Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English

289 Pages·2000·1.42 MB·English

by  John Russell Rickford

B u s i n e s s C u l i n a r y A r c h i t e c t u r e
C o m p u t e r G e n e r a l I n t e r e s t
C h i l d r e n L i f e S c i e n c e s B i o g r a p h y
A c c o u n t i n g F i n a n c e M a t h e m a t i c s
H i s t o r y S e l f - I m p r o v e m e n t H e a l t h
E n g i n e e r i n g G r a p h i c D e s i g n
A p p l i e d S c i e n c e s P s y c h o l o g y
I n t e r i o r D e s i g n B i o l o g y C h e m i s t r y
e
WILEY
B O O K
WILEY
JOSSEY-BASS
PFEIFFER
J.K.LASSER
CAPSTONE
WILEY-LISS
WILEY-VCH
WILEY-INTERSCIENCE
SPOKEN SOUL

SPOKEN SOUL
The Story of Black English
John Russell Rickford
and
Russell John Rickford
Foreword by Geneva Smitherman
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
New York • Chichester • Weinheim • Brisbane • Singapore • Toronto
This book is printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Copyright © 2000 by John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford.
All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada
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This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Rickford, John Russell
Spoken soul : the story of black English /
John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-32356-X (pbk.)
1. Black English—United States. 2. English language—Spoken
English—United States. 3. English language—Social aspects—United
States. 4. Afro-Americans—Language. I. Rickford, Russell John.
II. Title.
PE3102.N42R54 2000
427(cid:2).089(cid:2)96073—dc21 99-37796
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
From Russell John:
For the Almighty, for whom our souls are a witness.
For my godfather Uncle Teddy, the swashbuckler who taught me
to take life in my teeth and leap.
For my father, the pacifist who showed me how to skip a rock,
build a kite, and be a do-right man.
From John Russell:
For Angela, my beloved, and for our children, Shiyama, Russell,
Anakela, and Luke, the pride and joy of our lives.
For my fallen/risen siblings: Peter Howell, Edward Noel, Patricia Stella,
and all my kinfolk, here and there. May the circle be unbroken.
For soul speakers everywhere. May their language be better understood
and appreciated, and may their enormous potential in school
and life be more richly realized.

Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Part One
Introduction
1 What’s Going On? 3
Part Two
“This Passion, This Skill, This Incredible Music”
2 Writers 13
3 Preachers and Pray-ers 39
4 Comedians and Actors 57
5 Singers, Toasters, and Rappers 73
Part Three
The Living Language
6 Vocabulary and Pronunciation 91
7 Grammar 109
8 History 129
Part Four
The Ebonics Firestorm
9 Education 163
10 The Media 181
11 Ebonics “Humor” 204
vii
viii Contents
Part Five
The Double Self
12 The Crucible of Identity 223
Notes 233
Index 261
Permissions and Credits 268
Foreword
It’s been a long time coming, as the old song goes, but the change
done come. Back when I was working with the parents and legal team
in King v.Ann Arbor(the “Black English” federal court case, 1977–79),
public confusion and misunderstanding about Black English came as
a shock to many linguists and scholars. Then shock waves again, al-
most two decades later, when the Ebonics controversy erupted among
the mistletoe and Kinara of the 1996 Christmas-Kwanzaa season. The
scholarly community has written volumes of commendable work on
Spoken Soul (not by that name, of course), dating back at least to
1884, when Harrison published “Negro English” in the academic jour-
nal Anglia. However, with one or two exceptions over the past three
decades, scholarly research on this language spoken by millions of
African Americans has not been written up for the public at large.
Spoken Soul steps to the challenge. The book breaks it down and
makes it plain. At long last, the academic world of morphemes and
phonemes reaches beyond ivied walls, connecting town and gown.
The Rickfords—in this case not husband and wife, but father and
son—take their title from the name that writer Claude Brown gave to
our language back in the 1960s. They present myths and realities
about Spoken Soul, and in the process do much soul-speaking them-
selves, covering topics from the language of great comedians and
actors to that of “preachers and pray-ers.” In writing that is rich and
powerful—and funky and bold when it bees necessary—they dissect
black writing and black speech, the grammar and history of Spoken
Soul, the Ebonics controversy and media coverage of it.
The story of Spoken Soul is not an easy one to tell because it is
not just about language. To tell the story right, you have to talk about
the culture and lived experience of African Americans. You have to
talk about a language inextricable from the complex social structure
and political history of people of African descent in these United
ix