The language of professional blackness: African American English at the intersection of race, place, and class in southeast Washington, D.C.
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Increasingly, studies of African American English (AAE) include in their scope the speech of upper and middle-class African Americans (Rahman 2008;Weldon 2011;Alim and Smitherman 2012; Weldon and Britt forthcoming), rather than focusing on the working class males historically privileged as the most authentic speakers of the variety (Labov 1966(Labov , 1972;;Fasold 1972).Relatively little scholarship, however, has focused on the speech of African Americans in a heavily class-mixing environment.This project takes a mixed-methods approach to examining the ways in which professional class speakers in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, D.C. use African American English in identity construction.It undertakes the study of one phonological variable, final consonant devoicing (FCD), and additionally studies quantitatively and qualitatively those speakers' use of morphosyntactic features of AAE.The statistical results for FCD are consistent with other findings: individual speaker variation accounts for the majority of the data.The intraspeaker patterning of FCD, however, suggests that professional class African Americans orient to an iconized idea of devoicing as precise pronunciation, allowing them to recruit a second-order indexical meaning (Silverstein 2003) of "correctness," which they then use to enact the identity of "professional class."The further examination of morphosyntactic variation reveals that the ways the speakers use AAE in specific stancetaking about the race, class, and and gentrification suggests that for these speakers, the use of an ethnoracially marked dialect is a means of affirming the positive affiliation with the predominantly African American neighborhood.This strategic employment of AAE features as part of their ethnolinguistic repertoires (Benor 2010), allows the speakers in this study to merge identities of African Americanness with professionalness in a way that helps stake their claim as longtime residents of a community that is rapidly changing.This dissertation makes contributions to the field of African American Language study in its use of mixed quantitative and qualitative technique, and its examination of an understudied region and an understudied African American population.Further, it finds that the social meanings of features of an ethnolinguistic repertoire are not always the same, nor do they necessarily stem from group-associational meanings.Rather, languaging in interaction means drawing on the multiple indexical meanings of any given variable in order to construct multiple-and at times, conflicting-identities of race, place, and class.iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I'd like to thank my committee, without whose guidance, goodnatured pressure, and above all patience this project would not have truly come to fruition.Natalie Schilling, my co-chair, who has seen me through since my very first day of graduate work; Jennifer Nycz, my other co-chair, who was ready and willing to hop onto a committee within days of beginning a new career in a new department, and Sonja Lanehart, who has been a crucial guide and mentor throughout my time in graduate school.Each of them has made their mark (well, many marks) on this project, and my scholarship is stronger for their input and individual perspectives and expertise.This dissertation was the product of a long formulation with not only those who have wound up seeing it through to its end, and with that in mind, I wish to also acknowledge the scholars with whom I've worked closely at Georgetown whose methods and perspectives shaped my own view of the topic at hand.Michael Lempert, whose anthropological perspective led me to seek out explanations which reach above and beyond variationist linguistics; Rob Podesva, at whose urging I began to explore the connections between variation and social meaning; and particularly Debby Schiffrin, who helped me draw the connections between the discourses of place and race which formed the nature of the questions I explore here.I am grateful for the support of the entire Georgetown Linguistics faculty, particularly Lisa Zsiga, Jennifer Sclafani, and Mark Sicoli who have in various ways assisted with the development of this project, and the professional, academic, and personal support of Heidi Hamilton, Deborah Tannen, and Anna Marie Trester.No work of scholarship is created in a vacuum, and so I am equally grateful for my peers in the sociolinguistics program who have provided feedback, advice, and wonderful camaraderie throughout these years: Anastasia Nylund, Patrick Callier, Jinsok Lee, Rachel Albritten and Mackenzie Price.I am particularly thankful for the wonderful women with whom I met weekly over the last three years as we cheered one another on to shape our unique projects in our subfields: Julie Lake, Kaitlyn Tagarelli, Amelia Tseng, and Laura West
Author: Jessica A. Grieser
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W828041882