The Relationship of the Speech of American Negroes to the Speech of Whites

ALMOST without exception, any scholar studying American Negro speech, whether as an end in itself or as part of a larger project, must dispose of two widely held superstitions: (1) he must indicate that there is no speech form identifiable as of Negro origin solely on the basis of Negro physical characteristics; (2) he must show that it is probable that some speech forms of Negroes-and even of some whites-may be derived from an African cultural background by the normal processes of cultural transmission. Such a necessity of refuting folk beliefs seldom arises when one is studying the English of other American minority groups. For these, it is generally assumed, though not necessarily in the terms anthropologists would use, that all linguistic patterns are culturally transmitted, that where a group with a foreign-language backgroundsuch as the Pennsylvania Germans-has been speaking a divergent variety of English for several generations in an overwhelmingly English-speaking area, there is nothing in their speech that cannot be explained on the basis of the culture contacts between the speakers of two languages. We are generous in recognizing Scandinavian linguistic survivals in Minnesota and the Dakotas, German in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley. We do not explain this influence on the basis of Scandinavian hair color, German skull configuration, or Dutch mouth shape, but on the grounds that two languages were spoken side by side, so that bilingualism developed in the community.' In forming judgments on the speech of the American Negro, however, the process has been reversed: the cultural transmission of speech forms of African origin has been traditionally denied, and the explanation of