Visibly invisible: The study of middle class African American English

Abstract

Middle class African American English (AAE) has remained largely invisible to the sociolinguistic lens despite the fact that over 50 years of research has made it one of the most examined varieties of American English. This gap in the sociolinguistic literature is largely reflective of a strategic effort on the part of linguists to dismantle the stigma associated with working class vernacular varieties and improve outcomes for working class speakers who face linguistic discrimination in schools. An unfortunate by-product of this laudable effort, however, has been the erasure of middle-class speakers from our conceptualisations of the AAE speech community and a virtual obsession with the vernacular end of the AAE continuum. By interrogating the concept of the linguistic lame and giving greater attention to patterns of code-switching and the ways in which talking Black or sounding Black get defined at the more standard end of the continuum, sociolinguists have an opportunity to broaden our understanding of AAE and its community of speakers and, in so doing, possibly extend our reach to a more diverse and inclusive audience of budding linguists.