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K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

African American English

About this video

Director
Neal Hutcheson
Provider
North Carolina State University / North Carolina Language and Life Project
Date created
2005
Duration
8:46
Location
North Carolina
File
Flash Video
License
This video copyright ©2008. All Rights Reserved

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  • African American English: In this activity, students learn about the history of African American English and the meaning of dialect and linguistic patterns. Students watch a video about African American English and analyze the dialect's linguistic patterns.

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Excerpt about African American English from the documentary Voices of North Carolina, produced by Neal Hutcheson and the North Carolina Language and Life Project.

This video is one in a series that also includes:

Transcript

(00:01) [Singing]
Narrator (00:10)
Language is an important part of all social and cultural groups, but it seems to have a special place in the African American experience.
Speaker (00:21)
We’ve come through racial discrimination, we’ve come through poverty, we’ll come through the floods, we’ll come through a whole lot. But you know what Princeville? You’re still standing.
Stella Adams (00:39)
Even inside the African American community, when you go from region to region, they’re really different voices and sounds.
James Spencer (00:44)
Guy in front of the white houses there, in the back of that woods, way back there, it’s deep back there — which they had of locked some of it out — but back on the woods, we’ll hunt bears. Usually me and dog will go out there and mud the footpaths; you can see them real good.  So it’s $400 just to go and find off to kill one, so it’s very expensive, shooting bears.  **** Way back through, went* through last.
Stella Adams (01:18)
You can tell the difference between an African American who lives in north east, because they say “scrait,” which is not something you’d hear in Durham,  or you’d hear in Winston-Salem, or you’d hear in Fayetteville.  But if you hear “scrait” or “screet,” you know exactly where they came from.  Inside the African American community too there is a love of language, there is a love of listening to different styles of language.  It’s the music and the poetry of the language, not matter which vocabulary set you’re using.
Bertha Maxwell (01:58)
Say what?  They’d say, “Say ‘honey child’,” because I would always, it’s just a part of my language, honey child, because I talk just like the people at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountain, with that kind of twang, and that kind of thing, and so that was just a part of me.
9th Wonder (02:28)
I have noticed this.  Every clique has their own lingo.  Every clique.  It can change from a clique standpoint to a state standpoint, to a region standpoint, you see what I’m saying? We might say stuff in North Carolina that people in Georgia might not say, but there may be things that people in North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia would say all together, see what I’m saying?
Reginald Evans (02:41)
I’ve been told I talk like I’m from the city, I’ve been told I talk like I’m from the country. I just talk like I talk, I am who I am.
Singer (02:54) [In song]
Only you and you alone, can thrill me like you do and fill my heart with love, for only you.
Frank Parker (03:05)
Dialects suggest at times a world view that I was always interested in.  There’s a form in Black dialect, the “be” form, “I be doing” x, y, and z, or “I be going,” — or that particular issue, which I always thought was interesting, but may be very descriptive of being in process, which is somehow not expressed in the regular language pattern.
(03:35)
It’s all a bunch of people in New York that we know, from down here, and the way they be talking, and stuff… The way they be talking and stuff, they — like, you can’t have to understand them, they have to stutter because they don’t know our language and stuff.
(03:48)
And that girl’s always ***
Richard Brown (03:56)
I know at my church, there’s a lot of bending of the rules, you know.  I.e. using of language, but it’s the use of language in a way to continue to communicate ideas, and oftentimes it’s not just ideas, it’s emotions.
Singer (04:13) [In song]
Only you can make this change in me
Man (04:22)
Ya’ll’d better get outta Chris ***. Ya’ll know who that is? Ya’ll’d better get out of that ***, boy!
Man (04:27)
That’s right, baby, that’s right. 
Man (04:29)
When you come to college you get folks from upstate, you get folks from down south, so you get a different variety of voices here, but once you get to know the heart and the spirit of folks, we’re all one big family.
Richard Brown (04:42)
I mean you always want to be connected with a group, and making sure that you’re continuing to be, to have that touchstone, of this is, you know, this is where you came from.  And this is how the folk, this is how the people talk where you come from.  It’s really important to not lose that.
Man (05:03)
You have to be able to relate to your peers, and you know, you gotta yell “what up, yo what up, what’s going on? Such and such, da da blah blah.” It’s our lingo, man.
Boy (05:14)
“What’s cracking” means, what’s up, “what’s up” means, “hey”
Boy (05:18)
“Fo shizzle” means yeah.
Boy (05:21)
And when most people say like, most people say, I can’t explain it, you explain it.
9th Wonder (05:38)
If Phonte comes over and he plays, you know he plays to my daughter, say, “word up, word up,” you know, it’s just like in the sixties, if you got “yeah, right on,” and “peace,” and you know, all of that, it’s about the same thing, so it’s a part of our life just like it’s a part of their lives, I guess.
Phonte (05:47)
We use that term because that’s like a sense of family, you know what I’m saying, it’s like, the term is the line, you know what I’m saying, if we’re real close, then we’re at liberty to talk like that because we understand each other.  Where if you were an outsider and I didn’t really know you, and you know, it’s like, “Hey how you doing,” it’s just like, “Oh, hi, how you doing man,” until I get that vibe that you loose, then it’s “what’s up,” you know, but until it gets to that point, you kind of just do that, you kind of draw that line.  The more closer you feel to somebody, then you loosen up, and the language plays a big part of that.
Man (06:22)
I’ve heard every walk of life say, “I’m chillin, I’m cooling, what up bro, what up man,” all of that is hip-hop music, which is an extension of seventies soul music, which comes off sixties Motown music.  I mean, it carries on, it carries on. So, with hip-hop — I don’t know where our generation would be as far as the way we speak and everything without hip-hop music man.
Stella Adams (06:45)
Every generation has to identify itself and create its own language.
(06:49)
They’ve negotiated a new space.
Phonte (06:49) [rapping]
One day will quote and yes, I’m overloaded with rhymes, verse, punch lines, similes and metaphors, for better or worse, I crush any competitors’ verse and I keep spitting for PBS and Phonte off of the top no second guessing, because I’m coming through with the right plan, and yes in hip hop we do have friends, and yes he is a white man his name is Joe *Skutta*, and he freestyle too, and I’m bout to show you just how we do, I’m spitting with my cap on, and I’m about to pass it to the left to *Scutta* so he can get his rap on now and clap on.
Joe *Scutta* (07:21)
Yo I’m back on the grind again, stay reminding them, we in the front where the line begin, and you in the back where the line go in.
Richard Brown (07:28)
I think it’s one of the many markers that people use to decide whether you are in the in group or the out group. 
Stella Adams (07:33)
And that’s one of the reasons for kind of mimicking the speech of people who you’re around, or consciously deciding not to.
Joanne McNair (07:42)
We were just talking about that on the way here, how people try to express themselves, well you don’t need to express yourself so much that when you get out in society you can’t function.  Because when you go in for a job interview, and the person sitting behind the desk, you know, they may not want to hear that.
Richard Brown (07:59)
Particularly in the African American community there is this idea that yes, you can speak in a much more relaxed, intimate, Black speech, in certain spaces, and then in other spaces, you have to speak a much more common English.  And for some people, there’s an internal struggle about, should you really do that.  Should you really be trying to talk like white folk? Or, should you always, all the time, no matter what setting you are in, speak the same way, speak the same way your mama taught you to speak.
Bertha Maxwell (08:31)
It all depends on what environment you’re in, expectations of other people, what they think they need to hear from you; all of these are the kinds of things that you encounter when you’re dealing with communication.