The goal of The Oxford Handbook of African American Language is to provide readers with a wide range of analyses of both traditional and contemporary work on language use in African American communities in a broad collective. The Handbook offers a survey of language and its uses in African American communities from a wide range of contexts organized into seven sections: Origins and Historical Perspectives; Lects and Variation; Structure and Description; Child Language Acquisition and Development; Education; Language in Society; and Language and Identity. It is a handbook of research on African American Language (AAL) and, as such, provides a variety of scholarly perspectives that may not align with each other -- as is indicative of most scholarly research. The chapters in this book "interact" with one another as contributors frequently refer the reader to further elaboration on and references to related issues and connect their own research to related topics in other chapters within their own sections and the handbook more generally to create dialogue about AAL, thus affirming the need for collaborative thinking about the issues in AAL research. Though the Handbook does not and cannot include every area of research, it is meant to provide suggestions for future work on lesser-studied areas (e.g., variation/heterogeneity in regional, social, and ethnic communities) by highlighting a need for collaborative perspectives and innovative thinking while reasserting the need for better research and communication in areas thought to be resolved.
Language Use in African American Communities: An Introduction ; Sonja L. Lanehart, Jennifer Bloomquist, and Ayesha M. Malik ; PART I. ORIGINS AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ; The English Origins Hypothesis ; Gerard Van Herk ; The Creole Origins Hypothesis ; John R. Rickford ; The Emergence of African American English: Monogenetic or Polygenetic? With or Without "Decreolization"? Under How Much Substrate Influence? ; Salikoko S. Mufwene ; On the Origins of African American Vernacular English: Beginnings ; Donald Winford ; African American English Over Yonder: The Language of the Liberian Settler Community ; John Victor Singler ; Documenting the History of African American Vernacular English: A Survey and Assessment of Sources and Results ; Edgar W. Schneider ; Regionality in the Development of African American English ; Walt Wolfram and Mary E. Kohn ; PART II. LECTS AND VARIATION ; The Place of Gullah in the African American Linguistic Continuum ; Tracey L. Weldon and Simanique Moody ; Rural African American Vernacular English ; Patricia Cukor-Avila and Guy Bailey ; African American English in the Mississippi Delta: A Case Study of Copula Absence and /r/-Lessness in the Speech of Black Women in Coahoma County ; Rose Wilkerson ; African American Voices in Atlanta ; William A. Kretzschmar ; African American Language in Pittsburgh and the Lower Susqueshanna Valley ; Jennifer Bloomquist and Shelome Gooden ; African American Phonology in a Philadelphia Community ; William Labov and Sabriya Fisher ; African American Language in New York City ; Renee A. Blake, Cara Shousterman, and Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz ; African American Vernacular English In California: Four Plus Decades Of Vibrant Variationist Research ; John R. Rickford ; The Black American Sign Language Project: An Overview ; Joseph Hill, Carolyn McCaskill, Robert Bayley, and Ceil Lucas ; The Sociolinguistic Construction of African American Language ; Walt Wolfram ; PART III. STRUCTURE AND DESCRIPTION ; Syntax and Semantics ; Lisa J. Green and Walter Sistrunk ; The Systematic Marking of Tense, Modality and Aspect in African American Language ; Charles E. DeBose ; On the Syntax-Prosody Interface in African American Language James A. Walker ; Segmental Phonology of African American English ; Erik R. Thomas and Guy Bailey ; Prosodic Features of African American English ; Erik R. Thomas ; PART IV. CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND DEVELOPMENT ; Language Acquisition in the African American Child: Prior to Age Four ; Brandi L. Newkirk-Turner, RaMonda Horton, and Ida J. Stockman ; The Development of African American English through Childhood and Adolescence ; Janneke Van Hofwegen ; Development of Variation ; Lisa J. Green and Jessica White-Sustaita ; Narrative Structures of African American Children: Commonalities and Differences ; Tempii B. Champion and Allyssa McCabe ; Some Similarities and Differences between African American English and Southern White English in Children Janna B. Oetting ; Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives for Assessing Young and School-Age AAE Child Speakers ; Toya A. Wyatt ; PART V. EDUCATION ; African American Language and Education: History and Controversy in the Twentieth Century ; Geneva Smitherman ; Managing Two Varieties: Code-switching in the Educational Context ; Monique T. Mills and Julie A. Washington ; Balancing Pedagogy with Theory: The Infusion of African American Language Research Into Everyday Pre K-12 Teaching Practices ; Sharroky Hollie, Tamara Butler, and Jamila Gillenwaters ; History of Research on Multiliteracies and Hip Hop Pedagogy: A Critical Review ; K.C. Nat Turner and Tyson L. Rose ; African-American Vernacular English and Reading ; William Labov and Bettina Baker ; Dialect Switching and Mathematical Reasoning Tests: Implications for Early Educational Achievement ; J. Michael Terry, Randall Hendrick, Evangelos Evangelou, and Richard L. Smith ; Beyond Bidialecticalism: Language Planning and Policies for African American Students ; John Baugh ; PART VI. LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY ; African American Church Language ; Charles E. DeBose ; The (Re)turn to Remus Orthography: The Voices of African American Language in American Literature ; James Braxton Peterson ; African American Language and Black Poetry ; Howard Rambsy II and Briana Whiteside ; African American Divas of Comedy: Staking a Claim in Public Space ; Jacquelyn Rahman ; The Construction of Ethnicity via Voicing: African American English in Children's Animated Film ; Jennifer Bloomquist ; SWB: (Speaking while Black or Speaking while Brown): Linguistic Profiling and Discrimination Based on Speech as a Surrogate for Race in International Perspective ; John Baugh ; PART VII. LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY ; Racializing Language: Unpacking Linguistic Approaches to Attitudes about Race and Speech ; Kate T. Anderson ; African American Standard English ; Arthur K. Spears ; African American English in the Middle Class ; Erica Britt and Tracey L. Weldon ; African American Women's Language: Mother Tongues Untied ; Marcyliena Morgan ; Black Masculine Language ; David E. Kirkland ; Hip Hop Nation Language: Localization and Globalization ; H. Samy Alim ; African American Language and Identity: Contradictions and Conundrums ; Sonja L. Lanehart
