"Tank ye, massa doctor, you did a me much great good; white or blackee woman, I care not for."
(a male slave after his castration; recorded by C.W. Janson in the end of eighteeth century) (Dillard)

Blacks will always differ from all other ethnic groups living in the USA. Almost all of them were brought over as slaves and also remained slaves until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The history of Black English in the United States is complex and even today, only partly understood. This paper reviews changes in Black English which are due to social and historical events of the American Black experience.

The Early Periods of Black English

One theory states that the policy of the slave traders was to bring people of different language backgrounds together in the ships, to make it difficult for groups to plot rebellion. The slaves found themselves in a situation where they had to develope a common auxiliary language. A pidgin language (an invented language with no native speakers) was formed for communication between different slave groups and also between the slaves and the sailors, many of whom spoke English. When the African slaves produced children, pidgin turned into a creole (a language with native speakers). During the next few hundred years this creole developed and changed to what is today known as Black English.

From the very early period (1620-1700) little evidence survives of the language spoken by African slaves. But by 1715 there clearly was an African Pidgin English known worldwide. The first examples were stated in court records and treatises on smallpox. However, it is self-evident that the spoken pidgin existed long before it was written down, maybe even before 1650.

In time there was a social division of the slave community. Black house servants were daily exposed to their masters' culture and, of course, to Standard English. Blacks working in the fields continued to live in their own isolated communities and thus continued to develop their own community's lingua franca. From the times of the American Revolution there are sufficient written documents to form a clear picture of the black language situation in the continental colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century slaves from Massachusetts to South Carolina used at least three varieties of English:

1. African Pidgin English, spoken mostly by slaves recently imported from Africa;
2. Plantation Creole, spoken by a great mass of field workers; and
3. Standard English, spoken by slaves who had learned English from their masters.

Over the course of time, the Pidgin and the Plantation Creole started to decreolize (change in the direction of Standard English). Different dialects were also formed due to geographical and social variations. However, the geographical variations were surprisingly small. Slaves from different plantations seemed to have a great deal of intercourse (in all senses of that term), and as the Marquis de Chastellux and the Reverend Jonathan Boucher reported in the end of the eighteenth century, slave society "existed beside but almost apart from the white community" (Dillard).

The General Awareness of Black English During The Civil War Period

Just before the war, abolitionist agitation made the language of the slaves known to almost every serious reader in the United States. Books like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) showed differences between the language of most slaves and that of the whites. More and more slaves were of course speaking Standard English at this point. There is also clear evidence that Plantation Creole decreolized more slowly in the plantation areas, where groups of slaves lived largely autonomous lives. Even today it remains unclear exactly how much influence blacks had on the pronunciation of the southern whites. But certain whites picked up speech habits from their servants and gradually developed a distinctive, southern way of speaking.

This influence of Black English on standard English was also seen outside the South. The early records show that all the varieties of Black English were also spoken in the North.

The Regional Spread of Black English in The Post-Emancipation Period

After the American Civil War (1861-1865), slaves received civil rights for the first time. In the early twentieth century, there was a great exodus to the industrial cities of the North. Several reasons can be found for this movement, e.g. bad crop years in the southern cotton fields and later a great demand for a labor force due to World War I. As blacks immigrated to new parts of the country, their culture became known especially through music and dance. New, informal vocabulary was picked up from gospels, blues and jazz and became used by all Americans. Blacks made a new cultural contact with mainstream Americans and this also led to a change in their own speech forms.

In the southern plantations, social conditions did not change much. Thus plantation creole was used for a long time after the Emancipation.

After World War II, desegregation, Negro rioting, and the Black Power movement brought Black English again to the attention of whites. Black children had by now entered previously all-white schools, and educators became interested in their language. Huge research projects made Black English one of the most studied dialects of all time. Whites finally realised that this language had distinct rules of its own and was not just a mass of random errors committed by blacks trying to speak English. In July 1979, The Ann Arbor School District in Michigan became the first school ordered by a court to take black children's dialect into account when planning the curriculum.

Creole English may not nowadays be apparent in the speech of many blacks, but it has been estimated that about 80 per cent of present-day black Americans speak a certain variety of English sometimes referred to as "street talk". Many blacks maintain two dialects side by side (standard and creole) and this has been actually recommended by black educators. Just like all ethnic groups, blacks have maintained an internal uniformity although being geographically separated.

The Future of Black English?

Many scholars have argued that Black English is "a language that will not be with us much longer" (Dillard). Pedagogues, black and white, have demanded its extinction. But dialects are maintained by social pressures within their own groups of speakers. Group identity is perhaps the strongest of those pressures. In 1960s black artists and intellectuals picked up Black English and made it a symbol of black unity. Today a school for black poets produces poetry in Black English and many writers use it in prose, too.

Perhaps one day the United States will officially become a multidialectal nation. This would finally give a well-deserved recognition to Black English, among other dialects, so that it would no longer be described as a "Non-Standard" language.

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Works Cited

• Dillard, J.L. Black English; Its History and Usage in the United States. New York: Random House, 1972.
• Ferguson, Charles A., and Shirley Brice Heath, eds. Language in the USA. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981
• Marckwardt, Albert H. American English. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

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