LING 338: African American English

A blog created and maintained by Professor Renée Blake and her students at New York University. Last updated in 2016.

View excerpts from this 2018 documentary that explores the history, development, and role of language in the lives of African Americans. Excerpts can be found under Resources and Videos and include interviews with everyday speakers as well as linguists, historians, and educators. From the Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University.

Essays and selected resources created in conjunction with the 2005 PBS "Do You Speak American?" program.

An interactive database on morphosyntactic variation in spontaneous spoken English mapping 235 features from a dozen domains of grammar in 50 varieties of English and 26 English-based Pidgins and Creoles in eight Anglophone world regions.

This project explores syntactic diversity found in varieties of English spoken in North America.

Developed by a team at the University of Oregon, this project provides information and resources about language in the African American community.

CORAAL includes data from over 140 sociolinguistic interviews from speakers born between 1891 and 2005 and over a million words of accurate time-aligned transcription of conversational speech.

Information on a range of African American language data sources, including sociolinguistic recordings, oral histories, and conversations.

This online collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP).

Recordings made between 1932 and 1975 in nine states with 23 formerly enslaved individuals. In addition to documenting their experiences, the interviews provide an opportunity for linguists to examine the development of Black English and the transformation of language over time.

Oral history videos and recordings sourced from collections at the Atlanta History Center and Weeksville Heritage Center. There are first-hand accounts of student activism during the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement and personal experiences from the African American Community of Weeksville, Brooklyn. All interviews include accompanying interactive transcriptions. Part of a large collection of materials documenting the history of African American communities in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina. (From Adam Matthew. Wellesley login required)

Links and demographic information about all of the African American speech samples included in this collection, which was funded by the Center for Applied Linguistics and the National Endowment for the Humanities and is available online through the Library of Congress. (1960s-1980s)

Open-access archive of recordings of English-language dialects and accents as heard around the world. Contains roughly 1,500 samples from 120 countries and territories, and more than 170 hours of recordings. Use the Global Map or Dialects & Accents menu tabs to navigate by country and region, or do a keyword search in the Archive.