Black street speech : its history, structure, and survival
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Black street speech : its history, structure, and survival
（Texas linguistics series）
University of Texas Press, 1983
1st ed
- : pbk.
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Note
Bibliography: p. [135]-141
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In the minds of many, black street speech-the urban dialect of black Americans-bespeaks illiteracy, poverty, and ignorance. John Baugh challenges those prejudices in this brilliant new inquiry into the history, linguistic structure, and survival within white society of black street speech. In doing so, he successfully integrates a scholarly respect for black English with a humanistic approach to language differences that weds rigor of research with a keen sense of social responsibility.
Baugh's is the first book on black English that is based on a long-term study of adult speakers. Beginning in 1972, black men and women in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, and Houston were repeatedly interviewed, in varied social settings, in order to determine the nature of their linguistic styles and the social circumstances where subtle changes in their speech appear. Baugh's work uncovered a far wider breadth of speaking styles among black Americans than among standard English speakers. Having detailed his findings, he explores their serious implications for the employability and education of black Americans.
Black Street Speech is a work of enduring importance for educators, linguists, sociologists, scholars of black and urban studies, and all concerned with black English and its social consequences.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Introduction: Street Speech as a Social Dialect
2. The Birth of Black Street Speech
3. Street Speech and Formal Speech: Linguistic Survival in Black and White Societies
4. The Scholar and the Street: Collecting the Data
5. Specialized Lexical Marking and Alternation
Code Switching versus Style Shifting
Topic-Related Shifting
Syllable Contraction and Expansion
Variable Forestressing of Bisyllabic Words
Hypercorrection
Lexical Summary
6. Unique Grammatical Usage
Locating Suitable Examples
Syntactic Constructions and Their Functions
Grammatical Summary
7. Phonological Variation
Suffix /-s/ Variation
Consonant Cluster Reduction
Is and Are Variation
Postvocalic /r/ Variation
Summary of Phonological and Morphological Variation
8. Educational Insights
9. Impediments to Employability
10. Dynamic Black Speech: A Nonideal Linguistic State
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
