especially well Pdapted to the study of struntnre, s primary purpose of this paper. A writing approach also has promise for future work with these young people; as I. Morris has remarked, "The development of modern linguistics has had a profound effect on the study and teach- ing of English grammar. The new approaches, with their emphasis on speech, would appear to call for a drastic switch from the written to the spoken language. Provided the treatment is on sound linguistic lines, concentration on the written language, beyond the establishment of the grammatical system, is perfectly valid and may still better serve the needs and interests of the general (non-

48 specialist) student." This suggestion seems particularly applicable in the South, where the very great majority of the colored students in the elementary and high schools are taught by colored teachers most of whom share the not unattractive phonology of their students. It would be as ridiculous as it would be unrealistic to expect these thousands of teachers and pupils to change their phonological speech patterns, for such a change would not only divide them from the other members of their own race, but would also make their speech strange to white Southerners so manyof whom share that same phonology to some degree. FUrther, it is the

colored students' use of the written language for which they aremost

often penalized in institutions of higher learning; it is herethat

they particularly need the protective cover of conformity. 22

To return, then, to the paperswhich formed the basis for the present dialect study, theinstructions below were, through the Parish

Spperintendent and the JeaneRSupervisors, furnished to the teachers

of junior and senior Englishclasses in the Parish schools:

HIGH SCHOOL JUNIORS AND sEnIons1967-68

During the next 15 minutesof class, write the story of your life from the day you wereborn until today. Tell something about your parents. Tell when and where you were born. Tell about your brothers andsisters. Tell about your school. Tell what you do in the summer. Tell what you like to do most ofall--and what you don't like. Tell what you plan to do when you get outof high school. Tell what you want to do when you are grown.

Write just as much as you can beforethe time is up. If you need more time ask your teacherto extend the time. Write as if you were writing a letter to yourbest friend. Don't worry about spelling and punctuation andrules of grammar; mistakes won't count against you. Just write and-have fun doing it. (Start by putting your name at the top of thepage.)

The autobiogrr.phy was chosen asthe form of the papers because

almost all students have enoughinformation about and interest in

themselves to write a paper ofreasonatde length on this subject.The

fifteen-minute time limit was suggestednot so much to curtail the

length of the compositions(since most students of this age will

write about as much in a quarterof an hour as in an hour, and at

least half have usuallyexhausted their literary endurance atthe

end of tenminutes), as to limit the imposition on thetime of the

cooperating teachers.

The instructions concerningspelling, punctuation, grammar, 23

designed toprovide a relaxedatmosphere, and the useof slang were there was avariance inracial attitudes and as a testof whether spelling and It might besaid here that towards informalwriting. in theanalysis of the papers. punctuation werenot considered tabulations keptwill be Complete detailsof the linguistic

Several tabulationsof no given in thefollowing chapter. that on the kept, one ofwhich indicated linguisticrelevance were handwriting is ofabout the sameoverall whole thecolored students' white students. quality as thehandwriting of the roughly 563 pages,the white The coloredstudents wrote

of .014 percent. students roughly555, a variance the familiesof the golored 'Mere were2,265 children in

information; thewhite students'famine* students whoreported this number of childrenper family was. had 1,397children. The average the white.The thirteen thus 6.8 forthe coloredand 4.31 for total attending whiteschools reported a colored juniorsand seniors of 4.15 their families,for an averags of fifty-fourchildren in a coloredboy, said thathe children perfamily. Only one student,

planned to becomepresident. aspects of dialect studyin hand, two With theresults of the importance of considered.One was the the problemremained to be communication, education,employ. languace levels:their effects on the question ofteaching approaches: ment, and status. The second was done, and what be done, whatought to be what has beendone, what can children who use anon-standard dialest must be done ifthose colored 244

are to be helpedto take responsible placesin a society one of whos more commendablie aimsis the elimination of thelower class.

Based on the materialcovered in this thesis, Northwestern

State College has the opportunityof setting up, in cooperation with area schools, a programfor language teaching for thedisadvantaged

Negro student which will form apattern for other schools across the nation, and particularly in theSouth. 25

CHAPTER II

AFRICANISMS IN THESTRUCTURE

blood in its heritagethan Natchitoches Parishhas more French

for that reasonthe old French most of NorthLouisiana, and perhaps /'bu re/ in Louisiang) is game of bourre(/bur/ in France, but

In order to. explainthe popular with manyof its card players.

study is based, wemight hypothesis upon whichthe core of this

suddenly found themselvestrans- posit a group ofbourre players who

poker players whowanted ported to a strangecountry inhabited by

countrymen. nothing to do--socially,at least--with their new fifty-two card four-suit In the new countrythere would be

numerals printed onthem decks of cards,unfamiliar in that the

After the bourreplayers had would be Roman, ratherthan Arabic.

might say, the newcard-players1 mastered the newnumerals--or, as one Certainly not, the lexicon--would they promptlystart playing poker?

play the game, nor desire chances are they wouldneither know how to

to change.

Indeed, let us further supposethat these bourre players came

but from variouscountries not from one countrywith one language, different-sounding set of each of which had adifferent-looking and in Dahomean, one numbers in its language: onein Ibo, one in Twit one

especially inclined to go on in Yoruba, and so on. flight they not be have in using the rules ofthe geam which theyfound themselves to 26

Few slave owners were conLnliedwith teaching the nicetiesof

the languageiro the Negro. The first English that was taught tohim, usually by overseers,was'a pidgin which was agrossly over-

simplified version of the master's language. It was not of the first

importance for the master to understandthe slave; the goal was for

the slave to understand the master, who may evenhave made some

effort to adapt the pidgin to the structure mostreadily grasped hy

The Negro in his own peer-group of other slaves, sooften

from other African countries, had the new lexicon in commonwith

them, and many important elements of structure as well, if we may

believe Lorenzo.Dlow Turner, the one person who has examined in

depth one form of rural Negrd English, and who has related its

ntructure as well as its phonology to the languages of Africa.The

central argument of this discussion is that the Negroes in their

cultural isolation, which still endures today, continued to us

these structural elements in combination with the new lexicon; that

many of these structural elements are even now to befound in the

language of many American Negroes; and that this hypothesis may be

fairly tested by using criteria taken from Turner's work.

In his book on Africanisms in.the Gullah dialect, TUrner

lists a number of structural similarities between African languages

and that dialect. They are:

I. Syntactical Features 1. Voice: lack of passive form. 2. Verb phrases: use of two or more verbs together. 27

words like adjectives: useof pre-positioned 3! Comparison of most." "pass!' Imona,"and "the of use ofwords withcombined function 4. Verbal adjectives: adjective, as in"He tall." verb and that of English arrangement ofsentences unlike '5. Word order: because Africanlanguages omission ofcopula and because of participles. prepositions,conjunctions and have few adverbs, "My father,he." of redundantphrases such as 6. Repetition: use MorxhologicalFeatures 1".. Number in singular Nouns: use of sameform in plural as A. in singular same formin plural as B. Verbs: use of for past asfor present. 2. Tense: useof same form 3. Case of inflection. A. Pronouns: minimum shown by of inflection. Genitive often B. Nouns: minimum noun, asin "My motherhouse." position before such as animals): use ofprefixed word C. Gender(e.g., of "woman" Orftman.112

in autobiographicalpapers What, then,might be expected have little students?They would written by coloredhigh school

the passivevoice(although one occasion in suchpapers to use gallon jar found: "It alsohad a broken notable avoidanceof it was also was abroken gallonjar in the in thealley"--i.e., "There might be animpression of alley.") With twoverbs(together, there

Such animpression mightbe con- ellipsis: ofsomething leftout. points: the useof the verbal veyed by severalother of Turner's of the copulain otherplaces, the adjective, thefrequent ominsion Such adverbs, conjunctions,participles. omissionof.prepositions, be anticipated, "the mostunkindest" would Shakespeareanadjectives as particularly the comparisonof adjectives, with generalunorthodoxy in the pastparticiple. Redundancy when they sharetheir form with

should be common. often in thesingular and Nouns add verbsshould be found 4s 28 * 4 -57

v., sometimes in the plural undercircumstances in which the structureof standard English does not allowfor such forms. Frequent substitution of the uninflected form fbrthe past tense, and occasional substitution of the past tense form forthe present, would be predictable, aswould . also a general non-standard useof tenses, with a heavy emphasis on the, use of the uninflectedform. The uninflected genitive would be fore- 4! seen. There should be many non-standard usesof all function words, including determinersancf'auxiliary verbs as well as prepositions and conjunctions; and there should be someidiomatic uses of the language not often found in standardspeech.

With these points in mind, tallies wereset up covering the following phenomena:

I. Nouns 1. Sinaular for plural 2. Plural for simplar 3. Uninflected genitive II. Adjectives: non-standard uses III. Adverbs: non-standard uses IV. FUnction words 1. Pronouns: non-standard uses 2. Articles: omission 3. Redundancy: "Fy father, he" V. Verbs 1. Singular for plural 2. Uninflected form for third singular 3. Uninflected form for past tense 4. Past for present 5. Other non-standard tenses 6. Other non-standard uses 7. Omission of the copula

Other omissions of words; non-standard usesof function words;

and idiomatic divergencies were both talliedand typed in fUll, so

that they could be analyzed more closely. Separate tallies were set , 29

relic forme "get me ajob" ind "childem," up forthe 17thcentury to.which such formspersist in this to give an ideaof the extent also kept of the useof the empty dialect. Like tallies were colloquial expressions,to gauge colloquialism "well"and of other habits intrude intothe written the extent towhich such speech students who usedslang (in response language; and ofthe number of so) as a guide to howrelaxed they to the specificinvitation to do

found themselvesin writing.

table shows the occurrenceof the anticipated The following \, and pronouns; the structures in nouns,adjectives, adverbs, article; and thefrequency of frequency of omittingthe indefinite

and "My sister,she."In this such expressions as"My father, he" of the coloredstudents- table, as in thoseto follow, the papers

of'40, except that the paperswritten by were analyzedin groups white schools("CWS") were the 13 juniors andseniors attending studPnts using eachstructUre is tallied separately. The number of the number of timesthe structure shown at the leftof the column;

was usedis shown at theright. 3 0

NOUNS FUNCTION WORDS Number sal. Plural than- 14tY Om. father, of for for flected ADV. PRON. ART. he students Plural SAjo Genitive Alg; 6 8 12 2 4 1 1 4 6 2 3 -3 A 40 17 34 4 4 0 2 26 8 1 1 66 3 3 5 9 4 4 0 B40 24 0 0 11 19 5 5 3 .3 4 4 4 5 C 40 14 32 i 1 1 1 0 0 4 5 3' 3 D 40 16 53 0 0 5 10 9 11 1 1 33 2 4 E 40 26 64 2 2 12 19 7 ii 1 1 44 1 2 F 40 2054 2 3 9 12 9 11 2 7 3 3 9 2 4 2 20 0 2 3 O40 16 33 3 3 9 13 6 6 4 12 3 4 3 3 H 40 15 42 3 3 9 15 5 5 5 8 3 7 1 3 1 1 0 0 0 0 I 22 11 17 1 1 6 5068 3222 24 26 3215 22 Totald 342 159 395 19 20 74 117 15 0 3 3 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 CHs 13 i 3 0 0 0 16 33 2224 26 32 15 22 TOTALS 355 160 398 19 20 74 117 53 71

most cormon It will be noticed inthe preceding that both the

non-standard uses in these categoriesinvolved the uninflected form of

the noun: that is, the use of thesingular form where the plural would

be expected in standard Ehglish("I have five brother") and the

genitive shown by position(ftmy father house"). These forms were

used by 45.1 percent and 22.1 percentrespectively. It will also be

observed that the colored students attendingwhite schools had fewer

non-standard uses in all these categories(except in non-standard Uses

of adjectives) than the other coloredstudents. This is to be

expected because motivation is a primaryfactor in learninp to use

the standard dialect, and the simplefact that these students braved

the difficulties of gettingadmitted to and attending class in pre-

dominantly white schools is a reliabletest of their motivation.

This small group of studentsexemplify in the remaining charts in

this section a similar pattern. 31

will be given in the appen- Typical examples inall categories , here in connectionwith the adjectivesthat dix. It might be commented type of "more happier" and"most relatively few(otily five) were of the

that such forms abound in 411° funniest," although thecolored teachers say

such forms as "register," the children's speech.Much more common were "retard" for "registered," "spoil," "bald head,""settle!" "cripple," and

"crippled," and "retarded." Ther "spoiled," "baldheaded," "settled,"

"hard work" for"hardworking;" were alsoforms omitting "-ing," such as

and the use of adverbforms such as "easily"for "easy." of rsometime" Most frequent non-standardadverb uses wer thos

"ever since." for "sometimes"and "every since" for forms: third singularfor The second tableshows divergent verb uninflected form for the first or second singular orfor plural; the

past for present; other non- third singular andfor the simple past; omission of forms ofthe standard tenses; othernon-standard uses; and

verb "to be."

VERBS . Uninflected forms Past Other: Omission 3d sing. for for f3r tense, of for 1st, 3d simple prew. number Other copula Group ,2d. pl. sims. past 12 12 17 3 3 10 14 A 12 23 13 32 8 34 7 2 2 14 20 5 5 12 14 B 16 24 11 19 11 20 2 2 16 26 5 6 10 14 C 13 18 17 38 17 36 . 6 9 21 9 21 13 16 4 D 12 15 13 25 2 2 3 22 41 7 9 8 9 E 17 27 2264 13 25 2 8 12 8 11 P 9 14 13 34 21 31 4 4914 5 10 13 4 5 11 14 G 17 26 14 30 13 19 4 7 8 12. 13 17 31 14 24 17 29 5 6712 H 3 '6 18 2 6 7 I 9 16 8 13 9 2810 107 174 5871 " 78 101 Totals 1221948125279 111 21437 57 2 2 2 0 0 1 3 CWS 5 6 1 1 2 5. 1 109 176 58 71 79104 TOTALS 127 200126280 11321938 59 32

in almost everyconceivable The copula wasfound to be omitted

off"), before adverbs("That position: beforeadjectives ("He well ("It a very niceschool"); when the funbegan"); before determiners "They want toknow what Igoing before participles("When I grown," ("She in the 9thgrade"); before conjunc for"); before prepositions

before negativemarkers("Courting not tions ("Maybeit because"); other verbforms ("Things Ilike to that much tome"); and before

do playfootball"). also varied, Miscellaneous tense(and number) problems were for the the use of theuninflected forms the mostfrequent being parents is name,""I'm plan." past and presentparticiples: "My

been expentedfrom Turner'sstatement This, ofcourse, might have in the languagesof West Africa. that there arefew participles persistence of therelic forms The third tableshows the

etc.) and "childern;"colloquialisms; "get me a job"("b174, me a car," than of word troubles;omissions, other the use ofslang; function and idiomaticdepartures. The the determinerand the copula; forms andcolloquialisms isnot number of childrenusing the relic word troubles,omissions and given. The nUmbersof function given. idiomatic departuresare not 33

Relics . Collocuialinms "cet me Function a job" "childern" "Well"OtherSlaw.Words Omissions Idiom 11 A 3 1 2 0 0 0 24 14 0 10 19 D 0 1 0 0 0 5 11 17 _ o o o o 5 e 3 o 1111 8 17 D 2 0 1 1 0 0 3 i 8 19 E 3 o 3 o 1 5 o 13 15 6 F 5 1 o o o 1 1 10 17 a 6 1 2 1 3 1 1 26 2 II 1 0 5 o 4

1 o 7 7 6 1 3 0 1 0 161 Totals 31 4 14 3 3 3 82 49 0 CI:is o o o 1 o o 5 4

TOTALS 31 4 14 1r4 3 3 87 165 49

As might be anticipated inthe writing of those whose language has a sort of double-exposureeffect from a basic structure which has few function words, the attemptsat using such words idiomatically are not always successful. Substitutions of one preposition foranother are particularly common:

Pre ositions "in" for "on," "with," "of," "to" 11 for "at," "in," "on," "to" 9 "to" for "at," "of" 9 "on" for "int"' "at" 5 for "in," "on," "to" 6 "for for "with," "ofu 5 "until" for "that" 2

Subtotal 47 Other 3

Total 50

The insertion of superfluousfunction words is also common. A

superfluous "in,"(particularly in phrases such as "My schoolin

which I like verymuch"), occurs in fourteen instances;superfluous

"to" or "on" in another thirteeninstances. There were also eight

non-idiomatic WAS of the conjunctions"which" and "wh.2,41." 34

Omissions add up to a total of 237,and, like omissions of the .0 copula, these come inalmost every variety,including 176 function word omissions. Nouns are omitted intwenty-two instances; adjectives in ten, includingsix omissions of the word"old" in such

phrases as "He is sixmonths;" adverbs in nine;and main verbs in

twenty.

Omissionsof function words are asfollows:

Pronoun Nominative 34 Objective 10 Genitive 3

Gulltotal 47

"of" 9 Hin" 18 6 "to" 10 msc. 10

Subtotal 53

Con 'unctions "and" 15 msc. 2 Subtotal 17 Amillem verbs "has," "have" 13 "would" (before"like") 11 msc. 5

Subtotal 29 Negative marker 9 Infinitive marker 21

TOTAL 176 "I was Many of the idiomaticdivergencies defy classification.

Doe" is fairly frequent, asis born to the unionof Mr. and Mrs. John [names of own parents]." "I was born to theparents of Mr. and Mrs. 35

Some of these students create verbs with an insouciance thatis sometimes thought to have disappeared from the face of this linguistic world: "I went site seening," "service my time in the

Air Force," "If I don't success in that field," "Nobodycould lap me" (i.e., hold me in his lap), "We always made it backup,"

"Maybe I would like to architect some of the world."

Distinctive idiomatic expressions include "Hepass" (i.e.,

he died), "She is low"(i.e., she is short in stature), "My sister

before" (i.e., my older sister), "black hair with afew grey strings,"

"I guess I'll just face the grown days as theycome." And, of course,

there are more function word uses that do not fitthe standard idiom:

fifteen involving the auxiliary verb "would," fourinvolving other

auxiliary verbs, two involving other functionwords.

FUnction words are a notorious stumbling-blockto any would-be

speaker of the English language. Adding together all the variances

involving function words, the followingresult is obtained:

Function Words Pronouns 22 Articles 26 "My father, he" 15 Tenses (est.) 50 Other verb forms (est.) 29 Copula 79 Omissions 176 Idiom 21 General TOTAL 505

The final table in this chaptershows, in successive columns,

the number of students with nonon-standard uses in any of the

categories tallied; the number withnon-standard uses in only one 36

category; the number with non-standard usesin two categories; and so on, through twelve. The final vertical column is devotedto the sum of the number of students multiplied by thenumber of categories in which there were non-standard uses. Percentages also are given. Simila0123.4 6 8 2lo 11 12 0 0 1 A 1 3 6 7 9 3 4 5 1 0 0 0 0 8 6 5 9 3 4 1 2 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 3 10 3 6 5 5 5 0 1 0 3 8 7 4 5 5 4 1 2 0 2 0 0 1 1 3 7 8 8 4 2 2 2

1 1 1 0 1 1 5 6 5 10 3 5 1 1 0 0 5 6 7 4 5 0 1 5 4 2 1 2 0 0 1 7 2 5 10 3 5 1 3 0 2 4 3 5 2 0 3 2 0 1 0 0

Totals 13 43 51 43 67 32 32 24 18 9 7 1 '2

Pct. .038 .125 .149.125 .195 .094 .096.070 .053 .026 .020 .003 .006 0 0 0 0 CWS 3 2 3 2 1 1 1 0 0

1 2 TOTALS 16 45 54 45 68 33 33 24 18 9 7

Pct. .045 .127 .152 .127 .191 .093 .093.068 .052 .025 .019.0025 4305

Thus we see that ninety-five percentof these young people

departed from the standard in atleast one of the ways suggested by

the TUrner study, and that on the averagethey departed from the

standard in at least four of thesecategories. Is this coincidence?

Is it coincidence that similardepartures are made by the Gullahpeople

in South Carolina and Georgia,by the mulatto people of the CaneRiver

country, by the Negroes of Natchitoches,and by the colored children

of California and of NewYork?This thesis takes the pointof view that

these young people arestill using elements of an Africanstructure

with an Ehglish lexicon; they arestill playing bourre. 37

It is often saidthat What sort of alanguage has resulted? where there is, so tospeak, Negro English shows"confusion." EXcept

(as in the function wordproblem, interference fromstandard English overinflect after havingbecome for example, and inthe tendency to

true. Exivessions like "Hetall conscious ofinflection), this is not

"I have fivebroOer," "It been along "fly brotherhouse," "Us going," of clarity andstreamlining. time," and "I comeyesterday" are models strongest and oldesttradition Not only that:they are in the

language. Angles, Saxons, and of the developmentof the English to the BritishIsles in thefifth Jutes took theGermanic languages

Celtic tongues. Late in the eighth century andpulverized the speeding up the processof loss century the Danishinvasions began,

heavily-stressed Germanictongues were of inflectionto which the

Normans in 1066and the denizensof the prone. Along came the the same position asthe Negro islands foundthemselves in much spoke to them in apidginEnglish. slaves in America:their rulers Hall as "a languagenative to ("Pidgin" has beendefined by Robert

inflections werediscarded as a neitherspeaker.") It took; Caxton and hisDutoh printers surfacing scubadiver dropsweights. the language. As more and (1476) had their ownmysterious effect on

in throughoutthe ensuing eras, more more foreignwords were taken thrown out. Inflections continus and more structuralfripperies were

day, though much moreslowly: note,for to dwindle inthe present

subjunctive. xc.nple, thefast-disappearing 38

tongue it is today The English languagebecame the synthetic

creolization. (Hall, essentially through processesof pidginization and

the native language of . again, defines "creole" as"pidgin which becomes

The performance was more orless ended only in a speechcommunity."4) became the ruler of the the 18th century whenEngland simultaneously

hellfire-and-brimstone grammarianswho seas andspawned a clutch of whose fulminations managed to make usage amoral issue and through

(largely under infractions of the"rules" which theydiscovered cabbage leaves)attained the status ofsin. Sterling Leonard Not everyone hasadmired their efforts.

doctrine of correctness, Andrus, in his book onthe 18th-century

had adopted Bayly'ssuggestion, says: "Again,if the grammarians that there is no needin English in which heanticipated Jespersen, simple regularizingmight for verbs to varyfor person, a perfect:4 singular of all perhaps have beenexpected in the third person

verbs except tobe."5 regularizing; The Negro isdoing his bit tobring about that

the Negro dialect seemsto be and far frombeing on the decline, (450-1050) and Middle spreading in Northerncities. Old English

each; Modern Englishhas English(1050-1550) lasted about 500 years The voraciouscomputer is almost had its inningsin terms of time. the millions of peopleof other already demanding asimpler language;

language may alsoknock off a nations to whomEnglish is the second In about 2050 ourlanguage few of its rough edgesand lace ruffles. 38

tongue it is today The English languagebecame the synthetic

creolization. (Hall, essentially through processesof pidginization and

the native languageof again, defines "creole" as"pidgin which becomes

The performance was more orless ended only in a speechcommunity."4) simultaneously became theruler of the the 18th centurywhen England grammarians who seas andspawned a clutchof hellfire-and-brimstone whose fulminations managed to make usage amoral issue and through

discovered (largely under infractions of the"rules" which they

cabbage leaves) attainedthe status of sin. Sterling Leonard Not everyone hasadmired their efforts.

doctrine of correctness, Andrus, in his book onthe 18th-century

had adopted Bayly'ssuggestion, says: "Again,if the grammarians that there is no needin English in which heanticipated Jespersen, regularizing might for verbs to varyfor person, aperfectly simple singular of all perhaps have beenexpected in the third person

5 verbs except tobe." about that regularizing; The Negro is doinghis bit to bring

Negro dialect seemsto be and far from being onthe decline, the (450-1050) and Middle spreading in Northerncities. Old English

each; Modern Englishhas English(1050-1550) lasted about 500 years The voraciouscomputer is almost had itsinnings in termsof time.

the millions ofpeople of other already demanding asimpler language;

language may alsoknock off a nations to whomEnglish is the second In about 2050 ourlanguage few of its roughedges and laceruffles. . 39

Negro may sooner,and the American is due forachange; it may come be showing the way,at least inpart. conclusion that thereis a Negro Still, beforejumping to the the written page,it seems dialect which will soidentify itself upon

by white studentsto determine advisable to examinepapers written

standard in the same way. whether theydepart from the written by white For control papers,355 autobiographies

Parish high schoolswereexamined juniors and seniorsin Natchitoches

those by thecolored students. In the on exactlithe same basis as relating to thework of the Negrostudents, following pages,the charts relating to thework of the previously used, arerepeated above those easay be compared. white students, sothat the.two sets may of the coloredstudents be It was requestedthat the papers schools would notbe handled in such a waythat the individual

No such requesthaving been indicated in any way;and this was done. schools, those papers weretabulated made in connectionwith the white that they'appearin the by school groups,and it is by such groups bottoM, is the Parish's oneurban white high charts. School 0, at the students in all(many from ruralareas); school, withapproximately 550 whose relative size maybe gauged by the the others arerural schools

number of papersreceived from each.

figures in thefirst chart appearing It will benoticed in the

diverged most oftenfrom standard below that both groupsof students where plural forms are structure in usingsingular forms of nouns

colored students didthis customarily employed. Almost ten times more

than white, however. 1

%ow

40

The saxt most frequent variation for the colored etudents was

the use of the uninfleoted genitive, while for the white student it

was found in non-standard uses of adjectives.Though in a few

instances white students, Me the colored,. shore "-ed" and "-ing"

endings from participal adjectives, they had no uses of the "more

better" type; their commonest non-standard form wash failuro) to add

the inflectional endings of ordinal numerals. Phrases like "the

three grade" occurred eleven times in the white papers, not at all

in the colored.

Under adverbs, the use of "sometime" for "sometimes" occurred

once in the white students' papers, and "every since" for "ever since"

three times. It will be noted that none of the white students used

the redundant pronoun in expressions like "My father, he", though

this expression is common enough in white speech.

Colored NOUNS FUNCTION WORDS Number Sgl. Plural Unin- MY of for for floated Om. father, students Plural VAL. Genitive ADJ. ADV. PRON. ART. he

A 40 17 344 4 8 12 2 4 1 1 4 62 3 3 6

40 2466 3 3 5 9 4 4 o 2 268 1 1 40 14 32 1 1 11 19 5 5 3 3 4 4 -4 5 16 5300 5 10 9 11 1 1 0 04 5 3 3 26 40 6422 12 19 7 11 1 1 1 3 3 2 4 40 2054 23 9 12 9 11 2 7 3 3 44 1 2 40 16 3333 9 13 6 9 2 4 2 20 2 3 40 15 4233 9 15 5 6 4 12 5 534 3 3 22 11 17 1 1 6 8 3 7 3 1 1 0 0

Totals342159 395 19 20 74 1175068 153222 24 26 32 15 22

CWS 13 1 3 o o 0 0 3 3 1 1 o 00 0 0 0

TOTALS 355 160 398 19 20 74117 53 71 16 33 22 24 26 32 15 22 White FUNCTION WORDS NOUNS MY Number sgl. Plural Unin- Om. father* for flected of for PRON. ART. he Genitive ADJ. ADV. students Pluralaa. 0 0 0 2 2 00 3 30 500 2 2 A 42 2 00 0 000 0 0 0 0 0 3 4 26 5 70 9, 0 0 0 B 1 2 0 0 0 1 1 1 00 0 C 8 1 2 0 000 0 0 0 2 5 5 7 1 D 19 4 90 0 000 0 0 2 2 1 1 1 1 24 2 4 1 1 2 0 0 E 6 3 5 4 52 0 7 1 1 4 F 42 10 160 33 0 0 8 11 46 d2 12 17 30 39 1 1 0 194 0 16 9205 5 0 14 21 2432 10 ALS355 41 72 410 with verbs,it will benoticed In the secondtable, concerned used the thirdpersonsingular form that twenty-onewhite students singular or forthe plural. In nine for the first orsecond person distance fromits instances, theverb was at some of thetwenty-five circum- have difficultyunder these subject; manyunskilled writers

stances. frequently usedtho uninflected The coloredstudents most singular or the where the thirdperson form of theverb in cases for them was called for. Next most common ii simple pasttense were whereas thewhite singular form asnoted above, the use ofthe third non-standard use cameunder theheading students' nextmost frequent elaborate formswhich, again, cause of "Other"--mostlythose more

problems forunskilled writers. 42

Colored VERBS Uninflected forms Omission Past Other: 3d sing. for fdr of for tense, for 1st, 3d simple seglia 2E11. number Other gram 2d. pl. gins, Rai-- 3 10 14 34 7 12 12 17 3 12 23 13 32 8 14 2 14 20 5 5 12 11 19 11 20 2 B 16 24 5 6 10 14 '2 2 16 26 13 18 17 38 17 36 C 21 13 16 4 6 25 2 2 9 21 9 D 12 15 13 9 8 9 25 2 3 22 41 7 17 27 22 64 13 E 14 8 12 8 11 34 21 31 4 4 9 P 9 14 13 14 4 5 10 13 4 5 11 O 17 26 14 30 13 19 6 7 12 7812 ly 31 14 24 17 29 5 H 17 6 7 3 6 9 18 2 2 8 10 I 9 16 8 13 58 71 78 101 214 37 57107 174 TOTALS 122194 125279 111 2 0 0 1 3 2 5 1 2 2 CWS 5 6 1 1 79104 219 38 59 109 176 58 71 TOTALS 127200 126 280 113

White 2 2 1 2 2 3 4 1 2 2 1 A 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 0 1. 2 1 1 3 5 3 3 0 0 B 0 0 0 2 2 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 C 1 2 2 3 0 0 2 0 0 1 D 0 O 3310 5 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 5 0 O 1 1 1 6 E 2 9 9 3 5 3 F 6 6 2 2811 2 10 12 11 12 6 6 10 13 13 22 5 8 10 11 33 13 16 47 9 13 23 26 28 TOTALS 21 25 19 23 27 find for the firsttime a category In the thirdchart, below, we of greatly exceed thecolored: in the use in which whitetabuleed uses much more of slang would seemto indicate a slang. This greater us word. relaxed attitudetoward the written .43

Colored' Relics Colloquialisms ' FUnction bget me Omissions Idiom libild#n" Nell" Other Slas Words ajor 11 24 14 1/ 2 0 0 0 A 19 5 0 0 0 0 10 B 0 1 . 17 5 0 0 0 0 11 c 3 0 17 3 0 0 . 8 2 0 1 1 D .... 19 0 i i 8 E 3 0 3 15 6 0 0 0 0 13 P 5 1 17 3 1 1 1 10 6 1 2 2 0 i 4 26 5 0 i w 1 0 7. 6 1 1 0 0 7 1 3 0 161 49 3 3 3 82 Totals 31 4 14 4 0 0 1 0 0 5 cws 0 0 165 49 4 3 3 87 TOTALS 31 4 14

White 1 i 7 1 0 1 5 1 0 1 A 3 i 6 0 . 0 3 3 B 0 0 2 0 0 1 0 o C 2 0 0 3 0 1 1 0 0 D 0 0 1 0 3 4 0 3 0 i 0 E 5 16 3 1 0 4 4 1 0 6 IP 5 5 3352 23 44 o 3 i 81 12 8 10 44 64 34 TOTALS 7 2 by race; it shows functionword problems The fourthtable, below, students about asmuch conjunctions gavethe white will beobserved that

trouble as they gavethe colored. Colored White Substitutions Prepositions 4 on, with,af, to) 11 of at, in, on,to) 9 5 9 0 toiat, ol 5 4 on(in, at 6 0 to) at (in, cm, o for (with,of) 5 2 o until(that) 47 13 Subtoitnal 1 3 0 ac. 50 13 Subtotal Superfluities 13 1 in 13 2 on 26 3 Subtottoa,1 6 5 Conjunctions 82 21

IL 44

note that almost In theOth table, omissions are shown by race; students as many white ascolored students omittedmain verbs, and that to of both races omitted agood many nouns. This may be attributed teen-age carelessness andprobably has no releyanceto structure.

MISSIONS Colored White Nouns 22 15

Adjectives "old" 6 1 other 4 1 Subtotals 10 2 Adverbs 9 2 Function words Pronouns nominative 34 14 objective 10 3 genitive 3 3

Subtotals 47 20 Prepositions "of" 9 1 "in" 18 2 "at" 6 1 "to" 10 5 MSC. 10 4

Subtotals 53 13. Con'unctions "and" 15 2 MEM. 2 3

Subtotals 17 5 Auxiliaa verbs "has," "have" 13 5 "would" (before"like") 11 1 msc, 5 2 Subtotals 29 8 Negative, marker 9 3

Infinitive marker 21 1 Total function words 176 50

rain verbs 20 18

TOTALS 237 87 45

students, four(not used by As for idiomatic usesby the white

in local speechthat they the coloredstudents) are so characteristic colloquialisms: "I likedto have should perhaps havebeen recorded as carries him many drowned," "can't hardlyafford it," "His work Interestingly, tws, white different places,""I was raised up." the parents of[giving own students used thephrase "I was born to

parents'names]".

Comparing all fUnctionword protaems ofboth races, the

result is: White ftnction Words Colored 19 Pronouns 22 Articles 26 5 0 "Ey father, he" 15 12 Tenses (est) 50 Other verb forms(est) 29 14 13 Copula 79 Other omissions 176 50 1 Idiom 21 21 General 87 TOTALS 505 135 chapter, the number The final table shows, asin the previous

of the categoriestallied; of students withnon-standard uses in any catvagory; the number the number withnon-standard uses in only one and so on, throughtwelve. with non-standard usesin two categories; the sum of the numberof The final verticalcolumn is devoted to categories in which there were students multipliedby the number of

given. non -standardiuses. Percentages also are Colored 2 10 11 12 Totals Cirma 0 114 21A16/18 5 1 0 0 0 1 --16g- A 1 g 7 9 3 4 i 2 2 , 0 0 0 151 0 8 6 5 9 3 4 5 1 1 0 0 0 163 C 1 3 10 3 6 5 5 D 3 8 7 4 5e 4 1 2 0010 137 4 2 2 2 2 0 0 192 E 1 i 3 7 8 a 1' 1 1 1 0 1 163 i 5 6 5 10' 3 5 1 0 0 5 6 7 4 5 0 1 5 4 2 0 153 1 3 1 2 0 0 171 H 1 7 2 5 10 3 5 2 0 1 0 0 96 I 0 2 4 3 5 2 0 3 7 1 2 1392 Totals 13 43 51 43 67 32 32 24 18 9 .020 .003 .006 Pct. .038 .125 .149 .125 .195 .094.096 .070.053.026 0 0 0 29 Cws 3 2 3 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 7 1 2 1421 TOTALS 16 45 54.45 68 33 33 24 18 9 Pct. .045 .127 .152 .127 .191 .093 .093.068 .052 .025 .019.0025.005 White A 16 17 5 3 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 41' 0 0 0 31 B 10 8 2 5 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 c 3 2 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 23 D 7 6 3 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 23 E 10 8 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 90 F 11 13 3 3 7 1 2 1 1 0 0 0 0 202 O 93 52 23 18 1 3 2 1 0 0 0 TOTALS 150 106 42 33 11 5 4 2 1 0 0 0 1 418

Pct. .421 .298 .118 .093 .031 .014 .010.005.0025 0 0 0.0025

The total number of coloredstudents withnon-standard uses in

three or fewer categories was 150, or.444; of whitehl-331, or .94.

The total number of colored studentswith non-standard um in sit or

more categories was93, or .292; of whites, eight, or.028. The

colored students averaged non-standard usesin four categories each;

the colored studeLts in whiteschools, in 2.23 categories each; the

white students, in 1.18 categorieseach.

The really interesting thingabout.this comparative study is

that there is no non-standard usage commonto the colored which is

not sometimes used by some whites,and that there are not a.feit 47 whites who *rite a reasonable facsimileof what we might be inclined to call "Negro dialect."

I. it then, to be concluded thatthere is a deep African subs-structure in the language of manySouthern whites?That through the process of culturaltransmission, often through colored servants and colored playmates inearly childhood, the dialect of the less cultivated Southern white has adeoidedly African cast?

Not necessarily. There are two other considerations to be taken into account. Any freshman composition teacher aRywherewould be justified, after scanning thepreceding charts, in responding with a cynical look and the question:"What other sub-standard uses are SIM., if punctuationand spelling are not taken intoaccount?"

TO be dUrs, there are a fewothers, but most of them are involvedin

attempt* to achieve more complicatedstructures. In aRy community

where many students do not usethe standard dialect, these arejust

the "errors" that will be found: usesthat tend further to simplify

a language thatis already distinguished by itsgreat inflectional

simplicity. The chances are that in the end, manyof them will

prevail, as they have prevailedbefore.

As for the second factor, onewhich relates closely to the

general Southern dialect, wemust return to Mr. Krapp, hisancestors,

hie heirs, and his as/aligns.

and finest "Mr.[James'Russell] Lowell, almost the greatest

realist who ever wrought kn verse,showed us that Elizabeth waestill

Queen where he heard Yankeefarmers talk," William DeanHowells wrote 6 in Critic4sq and !lotionthree-quarters of a century ago. Perhaps 48

find that the speech eraof Mr. Howells would bemuch surprised to

passed away fromthe.South, The Virgin Queenhas not yet entirely dazzled to hear where things move moreslowly. Many an outsider is

forms as "holp" forthe past tense of even todaysuch Elizabethan to rhyme with"sound." "help," and "wound"(i.e., injury) pronounced by the linguistic Other survivals areless easily recognized departure amateur; but thescholar soon findsthat virtually every

antecedents. "The construction from grammatical normshas respectable 'singular present for all of I is and the useof the third person present tense of tobe seems as persons andboth numbers of the But it is not characteriotically Negro asanything inithelanguage'.

From the thirteenthcentury, abnormal orunparalleled English. on record inthe northern forms I is, maa is, we,Lsa, atria are

Dictionary, contains dialects of English,and Wright's Dialect

localitiim in modernEngland," Krapp numerousexamples from r'emote 7 wrote in 1924. other English relic&in J. H. Combselaborated in 1916 on

Southern speech:

him for she and!le; them for ihm We find her and eta., on Relatives are omittedwhere they are now necessary; inscription is found:"Gclatbleiss thoge4, a rudetombstone this to find the insertion . . It is quite common sleeps here." . , pronoun,e.g.4''TheBritighvsthey". . of an unnecessary and the Elizabethans, thedouble comparative As with the firttin'er, most double superlative arecommon; e.g., more used with plural knittin'est Singular verb forms are used with pluralverb forms. nouns, andsingular nouns are "I weren't thereat the E.g., "These horsesis well groomed"; will and would arehopelessly confused, time." Shall, should, Brevity is thesoul of interchangeably and are used almost to discard the mountaineer'slanguage. It causes him He frequentlyomits the pronoun subjectin his conversation. 49

freely used as an . .Me adjective is the auxiliary. . out'n the hole adverb, e.g., "Zekepulled the ground-hog used in theSouthern mountains. easy." . . . For to is widely of my mind." . . The "I went for totell him a piece . . in -s, the E.E. third personplurar[of verbs] often ends "Heayy rains hurtsthe 41 [Early English] northernending. . . respect that themountaineer's vine-patches."It is in this Elizabethan usage. . . language mostclosely parallels in "He begun, tolay by Preterite formsin u are common, as This is evencarried (finish working) his cropyestcrday." "He brunc threehorses to town." over to theverb brine', in dropped in thepreterite in verbs The ending -edis usually E.g., "He sweat aheap when he whose infinitiveends in -t. In keepingwith the pulled thetroun'-hogout.T. . inflection -en,the Elizabethan customof dropping the participle arecommonly used.We curtailed l'ormsof the past eat, froze,hold, took, mistook, have here suchwords as: Arm, and many others,used for the rode, smit,!trove, alb mil, Verbs& conjunctionsand other past partioipleending, -1a. parts of speech arefreely omitted.° written for C. M.Wise at LSU in Alberta Harris,in a thesis pronunciations of the17th and 18th 1948, gave manySootch-Irish and tongues. She also centuries that arefamiliar to Southern ears

form their pluralin /aue/ or/m/ in says that nounseading in "st" (she Southwestern dialectsof England the Midland;Southern and postae/), thus throwinglight on the mentions/gostaz, nestae, "antses" a commonvocal consonant clusterproblem that makes accounts for allthose missing"Os" pluralization of"ants" and that forms of wordslike"Communist."9 in freshmanthemes on plural in his bookAmerican English, Albert II.Marckwardt, writing pluralizing inflectionafter numbers mentions as olderforma lack of "hien," "hern" and"yourn" which ("ten mile"); theabsolute pronouns later discarded; "mine" and acceptedfor awhile but weremodelled on ("he want") or itsextension to elimination ofthe thirdsingular oomingr); and ("tims some goodfriends," "Is you first andsecond, 50

for the past tense("I taken," "he done," use of.thepast participle 10 old-fashioned rural speechin and so on.) "He do" persists in

11 Southern England. dialect are not simple, The causativefactors of the Negro

be a rather simplething. !dental illness, tool wasonce thought to miserable homelife or a Now we know thatit may be due to a narcotics, unlooked-forside miserabl nervousheritage, alcoholism, normal dietary effects of medication,climate, fatigue, some particular..sufferer has theeffect of loco constituent whichfor the happens to be aperfectly sane weed--or to thefact that the patient

to whose civilisationhe is man in a crazyworld: that is, one things iv6sUsio mental illness; in unsuited.Any one of these to produde theresult, and most cases severaloPthem work together

each intensifiesthe other. - that something ofthat It is the contentionof this thesis

dialect: that theAfrican sub- nature has happenedwith the Negro importance, but thatit has stratum is very realand of the first

factors whichhave-had the.effect of long been'maskedby three other (1) the influence of giving it a strongtail wind. These factors are taught to the Negroslavesv simplification inthe original pidgin

(and earlier)-foftswhich'were (2) the influence ofthe 17th cencury 3 thirunAlookish to'do the first helearned; and(3) the,tendency of simplify, rather than toelaborate, the what comesnaturally: to

language. of Africanstructure, not only A simple *eatof the inflnence

the dialect ofthe white Southerner on the Negrodialect, but also on 51 in whose dbildhood home the Negro servant--cook, nurse,yard boy--

1 has been alMost taken for granted, might be made bycomparing the analyses given above with a similar analysis of papers written by white ohildren in communities where no Negroes have everlived. On set of such-papers was obtained from a school in ahill community in an adjacent parish and paperswritten by students whose parents were not born in the community were eliminated.The following table expresses the results:

Percentages of et:dents Non-standard uses: Natchitoches Parish Number of cats riesColored White Hill Communitr

None 445 .421' .4" .. ' ''.538 l'- One .127 .298 .231 Two .152 .118 .231 SUBTOTALS .324 '.837 -1:00o Three or more .675 .155

Moreover, in the papers written by students in the hill community, the'non-standard uses which were, in fairness; tallied, were not of the sort which are most prominent in the paperswritten by the colored-students. Only one student used a singular noun in place of a plural nountand this was "pest" for "pests"; theconsonist cluster ending is a notorious stumbling block for studenis of both races. Only one used a verb in non-standard number, and this was "he don't," long familiar in white speech. The other non-standard uses were substitutions of function words, omission of wordo(not inclUding the article or the copula) and aon-standard idioms.

Because of the smallness of the sample, this is not offered as a scientific test of the proposition thatremnants of the African 'akik;Ie

52

Southern dialect. However, it dees substructure havecrept into thy of that conclusion,and a direction stronglysiftgest the tenability for futureresearch. 53

CHAPTER III

1

LEVELS ANDLEARNING

four major onesare levels, ofwhich the Lank, Agehas many the fullyaccepted, or defined as theformally correct; sometimes 1 popular. Under the informal; trade ortechnical; and standard paper dialects wf.th oneof which this latter headingcome the many lies in Their origin,Hans Kurath says, is principallyconcerned. [which] results sepaiation of varyingdegrees, "Social andregional forms of speech. socially orregionally restricted in . . sets of

differences in . communication, thegreater the The looserthe net of between socialsets passing oftime, as speech willbe with the

region, oritsbetweenregions."2 onecommunity or Raven Kaavid,"is simply a A dialect, asdefinted by off regional orsocial. It is set habitual varietyof a language, varieties by auniquecombination of from all othersuch habitual phrase and meanings,grammatical forms, languagefeatures: words No patterns of stressand intonation. structures,pronunciations, from bad in itself;its prestige comes dialect issimply good or dial' t is initself a it. But every tile prestigeof those who use of human language, avalid instrument legitimate formof the worthy ofseriousstudy.° communication,and something like count!ites, manyof which havfi, As is nottrue in other speaks a in iheUnited States England, a ReceivedStandard: everyone

New England,Mountain Southern, reglonal dialect,be it Eastern levels pegional dialectsare many Brooklyn or someother. Within 'the class-, as W. Nelson Francis of class dialects. People of the working

mudh more often than withmembers of the says,taikipathone another ruling class, and their wyof life is quitedifferent.In time

vocabularies and suchdifferences in promo, they develop different . ciation and grammarthat they speek"diffeient social or..sliais t they live in the samevillage."."' dialects, even though . SO The kind of language amanuses tells Oil'social statas . course, muchelse. It has a good dealelsigit anthropologist

Walker defines as"referential meaning the information about

is communicatedtif the non-linguisticenvironment of a speaker which

other things, whether the a linguisticform." It may reveal, among speaker is a. native, forif he.is not, Walker pointsout, he is subject to interferencefrom his original language. State of boa* and state of mind arealso indirectly conveyedby language, says

William 0. Moulton, andlanguage mey tell us wherethe speaker +mei

6 _whisk from. Polish, technicality andkey are three other dimeesiese are decoded,accordiig to0leason.7

To return to socialdialects, they lime at leastthree levelei

assured, as Albert H.Marckwardt puts it, they maybe described as "the --4 the anxious, and theindifferent--a divisioncorresponding roughly te

the three level stratificationof society into upper, middle,and

anxious, group which includes lowerclasses."8It is the middle, or

the staunchest supportersof the prescriptive grammariansand

lexicographers. McDavid comments: "The tendencyto abandon local

folk-pronunciations and substitutepseudo-elegant or spelling pro

ciations is most characteristicof the newly-risen middleGlass 55 z

themselves from theilliterate and less cbre anxiousto differentiate knows only the fortunate in theircommunity. The uneducated person the community feels no folk-usage; the person sureof his position in

him and his!allay.° necessity to change thepronunciation normal to

stating that "We fearlower Werner Cohn alsostresses this point, quarter," and relating class speech and areinclined to give it no "precariousness" of the disdain for rlch speechdirectly to the

linguistic anob's ownsocialposition.1° have their own The speakers of the"anxious" social dialect the folkwas, and one ofthese is a telief thatthe speakers of This belief is alltoo "indifferent" socialdiale.ot are not bright.

often'seemingly confirmed bythe results of theubiquitous standard that one of intelligence rating tests. Current research indicates

of white children . the main reasons forthe difference between scores

that the tests and those of Negrochildren on such tests is simply the themselves are couched inthe middle-classdialect which many of

colored children do notspeak, and are based onmiddle-class "It experiences which manyof the coloredchildren have not had.

differences between Negroesand whites on - would appear that vocabulary sub- conventional intelligencetests, and especiany on

tests, may be primarilydue to failure inverbal communication S. Carson rather than in comprehension,"write psychologists Arnold differences are on, and A. I. Rabin, notingthat the principal score 11 the tasks requiringverbal comprehension andverbal expression. experience, Group intelligence testsand achievement tests measure

will score low because not grew matter.Rost of these youngsters 56 they have sot encompassed in the test,"NUrial said at the1964 Conference on Crosby ofIiita riv

SocialDiablecta.l2 connotes, as NcDavid has In short, alow-prestige dialect inferiority, but simply repeatedly urged, notintellectual or moral environment where such aform of that the speaker"grew up in an only give these peoplecommand speech was used."Education must not realize their potential, of the standarddialect so that they can and disseminateunderstanding he says, but itmust also both acquire 13 of dialectalminorities. and almost community That this must bedone region by region the South is especially by community isquite clear. The situation in The new resident ofthat complex, and notleast so in Louisiana. suppose--who goes out tofish for state--a native ofColorado, let us of bass; or who istold "trout" und finds himselfwith a Creel full of earth on his lawn that "salamanders" causethose little mounds bright-eyed (only to have his amazementcompounded when he sees a

gopher.sitting on top of oneof these hills offresh dirt); soon

different regional learns that he has cometo a land where a, very

Edward Sapir once wrote"No dialect is spoken. The anthropologist considered as two languages are eversufficiently similar to be different representing the samesocial reality. The worlds in which world with societies live are listinctworlds, not merely the same

different labelsattached."14 For the stranger living in Loui:Aana eerie, because most this phen4menon becomeswell-known and even more almost completely of the labels are notdifferent. The lexicon is-an 57 familiar one, but the attitudes, conveutions, reactions,beliefs, patterns of thinking and ways of doing towhich the words refer are often not at all the same as those towhich he is accustomed; end while it is easy to learn that in Louisiana"evenine may be any time after noon, and that a salamander isnot a lizard-like creature, other of the different, meanings andshades of meanings may be years in the learning,and many are never understood.

Similar misunderstandings are in store forwhite and colored teachers and students as their contacts become moreand more frequent; for they and their forebears have lived side byside in different worlds for as many as 250 years. There is no easy way to solve this problem; it has been decades in the making, it yill be many more in the unmaking. For both teachers and students to know that it is there can be helpfUl.

Another pitfall can be completely avoided if teachers will remertsr, when working with students who have traces, large orsmall,

of Negro Ehglish, that this dialect in its structural aspect has nothing whatever to do with communication. &dish teachers like to believe that the use of the standard grammar somehow lends to clarity

of meaning. There is no truth in this. The eminent practicality of

the non-standard forms has already been discussed at some lengthin

the preceding pages. The skeptic might do well to read an unputaished

doctoral dissertation (University of Michigan,1965) by Robert Sencer:

"An Investigation of the Effects of Incorrect Grammar on Attitude and

Comprehension in Written Ehglish Messages."The effect on attitude

was found to be considerable; the effect on comprehension was,in

brief, nil. 58

i dieviiffect of substandardlanguage on the attitude of

A. Close, who says: celtiviiii person hasbeen well-stated by R. misuse of the "It is a fast ofhunan behavior that ignorance or oommotions t languagehas the effectot,diverting the hearer's attoma1mi4oward our 'mistakes' and awsyfrom our meaning, and eves

so.that ho can't of alimptiag onrhearer's sympathy altogether bear7to 14sion'Ae us anylonger."15 This sort of thing has been deltriatArieblirt A. Hall, Jr., in his choleric bookLeave 'few

441011001W11950; reprinted in paperbackten years later as hillik/Sigi . Nally fuidameztalproblem is to got rid ofthe undemoorati attitude that underlies thewhole situation, that makes us con- diemwariant speech forms. [Standards] are criteria impused from the outside,for motives of laziness andsnobbery. swing 0_,lborial reason behindcondemning somebody for or buffet dress isthe desire to put that personin place. . The merit of what a person says or is set in any wayaffected by the way in whichthey say it et._ it, provided itis the most efficient wayof saying or Oisiriti and to acceptOr reject someone just because of N OOPOW or eincorrfotuspeech is to show oneselfsuperficial. 10,4 andsnobbish.1°

alliii-teinkt from a Cornell professor is-interesting and

there is more to the sitietion wortilyairrespeotfUl consideration, but

thaillo4anns to think. Crossly substandard language usesdo not toll

Most often they tell , .ustbitAbO-Spieker is worthless or despicable.

language lie years imp iimpafeOMRheart-rendingly, that behind that

of grindAsgpswerty and aleek of all those pleasuresthat make life

for-tho sere fortunate so wellworth living:the pleasures of the

mnesums.i6 ee.oert half, the library, even the pleasures of the

table. 50.

They tell the employer whose requirements for verbalAmpetel00

are high--the dootor or the lawyer,let us saythat he cannot tis. .

se4 this person as a cretary, because she would not know where tilipor in the dintiOnary for words like certiorari or dfoxyribonuolstow-"

They mqy tell the lady of the house that thin person would 21WW111:- competent gardener, because he could not read the directieSe 5 , ; 1. "4 running the power mower or for applying the insecticide safely;":1111,

tell the philosophically-inclined vis-a-vis that no matter hsvali , he might like to be a friend, on an equal footing, he could net succeed, .for he himself can talk with very great interest only&Set

Kant and Susanne Langer and Teilhard deChardin, and there is WO common meeting ground.

Enerson said it in his address on "The AmericanScholar*in learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already ltWei,,

: through the poverty or splendor of hisspeech."17Always whos44140,

ing with problems of sUbstandard dialect, we must keep it in the . banks of our minds that in most oases we are dealing-only with 0,- eymptom; that the basic job is awar on that poverty.

In the meantime there is much that can be done about

symptom. It is a challenge to the Amerioan educationalsystemommi--

one that there is danger innot meeting. The Briti6 astronomer Fred

Boyle, in an essay entitled "The Anatomy ofDoom," wrote that la his

hundred years, give or take a few, the population oftheworldigmndWri°

be so enormoui that each person would have just one squareyard*

the earth's Surface. But,Boyle.00ntiines,. there is no point la 60 worrying about this, because actually, long before it happens, so many people will have starved to death that it will not come to pass.

But he goes on to say that there is no point in worrying about that,

either, because long before it comes to pass', the system will have

18 broken down.

In short, we face catastrophe, Hoyle believes; and one of the

reasons is that we are not producing enough educated, competent

people to run our vast technology. Poor service in places of

business, lack of quality in manufactured goods, the undeniable

presence of incompetents in many positions: these phenomena daily

underscore Hoyle's point. To put bluntly another aspect of this

problem, we can afford the three R's more readily than we.can afford

the one big "R" that stands for Riots. If we cannot overnight give

these young people splendor in the EMersonian sense, at least we can

give them verbal adequacy. This is a job for the schools.

Verbal inadequacy is 9 perennial problem for the Negro college

student, and not only in formerly all-white colleges. Ehnice Shaed

Newton, director of the Bennett College Reading-Study Skills Center,

has found that many of the students attending Bennett are what she

calls "verbally destitute." "The low level of their skills," she

says, "makes it almost impossible for them to secure maximum concepts

commensurate with their learning potential in this verbal world in

which welive."19Not only must this verbal destitution be relieved,

but the Negro student who has a substantial amount of interference

from the creole language which is here identified as Negro Ehglish

must also become at least bidialectal if he is to compete in the

labor market. 61

Verbal problems, as evidenced by a substandarddialect, arelin ehort, a serious handicap to the Negro in thosetwo fields of education and employment. But we cannot intelligently help himwithout under- 411

standing the dilemma preaented by the wayin which his speech level

affects his social status. William Labov has stated this eloquently:

How is it that young people who areexposed to the Standard English of their teachers for twelve yearscannot reproduce this style for twelve minutes in ajob interview?The problem is parallel to the more seriousquestion as to how a studetik can sit througheight to ten years of school withoutlearning to read more than a few words, Those wilo feel that they can solve this problem by experimenting withthe machinery of the learning process are measuring tmall causesagainst large effects. Ny own feeling is that the primapyinterference with the acquisition of Standard Englishstems from a conflict of value systems.

Language may be looked upon as asystem for integrating values. Linguistics has made the most progress inanalyzing , the cognitive component; but manyelements of language (certainl; not all) are imbued with noncognitivevalues as well, and the total information conveyed in thesenoncognitive functions may outweigh the cognitive information. In our subjective reaction tests we have studied only those valueswhich follow the middle class patterns: the suitability of aspeech form for various occupations. But there are other values, valueswhich support the use of the vernacular styleof the working class, and the social, stratification of language. . . . There are many New Yorkers, tor example, who feel nodesire to be identified with middle class, white collar workers. They deliberately.turn aside from white collar jobs inseeking lower skilled, lower paid manual work. Identification with the class of peoplethat includes one's friends andfamily is a powerfUl factor in explaining linguistic behavior. "urthermore, I believe that w can establishthat the working class styleof casual speech has values strongly associatedwith masculinity .

There are also negativefactors in the conflict of value systems. The adolescent peer groupexerts strong pressure against any deviation inthe direction of middle classstandarde If it is true thatadolescent groups do not permitfree experimentation with middle classlanguage styles, and pat the3 penalize members who try to putinto practice the teachingof the schqols, then thepractical problem of urban dialect engineeing will have such group constraints as amajor focus. 11

62

It will be n3cessary to build into the communitya tolerance for style shifting which is helpfUl in educationaland occupational advancement.20

A sincere effort at changing the traditional dichotomyof the society is the suggestion of Einar Haugen, whosays "To become bi- dialectal is to acquire a dual identity,a we must never forget that the Negro dialect or any dialect identifies the pupil withhis fwaily, his playmates and most of his later associates.We should, therefore, beware of tearing them out of context without makingsure that there is at the same time, in the American white society,a change of heart and of law which will make them able to work at their language lessons with some kind of happy assurance that their efforts

21 are not in vain."

The teacher also needs some assurance that his own efforts will not be in vain. What can he do effectively when he finds himself confronted by a roomful of children, even of college students, the majority of whom are using substandard forms perhaps because of interference from African substructures, perhaps because of lingering pidginitis, perhaps because of culturally carried over structures dating back for centuries, perhaps because of the tendency in all folk speech to simplify structure, and perhaps because of all these things?

One thing he can do is to understand something of the linguistic learning process. Noam Chomsky was quoted in 1962 as saying that a child is born with a "built-in genetically transmitted mechanism to master the rules of various tongues," and that language 63 can best be leirned betweenthe ages of two and the teens, when this7"4* 22 instinctive basis exists. Subsequent studies have indicatod that the earliest years are compellingly formative. "It is important to note," says William A. Stewart, "that by school age, that is, by the age of six or seven, the average, mentally normal child Willalready have internalised most of the basic phonological and grammatical patterns of at least one linguistic system, and indeed perhaps more, iftheohild has been raisedbilingually."23 Levels in the acquisition of spoken Raglish were meticulously detailed by William Labov at the

Conference on Social Dialects:

1. The basic prammar. The first level is the mastery of the main body of grammatical rules and the lexicon of spoken ihglish, in such a form thpt the child can communicate his basic needs and experiences to his parents. This stage is normally achieved under the linguistic influence of the

parents. .

2. The vernacular. The second stage is the most important one from the point of view of the evolution of the language. In the preadolescent years, roughly ages five to twelve, the child learns the use of the local dialect in a form consistent with that of his immediate groups of friends and associates. At this stage, neighborhood dialect characteristics become automatically established responses in the ,attern of every- day speech, and the influence of the parents is submerged

under the influence of the peer group. . . 3. Social perception. The third stage begins with early adolescence, as the child begins to come into wider contact with the adult world. The social significance of the dialect characteristics of his friends becomes gradually apparent to him as he becomes exposed to other speech forms, even while he himself is still confined to the single style of his own vernacular 4. Stylistic variation. In the next ntage, the child begins to learn how to modify his speech in the direction of the prestige standard, in formal situations, or even to some extent in casual speech. The great turning point seems to be exposure to a group larger than the neighborhood group in the first year of high school 5. The consistent standard. It is not enough to be able to use standard speech forms sporadically. The ability to maintain standard styles of speech for any length of time is often not 64

acquirekat all The ability to switchto a standard style Ir speech andmaintain that style withreasonable consistency is acquiredprimarily by the middle class groups. 6. The full range.' Somespeakers attain completeconsistency; styles appropriate for a or somethingclose to it, in range_of wide range of occasions. Comperatively few . .attain this mostly level of skill in speaking,and those who do are 24 college educated personswith special interestin speech. . .

fixed, not in In short, the linguistichabits of the child are

in early childhood, and the classroom, butby his parents and nurses

As Bergen EVans toldthe largely by-his peersfrom that time onward. in 1963, "You Associated Press ManagingEditors at their convention

already fairly couldn't be admitted tokindergarten if you were not

great place for learning conversant with theEhglish language; and the

This teaches you a English in the schoolsystem is the schoolyard. great deal more than youget in school. One sneer in thesohczlyard will do more to correcttho deviation from thenorS of that group than that that any amount ofparentalthundering."25It is to be remembered other- sneer is asapt to be in the directionof a substandard form as wise.

Parents, like teachers,ploy a relatively minor role, asis

capital, with its big being dramaticallyillustrated in the nation's influx of Negroes fromthe Deep South. "It is easy," Stewart says,

Washington Negro "to find cases involvingsecond or third generation

families in which the parents arespeakers of a quite standard

variety of English, butwhere the children's speechis much closer

to that of the newer immigrants. The explanation seems tobe that

heavy post-war immigration hasdialectally swamped much of the

younger generation ofnativeWashingtonians."26Libov notes that 65

Negro'dialect is being copied by lower-class white New Torkers.27

Armed with an understanding of the fact that the child acquired

most of his language with little help or hindranc( from the schoolroom,

the teacher's next step is to learn to recognize and respect dialectal

forms. Nagy cogent appeals have been made for such undeutanding.

The British scholar Frank Whitehead, writing for teachers in that

land where there are many regional dialects,some of which are almost

mutually unintelligible, end where "the King's English" is the only

received standard, says: "At present far toomany children are made

to feel inferior, ashimed, or even sinful, because they find it -

natural to speak the samegroup language as their parents.

Pronunciation, dialect, local idiom, colloquialisms and slang

should be considered dispassionately, with the tone that belongs to

a sociological inquiry and not to a linguistic witoh-hunt."28

Success is most likely, says Thomas J. Creswell, witha

program that trier to augment the child's language, instead of trying

to supplant it altogether. "Probably any method which has surface

plausibility will work to some extent," hesays, "provided those being taught will endure it; what is most important is to designa method which is endurable."This, he adds, means emphasizing difference, not superiority or inferiority; and sinceemphasizing difference is the opposite of what mostieachersare inclined to, 29 it is not surprising that they often fail.

Provocative of long, long thoughts by members oftide teaching profession are these dispassionate stricturesby Labov: 66

exists in the conflictof Another negativefactor undoubtedly between the teachers' values symtelizedby the difference teachers have been speech and thestudents'. Although English nonstandard vernaculars as urged for many yearsto treat the it is clear thatthe simply "different"from Standard English, vernacular is "bad prevailing attitude isthat the students' It would be biglinh," "incorrect,"and "sloppy" speech. York City surprising if this werenot so.The survey of New reflect an almost shows that suchopinions of the teacher The conflict is universal sentiment ofthe speech community. student may be onlypartly a covert one:both teacher and unyielding aware of thevalue systems whichbring them into opposition. probably follow the Host teachers in theNew York City system features pattern of[the lower middleclass] for a great many forms of speech. In casual speech,they unconsciously use of others. which they themselvesstigmatize in the speech they use an even When they pronouncewords in isolation, those who use these higher percentageof.prestige forms than forms naturally incasual speech. Their performance is the sounds or governed by certain norms,and these norms are Thus the teacherwill images that theyhear themselves use. moralistic terms for frequently condemnstudents in strong, herself the use of speechforms that she frequently uses non- without being awareof them. There are undoubtedly many standard forms used bythe students thatthe teacher does not the teacher has no more use, but theessential fact is that tolerance for style shiftthan the adolescent groups fact that they Neither teacher norstudent is aware of the in their both follow the samepattern of style-shifting language, though atdifferent levels. The teacher struggles mietakenly telieves she to impose a fixedstandard, which she believe that follows herself, uponyoungsters who mistakenly vide in daily life. they also make noconcession to the other some In the data from theNew York City survey. we see transferring to evidence for the viewthat teachers may be recoil from a kind students their owninner conflicts; they of their own of behavior that isstill very much a part the student mayrightfully personalities. On the other hand, abolish com- . feel that the teacherthreatens him in trying to him as a member of pletely the speechpattern that identifies respects,-that awards his own group: thisis the group that he him prestige, thatestablishes his masculinity. values should te These comments suggestthat the conflict of investigated in the classroomitself. The foregoing remarks made in a community are merelyextrapolations from observations in which study, and they are based onthe least favorable caee, a male studentfaces a female teacher. 30 67

It should Ike stressed again that the teacheris dealing, not with corrupt and incorruptforms of the same language, but with basically differentforms which in effect constitutedifferent languages, and that nowhere isthis more true than in the caseof intrusions by the Negro English creole. Its very similaritx to the standard makes more difficultiesfor the student in switching,rather than fewer; as Irinar Haman wet "All scholars have agreed thatit

is harder to keep two similarlanguages apart than two verydifferent

31 languages."

The student who, with thishandicap, is trying to become bidialectal, must be expected to haveconsiderable difficulty with both phonological and grammaticalinterference, Gleason says,

stating that such students are strugglingagainst an "automatic

conformity" which is stronger than habitand which partakes of the

nature of instinct. Anyone who wants to teach these children a new 32 system must do it against thetmckground of the old, Gleason says.

The teacher must also anticipate that"The student wIth a system of

stress- and pitch-sequences different fromthose of the instructor wil:

proteldy have his peculiar problems ofword-division and punctuation,

or of avoiding linguistic sequenceswhich are clear as he says them

but ambiguous as he writes them . For such students the remedy

situations the problem of fit is. . . to recognize that in their

between speech and writing, never a simplematter for any speaker

of English, has specialcomPlications," according toNaavid.33 68

substandard structures Ito teacher'sinclination to sneer at

by a reminder that many -"crude"sal' "barbarous"may be lessened have been media for iimilar structuresexist in languages which

that "Latin and Russian "great literature. Leonard Bloomfield notes

Ivan durak, John is a omit the copula:peatus ille, happy is he;

in such structures fool;" and that French usesthe redundant pronoun

when is hecome?134 Russian as "Jean,quand estil venu?"--"Jean, Spanish and other also usually omitsthe article, while French, languages have thedouble negative.

Writing on the view ofgrammatical meaning taken bythe

Jakobson pioneering linguisticanthropologist Franz Boas, Roman

points out that "a paucityof obligatory aspectsdoes not by any be means implyobscurity of speech. When necessary, clarity can

obtained by adding explanatorywords."35Standard English is not

undignified because itsstructure--unlike that of Russianand the

gender must Romance languages, forinstancedoes not require that

be shown in saying, forexample, "I met a friend."By the same

token, Negro English is notbeneath contempt because ofits lack of

obligatory tense in verbs; the samephenomenon is exhibited by

Chinese and Burmese.

Finall,y, a study ofdialectology may be in itselfrichly

rewarding for the teacher."A familiarity with theprinciples and

findings of dialectology mckyyield an enriched understandingof the

complex cultural heritage weAmericans all enjoy, may demonstratein

dramatic fashion that One mgy bedifferent without beinginferior, 69 and thus leaefrom simplecuriosity through a moresophisticated understanding of languageto adeeper appreciation of thecomplexity

animal called man, for whom, and potentiality ofthis interesting 36 language is the mostpeculiar attribute," McDavid says.

While the nation'seducators wrestle as theyhave never wrestled before withthep'orblems of Negro dialect, it is worth .a smile to look badkat James A. Harrison, whoin 1892 urged the

dialeot "before it is American Dialect Societyto do research on the obliterated by the advancingschool-ma'am."37 to The advancing school-ma'amhas done remaAably little obliterate the Negro dialect, or anyother substandard form, from

feat the face of the earth inthe intervening seventy-five years: a

Labov, "that young that puzzles many. "Why is it," asks William people, who are exposed tothe Standard English oftheir teachers

for ten or twelve years,still cannot use this form ofspeech 'no matter how badly theyneed it? Why is it, Negroparents adk, that young Negropeople who are raised inthe North, of northern parents, 38 speak like southerners?"

Young white peoplehave a similar attachmentfor non-standard DartmosiA forms. Albert R. Kitshaber, inthe course of research at

College, found that "Sophomoresmade almost as many errors in their

writing afterayear and a halfof college as freshmen do aA the

beginning of English I and morethan freshmen make at the endof

English I. Seniors are worse thansophomores, having made more

I."39 errors in their papersthan freshmen do at the beginningof English 70

spelling,and punc- forms ingrammar, non-standard The freevie of * is amatter forsore theses inalldisciplines tuation intasters' ofLouisiana'sstate ora majordean at one concern onthe part been taught wishes hehimself had ruefUllythat he colleges;he adds haveavailed the schoolsseem to Grammarstudies in to writewell.

little ornot at all. affairs; similarstate of there is aremarkably In Iftgland National studies bythe British refers to aseries of Whitehead indicate thatlearning of English"which Associationof Teachers writtenwork."40 effect onchildren's grammarhas nobeneficial American ofEducationalResearch, According totheAncyclonedia mental. study doesnot provide have foundthat grammar investigators the writing, dossnot help increasefacility in discipline,does not aid inlearning&foreign literature,does not studentsunderstand 41 "The olditem- changelanguage usage. language, anddoes not of fruitless inthe face exercises wereparticularly correcting and "thenotiono'f habits,"McDavid says; establishedsystematic the oldhibits of speechanderadicating changimg awhole system intentions ofthe cruel factsthat the mould run upagainst the the practicesof bereinforced by teachersmould seldom Eliglish the of theplayground and alone theenvironment etherteachers, let

home."42 practiceswhich thegrammar-teaching To putit plainly, attending long as mostof thechildren seemed.to workadequately so (and hencenative were ofthe middleclass high schoolsand colleges 71 speakers of the standard dialect), or those witha strong motivation to become members of that class, are not effectivenow. The reason is not simple. Part of it is that the schools are burstingwith children of all classes. In the colleges and universities,some are from very poor families, and for these students higher educationhas been made possible usually by the government; someare sent by tlieir parents and are themselves indifferent; some are;sirlyavoiding the draft. Only in the first of these groups is there apt to bestrong motivation, but such students often have heavy initial handicaps not easily reduced when their classes and leisure hoursare abundantly supplied with other non-standard users of the language. There is also the fact that with our exploding technology; the wholenature of American education has changed; the liberal arts, instead ofper- vading every discipline, are firmly ensconced ina back seat.

It is encouraging that teachers are learning to avoid the old approach. San-su Lin, of the English Department at Southern

University, mentions the fact that the substandardusages characteristic in the Negro dialect are really notnumerous, a fact that makes grammar drills tempting as a solution to the problem;but this will not work, she sayr: if for no otherreason, because "parrot- like repetitions andaldiolingual drills day in and day outare hardly the kind of things they expect from college." She goes on to call mttention to one of the stumbling-blocks which must be taken into account in designing new procedures for inculcating standard Englishs

Furthermore, how do we krow that the student actualky hears the difference between his dialect and Standard English? The 72

answer to this question may sound unconvincing at first, but the truth is that a human being does not hear or see every sound or sight in the outside world. His senses are highly selective and he hears and sees only what is meaningftil to him. If the grammatical cmcepts of noun plural and verb tense do not exist in a student's dialect, it is not likely that he is aware of the sound segments that signify these con- cepts. According to our experience, a student simply did not see the s and ed endings printed in black andwhite when he was asked to read aloud a paragraph in thetextbook, and, after several months of practice with a tape recorder, we often found him conscientiously repeating "Johnny begin to read" when the model voice clearly said "Johnny begins to read."To plead with him to listen carefully was useless. Many instrudtors had done that and still complained of the inability of college students to follow simpleinstructions.g3

The student may have a markedly negative reaction to the kind

of item-correction that is endemic in many Ehglish classes, Stewart

says. "Uhless they are put within a general frameaork of systematic

comparison, corrections by the teacher of isolated bits oflinguistio

1

[ behavior are liable to be regarded by the nonstandard speaker as

capricious or arbitrary. At best, he may interpret this as evidence

of hostility on the part of the teacher," he warns. "At worst,he may

become uncertain about his language, and seriousmanifestations of

disfluency (such as stammering or unwillingness tospeak) mayresult."44

If the approach to the problem via conventional grammarstudy

is unprofitable, what does literature haveto offer?

I think that the purely linguistic side inthe teaching of [modern languages] seems in the way to.get more than its fitting share. I insist only that in our College courses this should be a separate study, and that, good asit is in itself, it should, in the scheme of generalinstruction, be restrained to its own function as the guide to somethingbetter. And thr something better is Literature. The blossoms of language bay certainly as much value as its roots, for if the roots secre food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the joyour consummation of that life is in the blossoms) whichalone the seeds that distribute and renew it in othergrowths. 7.

The speakeri.was James Russell Lowell, president of theModern Language

Association, which he was addressing; the year was1889.45His dictum

has been taken seriously by the academiccommunity for over three-

sr quarters of a century. It is Raven McDavid who turns the coin over

and shows us its modern side:

Perhaps the most important block in the wayof fully under- standing the proper position of linguisticsis that the teaching of language in our compartmentalizeduniversity curricula is almost exclusively done bydepartments of literatureEnglish, Romance, Germanic, Slavic and thelike. English grammar is taught as a tool to enablethe student to write acceptable literary essays; French orGerman or Russian grammar, as a tool to preparethe student for reading Les Miserables or Faust or Anna Karenina. These ends are not unworthy in themselves, but the emphasis uponthem in our academic system prevents students from realisingthat the command of a language is necessary not onlyfor facile reading and fluent conversation but for theundeutanding of the culture in which the language is spoken.40

It is interesting to note that thsre are manycolleges and

universities which include few, if any, linguistics coursesin their

Ehglish curricula this is Lowellism with a vengeance,when the

blossoms have no roots at all!But some English departments seem

slow to waken to the fact that there arscollege students now who do

not care if they never read AnnaKarenina, in Russian or in

translation, and who will probably neverread this booki-nor any of.

the other great classics of fiction. These are not stupid studentsl.

numbers of them have great facilityin reading in the literature of

mathematics, biology, physics and thelike on such a sophisticated

level that it would make their Englishteachers' heads swim. To be

sure, we have aneed--almost a desperate need--forthem to be familiar

with the core of the liberal artsand with the best that has been 74

thouc.ht on the great themes of life and death,good and evil, fateand free will, love and hate: with these thingsthat are at thevery center of the experience of all men, no matter howfar apart theyare in their fielas of professional interest. Leaving aside the greatbooks of religion, it ie in imaginative literature thatthese issuesare most

nearly approached. But though wemay lead the student to this water

of life, we cannot interest him in drinking itunless we havea respect for and some understanding of his own prospectivediscipline and of the

great literature of that discipline. Departments of literatureneed to broaden their scope if they are to reach the modernstudent.

Another regrettable phenomenonin literature classesie a

tendency actually to avoidthose many opportunitiesfor the teaohing of grammar which occur in connection with thestudy of belles lettrea.

The reasons are explainedby Gleason:

When classics are ,mnotated, vocabulary receivesthe lion's share. Grammar, by comparison,is neglected. Seldom a topic of discussion in literature classes, it isequally seldom the subject of annotations. The concentrationon prescriptive rules has made theapplication ofgrammar to accepted literary pieces both embarrassing and presumptuousand has hiddenany possible relevance ofgrammar instruction to reading. Reference grammars havinga role comparable to that of dictionaries are unheard of.

Yet grammatical problemsare present in all the literaryr4eces commonly read in the schools,and acute insome. Writers are no less likely to usea construction unfamiliar toa high school, student than theyare to use a word he will notknow. Other things being equal, theotrange construction'ismore of a prob lem, since we do not havethe same flexibilityin grammar as in vocabulary.47

It seems to be hard forthe average instructorin literature to

adknowledge to his clatsesthat Jane Austen said"ain'tu4 that Conrad used "he don't"1 that Faulkner wrote sentenceslike Chinese boxes; that 75 on almlst any page of agreat work will be found somedeparture from , the standard. Instead of pretending that he does notnotice, he might

at least say: "Ah, but they wereAreat--not standard!" But if he is

perceptive, he can .do better thanthis; literature is studded with

phenomena which illustrate the many waysin which the language can

be used, and is used, andwhich create occasions forexplaining the

underlying rationale of this fletibilityand diversity.

Where else may the instructorlook for effective means?Two

rumblings on the academic horizondisturb the English teacher of

today. One is the still rather quietthunder of the New Grammar;

which--as did the New Mathematicsof a few years ago--threatensto

send everyone back to school:supervisors, teachers, parents,

textbook writers, everyone. The other is what many thinkof as the

new permissiveness,which some regard with the sameuneasiness they

bring to minimal art and the miniskirt. Indeed, it appears to be a

sort of mini grammar; but tothe leading linguists of the day,it is

simply an effort to get grammarback on the right track whenceit

departed in the 1700's.

One 16th-century writerwho had an unclouded view ofthe

situation was John Locke,who, i- his Etsay on HumanUnderstanding,

wrote: "Whatever be the consequencesof any man's using words

differently, either from theirgeneral meaning or the particular

sense of the personto whom he addressesthem, this is certain, their

signification, in his use of them,is limited to his ideas,and they

quotes Looks can be signs ofnothing else."Sterling Andrus Leonard 76 in his book The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, 112271800 and goes on to say:

Locke, followed by Berkeley and Hume, is sharply contrasted with the usual conceptions of language in the eighteenth century. Locke presented with special clarity the idea that language is an affair of compact or convention; that.it has no inherently necessary form or any correspondence with reality; that words and forms can mean nothing whatever but what they are actually understood to mean; in short, that usage is the sole arbiter and. norm. Hence, he continued, the only safety in discussion is a common understanding as to meaning and an intelligible agreement as to forms. Here was material to .demolish completely all view of what words "ought to mean" or what any form or construction "ought tobe.n48

The grammarians somehow managed to convince many of the English-- speaking people that there is something immutable about the "rules" of grammar, just as there is something immutableabout the rules of mathematics. But the fact is that while two plus two does not on occasion equal ftve, and cannot be made to equal five; and that while the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°, and cannot be changed to

2300or to 61° to unit thefancy of the populace; thegrammatical "rule" that a third person singular subject takes an ielected form of the verb in the present tense, may be changed on human whim to an equally valid rule that a third person singularsubject takesan uninflected form of the verb in the present tense. In other words, the poker players may start playing bourre any time.

The "rules" of grammar, then, are conventions; they are manners.

In India at one time it was thecuitom of a widow to burn herself alive

on the funeral pyre of her husband; Americanwidows in the not remote

past wore black for a full year (as Spanish widows stilldo) and were

not allowed to wear diamonds while in heavy mourning,though pearls were permitted after six months. Tb be sure, there are some who still observe these customs, but they are as archaic as the useof "thee" and

"thou."The "test" grammatical usage iscaified after a fashion in . handbooks of grammar, and helpful they are, indeed; but thebest usage

is no more fixed than the "best"etiquette as codified in the also

helpful works of Emily Post or Amy Vanderbilt,and both kinds of works

have a wa/ of being.out of date before they areoff the press.Good

usage can be reliablyascertained only by a continuous process of

observacion; and when that usage changes, the grammarbooks have no

more success in calling"halt" than had King Canute in giving his

instructions to the.sea.

The message for the teacher is not totry to impose a standard

from a rule book which is notreflected in the standard of cultivated

members of the community in which thestudent lives. "If a student

makes a 'mistake' which does no morethan offend against one of his

teacher's favorite 'rules,' the 'mistake' is not a serious one in

!tself, and the wise teacher would notmark it so," R. A. Close

advises. "The safest rule one can'offer tostudents of English is

this: Follow the facts of accepted usage,and face the fact that pre

ordained and readymide rules forEnglish grammatical usage just do

not exist. What we think of as rules aresometimes nothing but O taboos passed on by one generation ofpedagogues toanother."A

The same observation appliesto speech. "We must avoid

thinking that there is some one regionwhere the 'best' Ehglisb,is

spoken, and particularly that thatregion is the one-in whichwe

1 78

ourselves live.We must not think that the Ehglish of Londonor Oxford,

or Boston or Philadelphia, is the norm by which all other speech must be

judged, and that in whatever respects other speech differs from this norm it is inferior. Good English is the usage--sometimes the divided usage--of cultivated people in that part of the English-

speaking world in which one happens to be,"says Albert Baugh in his

Wistory, of the English Lanffuage.5° The "new permissiveness," in sum,

is merely a recognition of the fact thatusage, not a rule book, always has established the forms of the language, and always will.

Instead of relying wholly on written grammars, the pedagogues will do well to keep their eyes and ears open and recognise the facts of linguistic life.

As for the New Grammar, the more serious scholars in the field

feel that it is not yet ready for use in the classroom because of the somewhat fluid state of its vocabulary and the fact that there is disagreement among the transformational generative grammariansas to various other details. However, the alert classroom-teacher (and most classroom teachers are both devoted and alert) is always ready to

seise on any new teaching device which seems to have possibilities,

and transformational- generaLive grammar, with its equation-like

formulae sateongenial to today's science-minded young people, is such a device. It is interesting to note in this connection 412at the

December14267, tame of The Instructor has very attractive articles ay two Tiorctiving transformational methods for teaching children ; la the primary grades. 79

Another avenue'with oonsiderable ProlimillOWSti the student who is seriously handicapped by aindolWindliArdieleot is that of teaching standard English as a foreign laws.. ihe idea is reasonably venerable, though it has been in the public eye only ih quite recent years. Charles Fries suggested it as moires1927;3/

Thomas A. !matt advised it in 1934, when he said "Bdhstandard students are not 'making mistakes.' They are simply talking or 52 writing in their own language."

Recently there have been qualms as to the precise nomenclature that should be used for the suggested procedure. Narckwardt calls for a term that is "accurate and at the same time nonpejorative."53

NoDavid points out that the Important thing is simply the use of the successful techniques developed for teaching foreign languages.54

Bingen reminds that a foundation must be laid before these techniques can be meaningfely applied. "The linguist's task," he says, *will be that of making a realistic description of the two dialects, of establishing a differential analysis of their systematic deviation in sound, grammar, and lexicon; of these, the grammar is the hardest' and the mostimportant."55

Of all the many procedures that can be used in the classroom, perhaps the most practical starting point for the Negro student who needs help in increasing his fluency in the standard dialect is through a writing approach.Basic to this thought is the fact that the written language, an implied in the first chapter, is itselfa sort of "foreign" language, in that it is a different language. It is easily so 00 presented to the student. Nelson Francis says:

If the standaris ofwritten English which his teacher is attepting to instruct [thestudent] in are presented az andther dialectthe common dialect of educated parsonswho writehe will,be able to see that it ispossible for him to -master that dialect and thus becomealio:Nor of the guild of the educated without eradicating the otherdialects in which he conducts the affairs of his everydaylife. Above all, he can be trained in standardwritten Nnglish without being made ashamed or self-conscious about hisnative speech. .56

Bloomfield has said that 'Mien the artOf writing becomes well-established in a:community, not only thespellinis of words, but even lexical and grammatical forms becomeconventional for written records. In this way, a literary, dialect may become established and.obligatory for written records,regardless of the writer's actualdialect."57

Standard written English, then, can be taught to theNegro student as his second language because it is a secondlanguage to everyone; and this can be done withOutelaborate preparations and without ill-thought-out tampering with his spokendialect.

Like every skilllexprossing oneself in writingLisbest acquired through practice. One very simple method- forincreasing writing practice for the student without buryingtheinstruotor in a storm of papers has been described by Edgar Madden,chairman of the

Department of Inglish at Northwood Institute. The crux of Madden's approachactually devised to increase student involvement and participationis that during lectures, when a question is asked by the instructor, he then asks the whole class to write the answer. beveral students are called upon to read what they have written; all ei

have.had the writing experience, all have the dpportunity to compare

their own written work with that of others. In comments by the

instructor on the answers that are read aloud, emphasis is on the

quality of the expression of the idea, not on the structural quality

of the writing. Madden says that a student will often clserv on

his own that the idea might have been expreisid.moteplearly by' using

a differentstruoture.58

This is amethod that can be put into pfactice in.any class-

room, from third grade to college and in between..it ii something

that any teacher--in any discipline--can undertake, if he hasan.

interest in doing so. It requires no apparatus other than an

abundant supply of paper for the children, and this,sorry to relate,

is not always possitae in the'poorer areas. The procedure can only

help the student in all his work by constintly expanding hisability

to put his thoughts into wards; and it is aimed right at the healit of

the Negro student's greatest difficulty in the formerly all-white

Southern college, where it is his written work, rathfor.than his

speech, that in so many cases lowers his marks.

It has teen said that "the problems of tettohing language, in order of their importance, are (a) having something tosay; (b) having a valid reason forsayingit; and (o) having the skill with which to say it." Current educational research demonstrates that "language instruction it; best accomplished if a student id constantlyplaced in situations where he needs to communicate with othersthrough writing or speaking," and that "children coming from a program rich in writing experiences with a minimum of grammatical drill succeededbetter in A

82

writing."59 oellege than Oid students who hadhad much gramOar andlittle

it starts by giving The Madden metheiaparticularly promising because

saying it.But . the studentsmiething to say and a valid reason for whatever method is ustA, a writingapproach to the grammaticalproblems

thought :1 of any substandard student is most aptto be effective, and a 1

should be approach is essential. The teaching of rules of grammar

inoidental to teaching the studenthow to write clear, simple,

meaningful prose. writing, the In addition to constantand meaningful practice in

student needs, as Francis hass.aid, confidence in his knowledge of his so native tongue, which isactually extenstve. Moot vitally.of all, he 61 and needs motivation; this hasbeen emphasised by Carl 0. P.Fransen 62 Charles Carpenter Fries, amongmany others.Success in learning

another dialect depends not only onthe will to succeed, but,

according to Einar Haugen, on aliking and admiration for thespeakers

of that dialect.

It ix Haugen's that is perhapsthe hardest chagenge of all.

It is encouraging to beable to say that the English facultyat

Northwestern State College hasaccepted the Negro student withcourtesy,

good will, and a full senseof the responsibility entailedand the

challenges to be met. 83

,ClaPTER IV .

CULLOM AND AN OPPORTUNITY FOR NORTHWESTERN STATE COLLEGE

With the increasing influx of colored students into formerly all-white schools, theprobeemsof the English teacher-multiply, for many of these students have a dialect which is substantially different from that used by the majority of the whitcstudents. *The nature of this difference is a matter for research in every individual region, almost in every community.

In the South, as in other areas where there are large Negro populations--for example, in the islands of the Cariboean--the Negro creole languages, whether Negro English, Negro Spanish, or Negro

French, have in common certain characteristics which cannot be wholly sttributed to cultural isolation or to a paucity of e4ucation.

Scholars differ as to the nource of these characteristics, many having ignored the work of Lorenzo Dow Turner on the African languages and the Oullah creole, and the work of such men as anthropologist Douglas Taylor on the creole languagesof the West

Indies.

TUrner found that the Oullah language has certain.structural similarities to the languages of West Africa, whence most of the slaves were brought to this country. In order to test whether these structural characteristics are also to be found in the Negro English of Natchitoches Parish, 355 papers written by colored junior and senior students in Parish high schools were analyzed; another 355 papers written by white junior and senior students in Parish high schools were used as controls. 84 411.

Results obtained in thisstudy seem to indicate thatthere is

This ii definite Ullman substructurein4thoJocal Negro dialect.. _. 1P substructure is bothmasked ind reinforced by three similar

influencesat'milikupon the language:(1) the influence of survivals .4, ,-., r,, ,.., , of archaic forms from17th-century and' earlier English;(2) the

4. simplifications of the pidgin Englishwhich was the first English

dialect learned by the slaves;and (3) the normal simplificationsof

the language which are to be foundin any folk'speech.

The study shows that ninety-fivepercent of the Negrostudents

are affected bythese factors, av compared to fifty-eightpercent of

the white students. A small study of papers written in acommunity

where no Negroes have eves 'livedindicates that Negro English may .

have had a perceptible effect on thestructure of the dialect used

by white people where there arelarge Negro populations. Studies by

Turner, Pardoe and others also suggestthat the typical Southern

phonology has been influenced by the phonologyof the African

peoples. A familiarity with the history of theEnglish language

indicates that some of these simpler formsused by the Negrostudints

may ultimately beadopted into the standard dialect.

In the meanwhile it is essential forthe schools to give these

students mastery of the standard dialect, notonly to enable them to

compete in the classroom and in the labormarket, but also for the

sake of the nation, already experiencing a severeshortage of skilled

workers.

If the schools are to cope withthis problem, it is obvious

not only that a great deal of research must bedone, but also that 85

understandings must be acquired. One is that many newattitudes and \ Negroes and whiteswill at communicationkin theclassroom between

period in which thetwo races best be difficultafter such a long Another is that have lived as neighborsbut in differentworlds.

medium of communicationtbut Negro English isnot an inefficient fgan standard rather the reverse; in someways it is moreefficient English or any othersub- English. A third is thatthe use of Negro intelligence or the moral standard dialect tellsnothing about the of those years ofpoverty calibre of the speaker,though it may tell front the of which it is often onesymptom. While on the national attack poverty is beingattacked, it is the workof the schools to

the symptom.

The N'egro who now usesNegro English needs tobe at least

citizen of our complex bidialectal to take hisplace as a responsible

dangers and difficultiesin civilization. However, there are certain the attempting to tamper withhis language. For one thing, it is

important to him to remain a language of his ownsociety, and it is attempts are often viewed, part of that society. For another, such of his masculinity; by the male student as apotential undermining high school level wouldbe there are indicationsthat .42glish at the thssubject more effectivelytaught by men.While the literature on for the male studer mentions only thedesirability of this situation better with girls as well, it is submitted thatthis would also work than to please a since a girl is usually moreeager to please a mau

member of her own sex. 86

Very little has been accomplished in the school room in the

last century fo eliminate Neiro lhglish or any other substandard

dialect. In the faoe ofAhis unpalatable fact, is obvious that

new approaches mustbe made. This stub, points to eight steps which:

might be taken toward the improvement of English teaching in 'the

schools.

1. Teachers Uust be aware of the linguistic learning processf.

that the student's badio gran:pie hie language, which is on almost ai

instinotua1 level, is learned outside the classroom from his perinea-

and his peer:, and principally from the latter.The fundamentals ars,%

aoquired before he enters school.

2. Negro Phglisiand.other dialects must be recognised and

respepted. roritioai, scornfUl, or moralistic attitude On iho part

of the instrUctor serves cily'to stiffen the student's resistance io

change. It is difieroncet,Imot supsrioiity or iferiority, that muts*'

be emphasised. Nee'ke teadhersme, need to recognite the fact that,

often suboonsoiously, they themselves at times ussisubstandard forms

in casual speech; and that ths negro, of their linguilitic snobbery

apt to be simply a reflection of their own middle class origin and

*precarious" social status. The Negro student will fiid dialect

switching 644,044 difficult, partly because of that instinctual

pressure mentioned aboveuand partly because of the Similarity between

Negro English end standard English. A comparattve study of the

structuie of o$her languages reveals, however, that.thereis nothing

"crude" or "barbarous* about tho African struovures whichare still

!mind in Negro Ingliih. Any dialect, moreover,,is worthy of stud,. 87

3. The traditional grammar approach must be abandoned as ineffective. Teaching must te in terms of systems, not items. Item corrections and grammatical drills are particularly futile, and to the student mg seem baffling or inimical, or may even be crippling.

Instructors must be aware that the student with a large dialeotal handicap often does not see or hear differemes between his own dialect and the standard forms: that such differences may be normal,

out. This at times happens to the instructors themselves.

4. Where dialect problems are great, the Departments of

Engliehlkust expand their offerings in linguistic studies. Also,

curricula in literature must be revised to stress materials more

germane to the interests of the modern student. Readings in the

classic literature of other disciplines would be to the point, as

woUldcourses in the literature of the Neve. The rich opportunities

for grammar teaching presented by literature, now often actually

avoided beosuse of the embarrassing tendenoy of the greatest author:

taithely to ignore the commandments of the prescriptive grammarians,

should be seised upon.

5. Instead of shying away from what they think of as "the hal

permissiveness," teaching staffs should scuttle their sometimes

arohaio approach,to grammar and recognise the criterion of usage.

Usage alwaywhas controlledind always will control the developmiht

of the language and determine what it actually "correct" and what bie

"incorrect" at any given tiie and under aw given circumstance*. The

question', is one of manners, not morels; of dustome, not of natural

laws. 88

6. The work of the traneformational zenerative grammarians appears to hold promise as an especially useful device for teaching students to become bidialectal, partly because-it gives effective and scientific means of descritdng aeparate language systems. These means are particularly congenial to today's science-minded young people.

Courses th linguistics which introduce the work of the transformation- alists should be made availatae to all present and prospective teachers of English. (It should be remarked here that sucha course is available at Northwestern State College, and that the library has extensive collections on linguistics in general and on the teaching of Nnglish as a second language. Materials on dialectology and on teaching English to the disadvantaged could profitably be supplemented4

7. ThesuccessfUl methods developed in teaching English as a

foreign language should be used in teaching standard English as a second dialect.

8. Since writing is a second language for everyone, a, writing approach has special relevance as an immediate expedient in helping

the regro student.The Madden method is one among many possibilities along these lines and has the advantages of being inexpenetwe, easy to use, and applicable at any level and in any discipline.

Whatever methods are used must rely on a thought approach. Th

student must be given skill in swing something meaningfUll not in

saying nothing "correctly." The goal of any program must be teaching

students to express ideas which are significant to them in clear,

simple, effective prose. 89

Three'psychological factors are involved. First, the student must be given confidence in his knowledgeof his language, which is actually extensive. Second, he must be stronglymotivated to acquire standard English, or anyefforts along those lines will be fruitless. Third, liking and admirationfor those who use the standard dialect are among thebest sources of such motivation.

Northwestern State College has anopportunity to lead the wog

in this field, possiblythrough augmenting the NorthwestLouisiana

Supplementary Education Center, whichat present is working with the

public schools in thirty parishesin the fields of mathematics,

science, conservation, and outdoorrecreation. The development of

a Language ArtsCenter under the aegis of the Center is oneof the

possibilities. Studies to be undertaken by suchabranch should

include area,by-area research indialects; comparisons of written

forms with speech forms of both whiteawl colored students;

investigations of the backgrounl of Negrostudents who have the

standard dialect, with a view todetermining how this was achieved;

correlations of the kind of writingdone by Negro students with the

amount and kind of instruction;and comparisons of white dialectsin

areas wherethere are no Negroes with whitedialects in areas with* all large colored populations. Institutes for teachers of English at

levels would be indicated. The Center should also developinstruo-

tional materials for thecolleges and universities inthe are, as

well as for the elementaryand high schools.

Finally, it is suggested thatthe Negro English teachers now

preparing to seek theMaster's degree be encouragedto work in

linguistics. FOOTNOTES

CRAFTER I

tWalterLedet, Registrar of Northwestern StateCollege; telephone conversation, December 12, 1967. 2 Mrs. Lavinia McNeely, State Supervisorof English and the Language Arts; letter, November 9, 1967.

3 Joe Gray Taylor,am Darlain Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1963),P. 3.

4Actsof Louisiana 182940-31-32 (Donaldsonville, 1830),p. 96. 5 Charles Barthelemy Rousseve, The Negro,in Louisiana (New Orleans, 1937)9P. .42. 6 Rousseve, p. 127.

7 C. C. Graham, Superintendent of NatchitochesParish Schools; telephone conversation, December 11, 1967. 8 Estimated from figures in Fifteenth Censusof the United States, ing.: population, III, part 1,, LeonE. Truesdell, ed. (iishington, 1932), 982.

9W.T. Couch, "The Negro," in Culture in theSouth (New Orleans, 1937), P. 459. 10 C. C. Graham.

11 C. C. Graham

1 2JimL. Knotts, Director of Adult Education,Louisiana State Department of Education, "State EducationDepartment Launches Attack on Illiteracy," The Boardman, official journal of theLouisiana State School Board Association, XX, No. 1 (September 1965),1. 13 county and gib:Meta Book, ma, Edwin D.Goldfield, ed. (Washington, 1967),p. 161. 142r . Charles Thomaq, Dean of Administration,Northwestern State College; telephone conversation, December 12, 1967. 15 C. C. Graham.

16 Office of J. E. Stewart, Parish Welfare Director;telephone conversation, December 12, 1967. 91

17County. and utt Data Book, 1967, pp. 152, 153.

18 F0r t940 figures, see 01:19.1 County Datame, 1 ?orris B. Ullman, ed. (Washington,1950), p. 169. For 1950 see Citz ad County Alla Book,122, Morris B. Ullman, ed. (Washington, 1953), p. 211. For 1960 figures, seegutEst Data Book, 1VJP, pp. 152 and 153.

19"The Language Behavior of Negroes andWhites," Pacific Sociologic4 Review, IV (Fall1961), 72. The underscoring has been added for emphasis.

2°"Negro English," AWAR, VII (18841232-279.

21"The Speech of Negroes in ColonialAmerica," Journalor Negro History, XXIV(July, 1939), 247.

22"The English of the Negro," AmericanSpeech, II (June, 1924), 190-191.

23The Relation of the Alabama-GeorgiaDialect 11 the Provincial Dialects al:GreatBritainTiaton Rouge), p. 64.

240rbis,IX (January, 1960), 10. 25 Unpub. dies. (Louisiana StateUniversity), p. vi. Raven. McDavid, now ldrector of the Atlas, saysthat contributions are now being elicited from Negro informants inMaryland, North and South Carolina, and New England, though the resourcesof the Atlas are not adequate for complete parallels of Negroand white informants. Also, a Louisiana Negroscholar, Melvin BUtler, is working on adissertation on Negro speech inLouisiana at the University of Michigan,using older Negro informants. 26 Ann Arbor, 1949, p. 6. 27 Melvin Butler, University ofMichigan; letter, November 22, 1967. 28 "Southern American Dialect,"American Speech, VII(April 1933), 43;

29"SocialHistory of the Negro,"AHandbook of Social psycholoa, C. A. Murchison, ed.,(Worcester, Mass., 1335),7 257.

3 Historical and Phonetic Study of NegroDialect," unputaished dissertation(1937).

31Pardo., pp. 1, 248,-149.The underscoring has beenadded fOr emphasis. 32 New York, p. 280.

33New York, p. 189. 4.4

92

34chicago,1949

35American Speech, XXVI (Februav 1951), 3-17.

36" New Languages for Old in the West Indies," Comparative Studies 'in Social History, III, No. 3 (1961), 277-278. The underscoring has been addcd for emphasis. See also Taylor's "The Origin of West African Creole Languages: Evidence from Grammatical Categories," American Anthropologist, LXVINo. 4 (August 1963), 800-814.

37Ithaca, N.Y., p. 15.

38NewYork, p. 45.

39EnglishSyntax, Teacher's Guide edition (New York, 1964), Teacher's Guide section, p. 12.

40H. A. Gleason, Jr., Linuistics and English Grammar (New York, 1965), p. 83. This book will be referred to in subsequent notei simply as Linguistics.

41The Structure of American Equalk (New York, 1958), p. 36.

42Teacher'sGuide, p. 16.

43Linguistics, p. 171. Those who have not ventured into the thickets of the New Grammar might want to know thaI the word "prosody," which once usually signified the technique of verse writing, is now being used to express those aspects of language which include proxemics (distance), attitude, and the suprasegmentals in general.

44"Spoken and Written Expression: An Ekperimental Analysis," Journal of Abstract and Social PsycholOgy, LVIII, No. 6 (1964), Z-7-44740, abstracted in Psychological Abstracts, XXXIX (February 1965), 180.

45"The Neglected Situation," in The Ethnography of Communication John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., American Anthropologist, LAWI, No. 6, part 2, special publication (December 1964), 136.

46H. L. Mencken, The American Language, Raven.I. McDavid, Jr., ed., (New York, 1963) n., p. 478.

47Linguistics, p. 369

48"TheFactor of Purpose in Grammar Teaching," English La.jar Teaching: English, as a Foreign or Second Language, XXI, No. 1 (0°- 1966), 44. 93

CHATER.P II

1See Taylor, "New Languages for Old in the WestlIndies," in which he quotes early French missionaries as saying thsy made such structural adjustments, and gives significant examples. It is also highly significant that Charles A. Ferguson of the Center for Applied Linguistics defines "pidgin" as "A hybrid language which combines the lexical stock of one language with the grammatical structure of another language or group of languages." This dfinition appearsin his paper, "National Sociolinguistic Profile Formulas," in Sociolinguistics, William Bright, ed. (The Hague, 1966), p. 311. This valuatae source, comprising the proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference held in 1964, was received from the library of the University of California at Los Angeles too late to be generally included in this study.

2Africanismsin the Gullah Dialect, Chapters IV and V, pp. 209431.

3Pidgin and Creole, Lemmagsb p. xii.

4pidaand Creole, Languages, I). xii.

5TheDoctrine of ,Correctness inEnglish atft17604800 (New York, 1962); p. 236. 6 Quotedin -Anericask ,kLiterature,Jaw Hubbell ad_ (New York, 1936), p. 297.

7"The !Inglis& of tho Negro," p. 192.

8"01d,!hay and Elisabethan English in the Southern Mountains," pialeoi, Notes, IV, Part 4.(1916), 284-293.

9"SouthernMountain Dialect," unpublished.

10 11ew Yozt, 1958I.PP.147,484

11 Raven Mc:David, "Historical, Regional and Social Variation'," Journal of English Linguistics, I (March 1967), 35.

CHAPTER III

1Henry Lewis Mencken, The American Language, 4th ed.(NewYork, 1936), p. 345; Kencken attributet the classification to Sterling Andrus Leonard and H. Y. Moffett.

2 "Dialect Areas, Settlement Areas and Culture Areas inthe U.S.," .The Cultural Approach, to Migilm, Caroline F. Ware,ed., (New York, 1940)9 R. 334. 3"Senseand Nonsense about American Dialects," LXXXI, No. 2 (May 1966), 10.

4 The Structure of American Ehglish, p. 45.

5"TaxonomicStructure and the Pursuit of Meaning," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, XXI, No. 3 (1965), 267.

4Linguistics,"NEA Journal, LIV, No. ) (January 1965), 53.

7Linmistics,p. 371.

8 "Review of the Confereuce," Social Dialects and Language Learning, Roger Shuy, ed., Proceedings of the Bloomington, Indiana, Conference, 1964 (Champaign, Ill., 1964), p. 156. This booklet will subsequently be referred to only as Social Dialects.

9 "Dialect Geography and Social Science Problems," Social Forces, XXV (December 1944 169.

10 "On the Language of Lower Class Children," School Review, LXVI, No. 4 (Winter, 1959), 436.

11 "Vertel Comprehension and Communication in Negro and White Children," JoUrnal of Educational Psychology, LI, No. 2 (April, 1964 47.- 12 "Future Research: Implications growing out of the Wilmington Stuay," Social Dialects, p. 137.

13 "American Social Dialects," College Ehglish, XXVI, No, 4 (January, 1965), 260.

14 Quoted by Clyde kluckhohn in "Notes on Some Anthropological Aspects of Communication," American Anthropologist, LXIII, No. 5, Part 1 (October, 1961), 899.

15"Correctness,Rules and EXplanations," English Language Teachiag, XVIII, No. 2 (January, 1964), 54.

16 Ithaca, N.Y., 1950, p. 236. In paperbadk, Anchor Books (Garden City, N. Y., 1960).

17 Quoted in American Life in Literature, p. 477.

18 In Encounter with the Future (New York, 1965), pp. 13-37.

19"VerbalDestitution: the Pivotal Barrier to Learning," Journal of lbact Education, XXIX, No. 4 (nil, 1960)1 499.

:6 "Stages in the Aovisition of Standardanglish,N gogia ; Dialeote,

21 "Bilingualism and Bidialectism,"iocial 2121221.0pl. 126. ,

22 "Language Understanding Could Neredita'ry,"Science Intl Letter, Deofmber 1, 1962, p. 352.

23"1PoreignLanguage Teaching Methods in Quasi-ForeignLanguage.

Situations," Language Information Series, II,Center for Applied , Linguistia (1964), 1.

24"Stages in the Acquisition of Standard English," pp. 91-92."

. 25_itor's phoice--You Couldn't Do Woise, reprintedfrom th6 1120111Migimaigg3) by 0.-C. Merriam Co. (Springfield,lass.), p.4.

26"FdreignLanguage Teiching Methods," pp. 13-14.

27 "Sta806," p. 98.

28 The DisappearingDLLs (London, 1966), ;4 208.

29"TheTwenty Billion Dollar Misunderstanding,"122114,Dimleots, p 13.

30 "Stamm," p. 94.The underscoring has been added foremphaias.

31"Bilingualism," p. 125.

32nuiatice,PP. 02, 349, 373.

33"Dialectology.and the Claesroom.Teacher," College English, my, No. 2 (November,1961), 115415

4. 34aLagmal (New York, 1933), pp: 172, 186.

35"Boas' View of Grammatical Meaning,"American Anthronolocisti Memoir No. 89, Supplement(October, 1959), 140.

36 "Ilialootology and the ClassroomTeacher," p. 116.

37"Negro English," Modern LanguageNotes, VII, No. 2 (February, 1892), 123.

30"stave," p. 78.

'39 Thane 1121$23:SOLIMEIBL:the NISNAMIST Writing in,Collime (New York, 1 3 , p. 109. 40The Disappearingalb p. 222.

41Chipper 11. Harrisf ed., third edition(New Urk,.1960), p. 461.

42"AmerioanSooial Dialects," p. 257.

43"PatternPractice in a Freshman inglish Progtam," &gig Dialects' pp. 57, 58.

44"UrbanNegro Speech: Sociollnguistio Paotors Affecting lhgliah Teaohing,"-Social Dialects, p.

45211LijV (1890), 21.

46"DialeotGeography and Socia Solana*Pr'oblbmsei >30tio No. 2 (Deoember; 1946), 168. .1. °Linguistics,p. 477.:

48p.23.

505eoond-edition(NewYork, 1963), p. 403. :1, 1927), P. 144. 2 5Quoted in v. AmerioanIminuatfourth edition, P.'344.

53"Review,"p. 152.

54"SooialDialects: Cause or Symptom.of Social Maladjustment," agke.D.ialects, p. 9.

55"Dilingualism,"p. 125.

561iheStructure of Amerioa4;h4lish, p. 567.The itidersooring has been added for emphasis.

57,1gaglage,p. 291. The underscoring has been added for emphasis.

58111flheParticipation Lecture," mujahajArimAgui, 1110041 Ocitair 1967), 26.

59111tcyolopedia It Education Ressar4h, p. 462.

60D.1Structure, g American "palish, p. 567. 61Quoted inlidMirisi lenstatfonith 62 Zughlaikt Sit P041 146, 15Io's' 63ItutninaiiseiP. 105.

;

1 'A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barth, &post A. T. "The LanguageBehavior of Negroes and Whites,"

pulp Sociological Review, IV, No. 2 (Fall 1961), 69-72. ; .

Baugh,Albrt Croll. A Mistory of the English Language, secondedition. No4 York, 1963.

Bloomfield, Leonard. Language. NewYork, 1933.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Relation of theAlabama,Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialeots of Great Britain. BatonRouge, 1935.

.Careon, Arnold S., and A. I. Rabin."Verbal Comprehension and Communication in Negro are White Children,"Journal of Educational psychology, LI, No. 2(April, 19615), 77-51.

Close, R. A. "Correctness, Rules andEkplanations," English Language, Teaching, XVIII, No. 2(January, 1964)9 51-58.

Cohn, Werner. "On the Language of Lower ClassSchool Children," School Review, LXVII, No. 4 (Winter, 1959), 435440.

Combs, J. H. "Old, Early and ElizabethanEnglish in the Southern Mountains," Dialect Notes, rv, Part 4(1916), 281497.

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Folk, Mary Lucile Pierce. "A Word Atlas ofNorth Louisiana." Unpublished doctoral diésertation, Louisiana State University,1961.

Francis, Winthrop Nelson. The Structureof American English. New York, 1958.

Fries, Charles C. The Teaching.of theEnglish Langfiage. New York,1927.

Gleason, F. A., Jr. Linguistics and EnglishGrammar. New York, 1965.

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Hall, Robert A., Jr. Leave Your Language Alone. NewYork, 19504 Reprinted in paperback as Linguistics and Your Languaa. Anchor Books, Garden City, La., 1960.

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IPPRIMIX

written by It might be notedhere that several groups of papers

written by white the colored students andat least one group of papers This students gave evidenceof having been rewritten and"corrected."

rather to Ski thought not toaffeot the results of the study, but enhance it, sincethe structural variations sought forappeared about as often in these papersas in theothers. This emphasises what has been stated in the preceding pagesto the effect tnat it is veryhard for apeman with aninstinctive structure to notice, evenunder pressure, that it isnot the standard.

The following examples aregtven in the categories used inthe

of tables. The numbers at the left ofeach example are the numbers the individual papers.

NOUNS

1. .Uninflected: singularfor .plural.

E30: My parent and I live onX street along:withwrthree sister R37: I-take trips, work, goplace X40:. I like so[me] of myteacher F15: I have 5 brother and 2sister F22: My mother and father arethe parent of nine children 1,36: One of my brother attends school R11: /Uring the summermonth 1(39: The way thing aregoing I 1: a citizen of the UnitedState 1101 I apply for all the jobthat I oan

2. Overinflected

On: I am a seniors at X school 034: Whereleoples can reallylearn 035: take up a subjects 110: a percents of it £29: My mother names is 1126: My father is with the ICSrailroads C 4: I am a juniors inibhool P 3: My plans is to go tocolleg 1(31: Before I was 1 years old [a very common use.] 103

3. Uninflected genitive

E32: My father name is F14: go to my friend house 015: a grown woman place 1111: wearingeach other clothes H14: I don't want to work in anywhite people house 1121: My father occupation A31: My mother is a teacher aide C11: She is a nurse aide C36: My sister wedding C37: He deliveries envelopesto some of Houston important companies

Other overinflected forms included(1114 and others) the plural "childrens" and (1137 and others) "the secondgraded."

ADJECTIVES

F 4: The lessons were much easy[i.e., easier] F 5: It is the most durtyes lookshool in Natchitoches[dirtiest looking] F 6: I want to set,me up and intelligencenight club F26: my olds brother[oldest] F37: I have four honeremebrothers F38: I was left hand G 8: the badest part of my life G15: It was very enjoying G24: My mother is the most wonderfUlistmother in the world 034: I like to go to differents states 035: My brothers are interesting in us H27: more nicer H34: He is vyry boss and fussie 110: Father is decease Ill: nine yearkolds

Notice that in many of theseinstances,Ate stated in the body of the paper, the difficulty iswith participial adjectives. Also notice (034, I11) the tendency to overinflect.

ADvERBS

1:34: Sometime I have asmall job F 8: In class I wauldpractice to read and writesometime F14: I always did want to fly everysince I was a b10.7 F25: Every since I wassmall 034: learn all I possible can 1121: I usual sit around thehouse 1125: and live happy 104

PRONOUNS

P 9: Some of the thing what I don't like are 729: I'm gaining the many things which will aid my in my future life 740: I have two sisters which are older[Most common with both races] 030: Them are very nice 034: enjoy theirselves H 1: a brother Ind sister which H 7: a man what I think I will be happy with 1112: They have they up and downs 1137: My mother he

ARTICLES: omission of the indefinite article

P33: sitting through long, boring lecture P38: settling down with husband 1131: I was very short little baby 1138: It is very large school 1140: My parents lived on farm D24: to become welder 117: My grandmother is *ypical sort of grandmother 235: I want to work at hospital 312: He has friendly personality 111 5: He always didn't like bath

1 VERBS . 1 1. Overinflected: use of third singular form for first singular or for plural. (There would be no occasion in an autobiograp)y to use this form with singular "you") P 7: I attends high school F34: I loves to go to school 022: They also tries to help someone when they needs help 033: They is so nice H 1: I plans to attend college 1114: I doesn't know 1132: My three brothers doesn't live a* home 1135: My plans is 1: I gose on a vacation A 4: I-really gets a kick out of it

2. Uninflected a: with third person singular E36: It also have rule and regulation P 2: EVerybody in my family adore him a lost. [the spelling "lostelfor "lots" is very common among both white and colored students and is doubtless related to the problem with consonantclusters.] P 6: He's married and have four children P24: My oldest sister have eleven children P26: My mother do houses work O 3: My daddy work out of town most4 038: Where my mother live and work 1131: One of them stay sick II 9: He do a little !armoring 311: This end py story b: for past tenie F 2: My oldest sister finish school this year P15: In the summer I had no vacationvI just work and went to thi poOl 028: My mother die when Iwas two year old H 7: She attend school last year H14: He stop school in the 7th grade 1126: You would learn slot ifyou study 1129: I begin school here in first grade 1137: It offer me a chance 110: Mother stop working and every sent then she haven't work at all' Ill: A lot of things that happen long timei ago

3. Overinflected: uae of simple past or past participle for uninflected forms ,. 038: When I finished school I plan A26: I like to fish, it is something I really enjoyed doing C 5: Doing the summers I go to Houston Texas and spent about 3or4vial D31: My father sang good, he sings churchsongy E 3: She let me play with her pens and scrambled allover her papers E27: I also learn different things, met differentpeople, and go to various surroundings B24: I know how to met people B25: I want to becamea nurse 4 P34: I like to met new people 032: I did had a lot of fun IV 034: Everything I asked for she be willing to give

4. Other Verb Problems, Tense end Number E35: I were born in Alexandria F37: It are very nice E33: Most of the time me andmy little sister be clam the'house !Or_ our mother F 1: On the three monthswe be out of school C37: I was borned in a house C 8: TWo of my sisters finish school[i.e., have finished] 016: lkom the time I begun school E28: As far as my parentsare concarn E31: Both are now live together happy E38: I am plan togo out of town P23: I was born here and live here allmy life I 2: They arguing and quarrelling [i.e., Theyargue and.quarrel] [Most of these involve inappropriateuse of the uninfleoted form] 106

5. Other Verb Problems

E31:We do not have enoughteacher to teacher all the children [Addition F21:Father went to the fifthgrade and drope out to work of a terminal "e" to theuninflected form isoommon.] F26:I have two brothers marriage F28:I weight 120 pound[Very frequent] F29:He,and my mother devorse F34:I like to reads novels G 7:They founded the money G18:I'am in the 12th grade[Very frequent.] 034:I like to watch TV and listto the radio 035:I went to visited some of mypeople H18:I was borned in Natchitoches H26:When I don't be working E35:I were born in Alexandria F37:It are.very nice H31:Get a job been a doctor[i.e., being] I 3:I attained high school 18 I 4:a brother whoshall soon reach the age of I 8:I song in the choir

6. Omission of the copula

F 4:When I grown F 5:My brother fat and tall F26:He next to me G 2:There only my brotherand me F 5:It nothing I don't liketo do F18:My name [JohnDoe] G 2:I born to Mr. and Mrs. 1138;I born in Natchitoches F26:Both of them in the ninthgrade 015:My sister going toNorthwestern When I get grow I planning 035: to finish 1136:My brothers are studentsat the University and suppose 1125:The reason I don't liketo because G15:Courting not that much to me sisters] I have that not married 028:X and X is the only tosister [two

FUNCTION WORDS

F 7:A good solid chancetoward life F13:I was born in July17 P24:My mother had to helpin the farm Greenville Baptist Church F24:I was united in the F30:My mother and father areof the greatest people to X school are very nice P37:I think all the teachers G 5:I know all the teachersthat teach to our school 8:I work to a barbecuepit G18:I want to bean coach 023:I love to attend tosports activities 101

G26: She works at in aprivate home 035: I was bort inMarch 31 B24: I am a juniorof X school State College Cws11: They both arestudents of Northwestern Cws13: rgo to a campthroughout the stateof Louisiana B37: I were born in ahot summer day Co. P' 6: He's working overto Howard Lumber in which I tried to do I 2: I would ratherattend another school, [Very frequentg Ills Then, maybe,I'll have a twochildrens 121: I live at RouteOne sisters for the axcAption 016: I have a totle of6 brothers and seven to the two died abrother and sister G17: I go to schoolto Central High C17: I got used ofit C33: She also wentto farther schooling E 4: so happy thatday until I was cry for 1938 E 7: My father andmother married in the year B11: I write on my sparetime

OMISSIONS

A 3: I would liketo work the summer A 7: Most of all[what] I like to do is A 8: Most of thetime when are working [Most frequently.] A18: When I'm grown Ilike to get married make the most ofconsists of £20: argue with someonesomething . . . A37: I want be awelder A38: I most of all towork on cars [them] and they don't understand me £40: I don't understand get away !Tom for B 1: I would like veryto live in 1.4ifornia . . . sisters . serving in ,awhile . . .five brothers seven them one away 6 the that is goingViet Nam . . a few of rest of them is home B 6: I dislikefor people accuse me don't want to be around me B12: I don'tlike to be around who B13: all of my yearsbeing here B14: until I wasthird grade old B15: My mother nameis XXX and is 40 years B18: during the summer[I] get a job B32: [I] likepeople who like me B31: The first[thing, book, story] I read was C 1: I want be ateacher C10: I want workfor my living and two children[i.e., has two children] C13: My sisterlives in California been there everysceOn I been C26: I was bone inLouisiana in 1949 and put "is," bone and steel. [i.e., "still am;" the student then crossed itout.] [Very frequent.] D 6: She is a, yearand seven months[old]. 100

IDIOM

E38: She is very nice and freeheart F 5: After that I will like to do my owndrawtmg for myself and sale them F11: VIM I like to do most of allis play sport. F28: I am now the age of 17 F37: I plan to go to trade schooland take up nurse F39: Mi future career in themedicine 011: I. like arranging furnish HI1: When I finish college I willlike to have a job H20: While being over there[i.e., in Houston) H28: Father is the laundrist D28: It is the best school in thesurround. [This has a Cajun sound.] E 5: After I have serviced mytime I will like to take atrade D 1: My mother, who teachersschool C36: My sister before C21: I was dtscharged from thehospital for good, unless something would happen C25: Over the summer I had apleasure.to visit a cousin inDallas C 7: My mother ie a housekeeping B 9: Ny father do a little farmer BI4: I,hope by the time I am22 I could have made my parents proudof me 130: He will be get out on October30. I am gone to come backif I don't be two old. service my time in the Air Froce

.Micerpt from paper written by white studentin hill community

with no Negro residents:

I have got an older brother; heis two years older than I am. 'I have got a little brother thaiie.7 and a little sister 9 years 'old. When Lonnie and I was kids we us[i.e., used] to fight all 'the time. But !Are done a lot of thingstogether. Ny little sistOr and brother are about theeameaway as Lonnie ancl was.

I go to (name ofschool]. I guess it is a pertty good school. But One thing I don't likeabout it is the High School building it aóte like it is aboutto fall down.' BUt all therest 'of the building are almostbrand new.There is another thtmg about our school it does nothave enough subjeots that you can .take if you wanted to.

Excerpt from paper writtenby colored student:

.In our famay wefortunite to have five girlsand six boys, a total of eleven in all.We live a Christian life, meaning we go to church on the Sundsiyand take an active part in theservice. .But most'of the family had movefar alley, but when theyileft we all sort miss them. They comes badk on Christmasand spent Christmas with us.When Christmas get here we, oursget toe:Aber have a great time together. 109

When I finished highschool I would like to take up welding or some form ofbusinees. I plan to go to a trade school when I fthished,unfortunate I wouldn't attendCollege. But some day Iwould like to owns my onbusiness and a nice place to rive. I been going to[name of school] every sent [i.e., ever since] I was six yearsold and I'm planning on finished here too.

It will be observedthat while most of thenon-standard verb

be categorised under the same uses in thewhite student's paper oan

headings se those typicalof Negro English, theyaro actually

.dissimilar in flavor, as it were. Notice also that thecolored

student, who is obviouslyconsoious of inflection,tends to.over-

4.3 inflects e.g., "totals?'"owns," eto.