6 Linguists tend to use the term African American Vernacular English
(AAVE) or African American English (AAE), but there are many other
variants that are widely used; Black English Vernacular (BEV) is
probably one of the most common.
7 For further reading on Mock Spanish, see the recommendations at the
end of this chapter.
8 As far as I am aware, there is no body of work on how Latino or Asian
communities hear or interpret AAVE, or what values are attached to
AAVE speakers. As I cannot extrapolate that information from the
available data, I have to restrict my analysis to Anglos.
9 The representation of African Americans in entertainment was touched
upon in Chapter 6, but the subject is a very large and complex one.
Any real examination would have to include consideration of age-
grading.
10 Metathesis is the process by which letters, sounds or symbols are
transposed, as in the change of Old English brid to Modern English
bird.
11 The movie My Cousin Vinnie is set in the South, with two main
characters who are Italian-American New Yorkers with very strong
accents. This is one of the few fictional treatments that purposefully
draws attention to stigmatized features of Anglo English that I’m
aware of, and well worth watching.
12 At the end of this chapter you will find another news column on the
subject of athletes’ use of AAVE.
13 Eagleton has argued that literature has a singular relationship to the
ideological process. He finds it to be:
the most revealing mode of experiential access to ideology that we
possess. It is in literature, above all, that we observe in a peculiarly
complex, coherent, intensive and immediate fashion the working of
ideology in the textures of lived experience of class-societies.
(1976: 101)The representation of spoken dialect in written fiction is a very large
and complex topic. See especially the work of Dennis Preston on this
issue.