Online Resources for African American Language

The Harlem 1969 recordings were made by a research team led by Walt Wolfram. The research questions focused on expanding the descriptive accounts of a range of social dialects in the US. From a theoretical point of view, this research study analyzed the relationship between language contact, bilingualism, and sociolinguistic variables that had been well-studied in other northern Black communities. And, like his prior collaborative work in Detroit and Washington DC, Wolfram et al. (1971:2) ultimately had an applied viewpoint: "We need to know how the various social dialects in the United States are structured if we are going to base our educational strategies on sound descriptive facts."

The sociolinguistic interviews were conducted in August 1969 at a summer camp in Lake Champion, New York. Participants were interviewed by either Walt Wolfram, Ralph Fasold, or Roger W. Shuy.

This sample, called Harlem Sounds, focuses on the particular line of questions about ritualistic language in the community, particularly sounding, which "involves insulting someone's mother, although other relatives might also be mentioned (e.g., grandmother, father, uncle). The presuppositions under which the activity is conducted are shared by the participants, namely, that the insult is not literally true. The proper cultural response to a ritualistic insult is another ritualistic insult" Wolfram (1974:258).

Harlem Sounds comes from The Walt Wolfram Papers 1971-1998 special collection at North Carolina State University. The original tape was digitized by Brooke Wallig at North Carolina State University in January 2016. The tape reel, a Scotch magnetic tape 150 extra length, was not separated into tracks, and contained 20 excerpts, totalling 45.3 minutes (~7700 words).

Charlie Farrington transcribed and prepared the excerpts for upload.

Table 1. Demographic information by file name, including age, ethnicity, borough, region within Borough (see figure 1). Race of peer contacts was taken directly from interview report forms.

^a From North Carolina, only one year in NYC

Figure 1. Geographical location of informants (from Wolfram 1974:14)

Citation

If you use these recordings, we ask that you cite the following:

Kendall, Tyler and Charlie Farrington. 2023. The Corpus of Regional African American Language. Version 2023.06. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project. [https://doi.org/10.7264/1ad5-6t35].

Wolfram, Walt. 1974. Sociolinguistic Aspects of Assimilation. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. <https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED091933>.

Back to CORAAL Supplements

As part of the recording process in the CORAAL:DCB (Washington DC 2016) component, most participants read the "Please Call Stella" reading passage from the Speech Accent Archive (Steven H. Weinberger at George Mason University):

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

The Supplement contains 21 minutes of total speech. The passage is short, on average 28 seconds in length per speaker, but contains a range of English sounds and sound sequences in a controlled task and can be useful in evaluating stylistic differences in comparison to the conversational speech contained in CORAAL:DCB, which is from the same speakers.

The Stella passages were transcribed in Praat by Chloe Tacata and Charlie Farrington. Orthographic transcripts are available as Praat TextGrids (.TextGrid), ELAN files (.eaf), and plain, tab-delimited text (.txt). In addition, the DCB Stella Passage also includes phone-level aligned Praat TextGrids (via the Montreal Forced Aligner; McAuliffe et al. 2017). We also include the FAVE-Extract (Rosenfelder et al. 2022) vowel measurements. All files were prepared for upload by Charlie Farrington.

Metadata for the speakers of the DCB Stella Passage are available on the CORAAL Download Site (http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/coraal/).

The DCB Stella Passage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (4.0) International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). It is available for free and is downloadable from the above link. It is also available as part of CORAAL's Commercial Licenses.

Citation

If you use these recordings, we ask that you cite the following:

Farrington, Charlie, Minnie Quartey, Chloe Tacata, and Tyler Kendall. 2023. CORAAL:DCB Stella Passage (Washington DC 2016). Version 2023.03. A Supplement to the Corpus of Regional African American Language. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project. [https://oraal.uoregon.edu/coraal/supplements/dcb-stella].

Kendall, Tyler and Charlie Farrington. 2020. The Corpus of Regional African American Language. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project. [https://doi.org/10.7264/1ad5-6t35].

Back to CORAAL Supplements

This is a companion webpage to the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science article "Sources of variation in the speech of African Americans: Perspectives from sociophonetics," by Charlie Farrington, Sharese King, and Mary Kohn.

What is African American Language?

• African American Language (AAL) varieties are spoken by many African American speakers in the United States. Over the past half century, AAL has been the subject of a great deal of research by linguists and other scholars. Click on any of the links below to learn more about AAL, who speaks it, how it developed, and more!
• Over several decades, hundreds of researchers have investigated different aspects of AAL. Some prominent early sociolinguists, including William Labov and Walt Wolfram, pioneered the study of the variety. On our Find An Expert page, we celebrate the ongoing contributions of Black scholars researching AAL.

Why do you call it "African American Language"?

• African American Language is a term used to describe language use within the African American community. The speech of African Americans has been called many things by linguists over the years, including Black English, AAVE, AAE, and Ebonics, though these terms may not specifically refer to the same group. Lanehart and Malik (2015:4) suggest that "when speakers know AAL, they know a system of sounds, word and sentence structure, meaning and structural organization of vocabulary items, and other linguistic and metalinguistic information about their language, such as pragmatic rules and the social function of AAL."
• African American speech is better viewed as a continuum rather than one speech variety. Not every speaker uses all features associated with AAL. For other definitions of AAL, check out What is AAL and who speaks it?

Why do scholars and teachers care about AAL?

• Throughout the half century of sociolinguistic work on AAL varieties, several goals for research have occurred at the same time. For example, William Labov's work in New York City, Walt Wolfram's work in Detroit, and Ralph Fasold's work in Washington DC address core theoretical question to the sociolinguistic enterprise, at the same time, this research was federally funded by the US Office of Education with specific interests in the relationship between vernacular AAL and school performance. Research into reading and AAL, teaching strategies, and acquisition followed. As April Baker-Bell (2020:3) recently wrote in her book, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, social justice is linguistic justice:
  • "Linguistic justice is a call to action: a call to radically imagine and create a world free of anti-blackness. A call to create an education system where Black students, their language, their literacies, their culture, their creativity, their joy, their imagination, their brilliance, their freedom, their existence, their resistance MATTERS."

What do researchers study about AAL?

• Researchers study many different aspects of AAL, including linguistic features and how it has changed over time, perceptions and attitudes, the role of AAL in education, language acquisition, regional variation, and bi-dialectalism. For more information, see AAL Linguistic Patterns. To learn about some of the researchers who study different aspects of AAL, please see our Find an Expert page.

Where did AAL come from?

• The origins of AAL have been long debated by linguistic researchers. Several competing positions have emerged, including the Creole Hypothesis, the English Origins Hypothesis, and, most recently, the Substrate Hypothesis. Linguists have used letters written by 18th and 19th century African Americans, written interviews, audio recordings of formerly enslaved individuals, and modern recordings from isolated Black communities to investigate how the speech developed out of the first African Americans and enslaved African peoples in the United States. Most linguists agree that what we now know as AAL primarily developed during the 20th century due to the population movements during the Great Migration and subsequent segregation in large urban centers. For more on the development of AAL, see How did AAL develop?

Who speaks AAL?

• It is difficult to estimate the total number of speakers of a variety, since, as mentioned above, AAL is a continuum. It is true that not all African Americans speak an AAL variety and not all speakers of AAL are African Americans. Some African Americans may speak a variety that aligns more with White Mainstream English, and some non-African Americans may incorporate AAL linguistic features into their speech.

Is AAL a language or a dialect?

• For linguists, the distinction between languages and dialects is often unclear and can be due to sociopolitical concerns rather than definitions related to things like mutual intelligibility. In using AAL, we follow Lanehart and Malik (2015:3) in suggesting that calling these speech varieties African American Language varieties, rather than African American English varieties because it is a more neutral term, as it bypasses "some of the problematic implications of 'English' within the socioculture and history of African slave descendants in the United States and the contested connections of their language variety to the motherland and colonization and encompass rhetorical and pragmatic strategies that might not be associated with English."

What is Black American Sign Language?

• Black American Sign Language is a unique dialect of American Sign Language that developed within historical segregated African American deaf communities throughout the United States. To find out more, you can visit the website for the Language & Life Project's new documentary, Signing Black in America.

Why the Online Resources for African American Language and the Corpus of Regional African American Language?

• We saw the need to develop public resources and tools for improving research and education about AAL. Both ORAAL and CORAAL were launched in January 2018. ORAAL seeks to have an engaging, publicly-oriented interface designed to appeal to public users (such as K-12 students and teachers, families, and other non-linguists) in addition to researchers, with supporting contextual and educational information about AAL. There has been an information gap over the last forty years between academics and the general public, such that many of the myths with respect to AAL persist in the public domain to this day. For more about ORAAL, see About This Project.
• For over 50 years, researchers have turned to spoken language data from African American individuals and communities in order to investigate core, basic questions in sociolinguistics and in the history of American English. Researchers have also studied AAL to combat public myths and prejudice about language. Despite such an intense research tradition, almost no primary data are available for researchers or educators. As social science disciplines, and linguistics in particular, take more seriously issues of replicability, big data, and open-access, it's imperative that publicly available datasets be developed and shared. CORAAL currently includes data from over 150 sociolinguistic interviews and over a million words of time-aligned transcription of conversational speech. For more information, see ORAAL's CORAAL page.

References

External sources includes a wide variety of sources, including sociolinguistic recordings, oral histories, and conversations. Each source listed below includes information about accessing the recordings, recording availability, and external links for further information. If you are looking for downloadable audio with time-aligned transcripts, please see what is available via CORAAL.

The following data sources list was prepared by Charlie Farrington and Jaidan McLean. Please contact us at OnlineResourcesAAL@gmail.com if you want to suggest more sources to add to this list or you want to include your own data!

African American Writers 1892-1912 (AAW) Corpus

From the Corpus Linguistics in Context (CLiC): "The CLiC Fiction project team (Professor Michaela Mahlberg and Research Fellow Viola Wiegand) have compiled this corpus in collaboration with Nicholas J. Rosato and Claiborne Rice of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who had the idea for this corpus and prepared the text files." (Source) This corpus contains novels by Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton E. Griggs, Frances E.W. Harper, and James Weldon Johnson.

American English Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics

The American English Dialect Recordings collection, available online through the Library of Congress, contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. These include a variety of speech styles, including linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches. They were originally collected as part of Donna Christian's "A Survey and Collection of American English Dialect Recordings" funded by the Center for Applied Linguistics and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The following page includes links and demographic information about all of the African American speech samples included in the collection.

Asheville 1974

Asheville 1974 is a dataset of sociolinguistic interviews collected by Ronald Butters in Asheville, North Carolina. Forty six recordings were made between May 1974 and August 1974. There are nineteen African American speakers, who are born between 1889 and 1960. Please note that there are young males and older females in the dataset. Located in Western North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville's population in 1970 was nearly 58,000, and it was home to the Allen School, a notable private school in North Carolina that served black students during segregation in the public school system. These recordings are password protected, but can be accessed through the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project.

Butters, Ronald. 1981. Unstressed Vowels in Appalachian English. American Speech 56.2: 104-110.

Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South

Duke University's "The Behind the Veil Oral History Project" was undertaken in 1993 to 1995, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. From Duke: "The primary purpose of this documentary project was to record and preserve the living memory of African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s". "Four hundred and ten of the 1,260 interviews have been digitized and made available on this site totaling about 725 hours of recorded audio. One hundred and sixty five of hte interviews include transcripts comprising more than 15,000 pages of text." The digitized recordings are available freely online, but lossless (e.g., .WAV) recordings can be requested and made available to researchers.

Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South Digital Collection, John Hope Franklin Research Center, Duke University Libraries.

Detroit Dialect Study

The DDS was a foundational study of social stratification in American English in which Roger Shuy and colleagues recorded over 700 white and Black Detroit residents to determine linguistic patterns at play across ethnicity, sex, social class, and age, and the outcomes have informed work on education policy regarding vernacular American English dialects.

The newly digitized recordings will be available via the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP).

Dictionary of American Regional English

Between 1965 and 1970, fieldworkers for The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) conducted interviews with nearly 3000 informants all across the country. The resulting recordings, which consist of both conversational interviews and the Arthur the Rat reading passage, were digitized, anonymized, and made available through the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Digital Collections.

The link below includes links and demographic information about all of the African American speech samples included in DARE.

Oregon African American Railroad Porters: Oral History Collection

This oral history collection consists of 20 primary speakers across 30 recordings, two of which are from a Senior Citizens Association Meeting and include multiple unknown speakers. While the African American population in Oregon is quite small, the economic impact the community has had on Oregon has been substantial through the railroad system. These recordings were conducted in the 1980’s, with a brief description of the interview's topics provided. Audio files and transcripts are available through the Oregon State University Collections and Archives Research Center.

Oregon State University. 2016. African American Railroad Porters Oral History Collection (OH 29). Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center.

Roanoke Island

Roanoke Island, North Carolina recordings were made in 2003 by members of the Language and Life Project. There are 35 African American speakers in the SLAAP Roanoke Island project, including twenty males and fifteen females, born between 1921 and 1991.

From The Language and Life Project: "Roanoke Island, a thirteen-mile island in the Croatan and Roanoke Sounds, located between the Outer Banks and the mainland coast of North Carolina, is well known as the site of the Lost Colony, where the first settlement of British colonists disappeared in 1587. The untold story of Roanoke Island, however, is its role in the development of Outer Banks African American speech. During the Civil War, the 1862 Battle of Roanoke Island ended Confederate resistance along the Outer Banks and stripped the Confederate army of one of their most vibrant maritime routes for provisions. This Union victory also escalated an influx of freed and runaway slaves to the North Carolina coast and compelled the creation of the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island. The goal of this Freedmen's Colony was to establish a self-sufficient African American community. By the end of the Civil War, the population of the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island was nearly 3500. Unfortunately, the colony was disbanded when the former residents of the island demanded their land back after the war. Following the forced disintegration of the Freedmen's colony, about 300 African American residents remained on Roanoke Island. Many of the approximately 250 current African American residents of Roanoke Island can trace their ancestry back to these people who remained on the island from the Freedmen's Colony."

Carpenter, Jeannine. 2004. The lost community of the Outer Banks: African American speech on Roanoke Island. Master's thesis. Raleigh: North Carolina State University.

Robeson County

The Language and Life Project conducted interviews with over a hundred Robeson County, North Carolina speakers. There are 23 recordings of African American speakers in the SLAAP archive, including six males and seventeen females. Robeson County is a tri-ethnic community located on Interstate 95 near the South Carolina border. Native Americans comprise approximately 40 percent of the county population, African Americans 25 percent, and Anglo Americans the remaining 35 percent.

From The Language and Life Project: "According to historical records, early Anglo settlers from the Scottish Highlands, some of whom were Gaelic speakers, found the Lumbee, the Native-American group within the county, speaking English when they arrived in the Robeson County area in the 1730s. A group of African Americans, including both runaway and free slaves, was also scattered in the region at the time, so that the three ethnic groups have lived in this region for almost three centuries. The ethnic relations of the three groups have shifted through time in response to various sociopolitical events, including the desegregation of county school in the early 1970s. Despite some increase in intercommunication among the three ethnicities, ethnic boundaries remain strong; and Robeson County in large part continues to exist in a state of de facto segregation into three ethnic communities."

Wolfram, Walt, and Clare J. Dannenberg. 1999. Dialect identity in a triethnic context: The case of Lumbee American Indian English. English World-Wide, 20.: 79-116.

Rochester Voices

Rochester Voices is the home of the Phillis Wheatley Public Library Oral History Collection. These oral history recordings, done between 1978 and 1981, highlight the public contributions of African Americans in the Rochester area focusing on occupations, attitudes and roles in the community, discussing things like housing discrimination, segregation, and employment barriers. These recordings nicely completement CORAAL's Rochester component of recordings made by Dr. Sharese King in 2016!

Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories

This collection consists of 23 primary speakers across 63 recordings. The age of the speakers range from 1842 to 1882, with the majority being over 80 years old. These recordings were taken between the years 1932 and 1975, and across 9 states.The individuals discuss their life of enslavement and life after freedom, and some sing songs that they learned as slaves. Unfortunately, not all of the recordings are clearly audible due to background noise and microphone issues. Some time-aligned transcripts of these recordings are available through the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project.

Bailey, Guy, Natalie Maynor, and Patricia Cukor-Avila (eds.). 1991. The Emergence of Black English: Text and Commentary. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.8

Wilmington 1973

Wilmington 1973 consists of 79 individual interviews across 79 recordings. This collection was collected by Ronald Butters in Wilmington, North Carolina between July 1973 and August 1974, and includes speakers born between 1893 and 1957. There are 31 African American participants, including 20 males and 11 females. Located on the southern North Carolina coast, sitting along the Cape Fear River, Wilmington's 1970 population was just over 46,000, and was 34.3% African American. These recordings can be accessed through the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project.

Butters, Ronald R. and Ruth A. Nix. 1986. The English of Blacks in Wilmington, NC. In Michael B. Montgomery and Guy Bailey (eds.), Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 254-263.

Thomas, Erik R. 1989. The implications of /o/ fronting in Wilmington, North Carolina. American Speech 64: 327-333.

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Charlie Farrington, March 2023 (last update)

The Bibliography of African American Language Research was created by Charlie Farrington with additional help by Chloe Tacata. Charlie Farrington maintains the bibliography.

How to cite this bibliography:

Farrington, Charlie. 2023. Bibliography of African American Language Research. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project.

This bibliography was created in Zotero and the contents of this page were automatically generated using BibBase. The title links take you to a separate BibBase page where you can add to your library or add a comment. These pages are not monitored by the ORAAL team.

Please allow time for reference list to load.

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Additional Bibliographic References

On this page, we highlight Black linguists who have contributed to the study of African American Language in the United States. Some have worked on AAL in the variationist sociolinguistic paradigm, while others focus on educational or psycholinguistic questions. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. At the bottom of the page, we include an In Memoriam section.

If you have a suggestion for an addition, or if you are on this list and want to be removed, please contact us at OnlineResourcesAAL@gmail.com.

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Charlie Farrington, February 2024

While much of the work on AAL for educators is geared towards primary and secondary education, on this page we focus on materials for the study of AAL and other non-mainstream varieties in the college classroom. Like our Resources for K-12 Educators page, we include links to videos, other websites, and books that might be off interest. To learn more about AAL more generally, visit Learn More about AAL and our AAL Facts page!

Videos

Documentaries (Full Length)

For more clips and excerpts, visit our Learn More page!

Web Links

Curricula and Materials for AAL

Do You Speak American? For Educators - Do You Speak American? was a 2005 documentary series produced by PBS. On their companion website, there is plenty of information for educators, focused mainly on high school and college levels (available here), including specific curricula for the study of African American English in the classroom.

• African American English Curriculum (College)

Language Diversity on Campus

At North Carolina State University, the Language Diversity Ambassadors, a graduate student run outreach group, promotes awareness about linguistic diversity and linguistic discrimination on NC State's campus as well as society at large. They are in the process making several resources available on their website. Research by Stephany Dunston and colleagues (The Importance of Graduate Student Engagement in a Campus Language Diversity Initiative, Journal of English Linguistics, Vol. 46(3):215-228) suggests that student involvement in such initiatives is critical to reach diverse audiences, both on campus and in the community, but this engagement also teaches them the importance of engagement and being able to communicate research to a wider audience.

Sociolinguistic Artifacts

The Sociolinguistic Artifacts website was developed by Kara Becker at Reed College as a way to collect and curate sociolinguistically relevant media content. The website is frequently updated with contributions by students and other users. Each artifact submission comes with a description of the content and several tags to make searching easier. The screenshot below is the front page for artifacts tagged with African American Language (also available here)

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Over the last fifty years, sociolinguists have described the structure and debated the origins of African American Language (AAL), and much of this work has been applied to factors related to the education of African American students, but also more broadly to the study of language variation in the classroom context. On this page, we gather together several resources for K-12 educators on the study of AAL (and other non-mainstream varieties of English) in the classroom, including links to videos, web links, and books.

You can also visit our Resources for Post-Secondary Educators for materials in the college/university classroom, and our Learn More about AAL page. This website is not exhaustive and will be updated regularly. If you have any videos or other resources you would like to see on this page, please send us a message at OnlineResourcesAAL@gmail.com.

Videos

Web Links

Black Language Syllabus

In the Summer of 2020, Dr. April Baker-Bell and Dr. Carmen Kynard announced the creation of the Black Language Syllabus website. They state: "Our mission for the #BlackLanguageSyllabus is to celebrate the beauty of Blackness and Black Language, fight for Black Linguistic Justice, and provide critical intellectual resources that promote the collective study of Black Language. [...] The #BlackLanguageSyllabus is for Black Language speakers who are looking to re-educate themselves about our mother tongue, academics and educators looking to reimagine their classroom curricula and pedagogies, and for anyone who is interested in learning about Black Language + Black liberation."

In addition to a Black Language Magazine, which was first published in September 2020, the Black Language Syllabus website will include homework on Black Language and Young Adult Literature, Black Language and Hip Hop, and Black Language and Education.

Curricula for Teaching about AAL and Dialect Variation

Over the past several years, the Linguistics Program at North Carolina State University, in conjunction with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, has been at the forefront of research related to dialect education and awareness for both teachers and primary/secondary school students. The materials developed by these researchers include continuing education webinars, videos, lesson plans, and workbooks for K-12 educators. Each of these resources include lesson plans that directly address AAL, but were developed to address the roles of language variation in the classroom more broadly.

Voices of North Carolina Curriculum for 8th graders (developed by Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram)

• The multimedia Voices of North Carolina dialect awareness curriculum was developed by NC State faculty members Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram in 2005 and updated in 2007. The culmination of Wolfram’s work in the public schools over the past twenty years, Voices of North Carolina is the first state-based curriculum on language variation in the country. It is designed to help teachers better meet the standard course of study for 8th grade social studies and it is endorsed by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. The curriculum is designed to be teachable by teachers without any background in linguistics. The curriculum was proven to be highly successful in pilot runs in Johnston County, NC, and in Ocracoke, NC.​

Linguistic Applications in the Classroom (developed by Nicolette Filson)

• Designed in 2011 by Nicolette Filson at NC State, this curriculum corresponds to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study for 9th Grade English Language Arts. It is designed to provide students with the necessary tools to describe the English language through understanding its evolution and critically thinking about the consequences of that change.  Language can be a challenging aspect of the English education curriculum to teach; however, this material is designed particularly so teachers who may have minimal or no linguistic background can still be successful teaching this material. Each day of the curriculum is prefaced with basic information about the material for that day, the key concepts, and, if needed, the historical or social background of the topic.

Continuing Education Webinar Series

• Between February and April 2011, Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram hosted three hour-long webinars investigating dialect and language diversity in North Carolina, including "The Reality of Dialects", "Regional Dialects of NC", and "Social Dialects". These were designed for 8th grade social studies teachers, but were open to all teachers.

For a complete list of resources from NC State Linguistics, please visit their website.

Do You Speak American? For Educators - Do You Speak American? was a 2005 documentary series produced by PBS. On their companion website, there is plenty of information for educators, focused mainly on high school and college levels (available here), including specific curricula for the study of African American English in the classroom.

• African American English Curriculum (High School)

Books

Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy (2020)

April Baker-Bell

"Bringing together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy, this book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. By highlighting the counterstories of Black students, Baker-Bell demonstrates how traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, or consequences these approaches have on Black students' sense of self and identity. This book presents Anti-Black Linguistic Racism as a framework that explicitly names and richly captures the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization Black Language-speakers endure when using their language in schools and in everyday life. To move toward Black linguistic liberation, Baker-Bell introduces a new way forward through Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students. This volume captures what Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy looks like in classrooms while simultaneously illustrating how theory, research, and practice can operate in tandem in pursuit of linguistic and racial justice.　

A crucial resource for educators, researchers, professors, and graduate students in language and literacy education, writing studies, sociology of education, sociolinguistics, and critical pedagogy, this book features a range of multimodal examples and practices through instructional maps, charts, artwork, and stories that reflect the urgent need for antiracist language pedagogies in our current social and political climate." (from routledge.com)

For more information: https://www.routledge.com/Linguistic-Justice-Black-Language-Literacy-Identity-and-Pedagogy/Baker-Bell/p/book/9781138551022

Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011)

Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson

"In today’s classrooms, students possess and use many culturally, ethnically, and regionally diverse English language varieties that may differ from standardized English. This book helps classroom teachers become attuned to these differences and offers practical strategies to support student achievement while fostering positive language attitudes in classrooms and beyond. The text contrasts standardized varieties of English with Southern, Appalachian, and African American English varieties, focusing on issues that are of everyday concern to those who are assessing the linguistic competence of students." (From tcpress.com)

Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools has an accompanying free mobile app, called Valuable Voices, which contains exercises and resources for educators and students. "The app provides 12 ready-to-implement exercises for students and educators — one a month, for a year’s worth of teaching — to build awareness of language and culture. The teaching exercises are geared toward secondary English but can easily be adapted for various grades and content areas."

For more information: https://www.tcpress.com/understanding-english-language-variation-in-u.s.-schools-9780807751480

Check out a video from UMBC featuring Dr. Christine Mallinson talking about Understanding English Language Variation here.

We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary Classroom (2014)

Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson

"Building on the authors’ highly acclaimed first collaboration, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools, this book examines the need to integrate linguistically informed teaching into the secondary English classroom. We Do Language features concrete strategies, models, and vignettes, as well as classroom materials developed by English educators for English educators. It is essential reading for anyone interested in learning about the role that language plays in the experiences of students, both in secondary and postsecondary environments." (From tcpress.com)

The authors' accompanying website includes several exercises and links for each chapter!

Dialects at School: Educating Linguistically Diverse Students (2017)

Jeffrey Reaser, Carolyn Temple Adger, Walt Wolfram, and Donna Christian

"Comprehensive and authoritative, Dialects at School reflects both the relevant research bases in linguistics and education and educational practices concerning language variation. The problems and examples included are authentic, coming from the authors’ own research, observations and interactions in public school classrooms, and feedback in workshops. Highlights include chapters on oral language, reading and writing in dialectally diverse classrooms, as well as a chapter on language awareness for students, offering a clear and compelling overview of how teachers can inspire students to learn more about language variation, including their own community language patterns."

The companion website for Dialects at School contains a wealth of information, including discussion questions, links of interest, as well as activities and resources. (https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138777453/default.php)

Other People's English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy (2019)

Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barrett, Y'Shanda Young-Rivera, and Kim Brian Lovejoy

"Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy presents an empirically grounded argument for a new approach to teaching writing to diverse students in the English language arts classroom. Responding to advocates of the “code-switching” approach, four uniquely qualified authors make the case for “code-meshing”—allowing students to use standard English, African American English, and other Englishes in formal academic writing and classroom discussions. This practical resource translates theory into a concrete road map for pre- and inservice teachers who wish to use code-meshing in the classroom to extend students’ abilities as writers and thinkers and to foster inclusiveness and creativity. The text provides activities and examples from middle and high school as well as college and addresses the question of how to advocate for code-meshing with skeptical administrators, parents, and students. Other People’s English provides a rationale for the social and educational value of code-meshing, including answers to frequently asked questions about language variation. It also includes teaching tips and action plans for professional development workshops that address cultural prejudices." (From Parlor Press).

The authors have prepared an online appendix (available here) that includes mini-units on code-meshing.