Abstract
This study examines how 9- to 13-year old African American students in a Washington, D.C. after-school program use an African American discourse practice called marking to voice adults performing acts of discipline. Using audio-recorded data collected during nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how students used marking to resemiotize the prestige value of African American Language (AAL) relative to so-called “standard” American English, which is imagined in relation to whiteness as an objectively correct set of linguistic practices. As part of an intersectional raciolinguistic perspective, this study foregrounds how students recruit gender stereotypes to challenge hegemonic ideas about racial and linguistic difference. It also attends to the contradictory nature of everyday acts of resistance: while students transformed hegemonic raciolinguistic ideologies of “articulate” and “appropriate” language in the after school space, they relied on racial and gender stereotypes in order to do so.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the journal editors, Alexandre Duchêne, Ruanni Tupas, and Isabelle Affolter, and the two anonymous reviewers, whose directions and comments helped me much improve upon the conceptualization and analysis in this paper. I would also like to thank Angela Reyes and H. Samy Alim for commenting on earlier versions of this work and for their encouragement. Thank you to Mary Bucholtz and the participants of the 2018 American Anthropological Association panel, who read and heard some version of this work: Addie China, Rosy Hall, Maureen Kosse, and Adrienne Lo. A special thank you to the co-authors of this thematic issue, whose work has been inspiring for my own: Addie China, Rachelle Jereza, Sabina Perrino, Jennifer Roth-Gordon, and Catherine Tebaldi. Thank you so much to Adrienne Lo, our issue’s discussion essay author. Finally, my most heartfelt thank you to Maureen Kosse, who continues to inspire much of my work on voicing and who has joined me on this project since we first organized it as a 2018 AAA panel.
Appendix A. Transcription key
“ ” | constructed dialogue |
. | end of intonation unit |
, | end of intonation unit; fall-rise indicates possibility for turn continuation |
- | self-interruption/repair; break in the word, sound abruptly cut off |
: | lengthening |
h | laughter; each token marks one pulse |
(( )) | transcriber comment |
[ ] | overlap |
= | continuing turn |
(<0.5) | pause <0.5 s |
References
Agha, Asif. 2005. Voicing, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1). 38–59. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38.Search in Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy. 2004. You know my Steez: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society.book-chapter.Search in Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy. 2016. Introducing raciolinguistics: Racing language and languaging race in hyperracial times. In H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford & Arnetha Ball (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 1–30. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.book-chapter.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625696.003.0001Search in Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy, Jooyoung Lee & Lauren Mason Carris. 2010. “Short-fried-rice-eating MCs and good-hair-havin Uncle Tom niggas”: Performing race and ethnicity in rap freestyle battles. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(1). 116–133. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2010.01052.x.Search in Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy & Django Paris. 2017. What is culturally sustaining pedagogy and why does it matter? In Django Paris & H. Samy Alim (eds.), Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world, 1–24. New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University Press.book-chapter.Search in Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. Discourse in the novel. Austin: University of Texas Press.Search in Google Scholar
Basso, Keith. 1979. Portraits of “The Whiteman”: Linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511618147Search in Google Scholar
Berman, Elise. 2019. “Force signs”: Ideologies of corporeal discipline in academia and the Marshall Islands. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28(1). 22–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12175.Search in Google Scholar
Blake, Renee. 2016. Toward heterogeneity: A sociolinguistic perspective on the classification of Black people in the twenty-first century. In H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford & Arnetha Ball (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 153–170. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.book-chapter.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625696.003.0009Search in Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1982. Language and symbolic power. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Brodkin, Karen. 1999. How jews became white folks and what that says about race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary. 2011. White kids: Language, race, and styles of youth identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511975776Search in Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2006. Little women and vital champions: Gendered language shift in a northern Italian town. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16(2). 194–210. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2006.16.2.194.Search in Google Scholar
Chun, Elaine. 2001. The construction of white, Black, and Korean American identities through African American Vernacular English. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1). 52–64. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.52.Search in Google Scholar
Chun, Elaine. 2016. The meaning of Ching-Chong: Language, racism, and response in new media. In H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford & Arnetha Ball (eds.). Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 81–96. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.book-chapter.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625696.003.0005Search in Google Scholar
Clark, John Taggart. 2006. Negotiating elite talk: Language, race, class and identity among African American high schoolers. New York, NY: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511755064Search in Google Scholar
Cutler, Cecilia. 2003. “Keepin’ It Real”: White hip-hoppers’ discourses of race and authenticity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13(2). 211–233. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2003.13.2.211.Search in Google Scholar
Delfino, Jennifer B. 2016. Fighting words?: Joning as conflict talk and identity performance among African American preadolescents. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(5). 631–653. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12214.Search in Google Scholar
Delfino, Jennifer B. Forthcoming. Speaking of race: Language, identity, and academic success among African American children. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Search in Google Scholar
Echeverría, Begoña. 2008. Language ideologies and practices in (en)gendering the Basque nation. Language in Society 32(3). 383–413. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404503323048.Search in Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope & Sally McConnell-Ginnett. 2013. Language and gender. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139245883Search in Google Scholar
Fader, Ayala. 2007. Reclaiming sacred sparks: Linguistic syncretism and gendered language shift among Hasidic Jews in New York. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17(1). 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2007.17.1.1.Search in Google Scholar
Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review 85(2). 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149.Search in Google Scholar
Fordham, Signithia. 1996. Blacked out: Dilemmas of race, identity and academic success at capital high. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226229980.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Fought, Carmen. 2006. Language and ethnicity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511791215Search in Google Scholar
Gal, Susan & Judith T. Irvine. 2019. Signs of difference: Language and ideology in social life. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781108649209Search in Google Scholar
Goodwin Marjorie Harness 1991. He-Said-She-Said: Talk as social organization among black children. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Green, Lisa J. 2002. African American English: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511800306Search in Google Scholar
H. Samy Alim & Geneva Smitherman. 2012. Articulate while black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the U.S. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Hall, Rosemary. 2019. The mouths of others: The linguistic performance of race in Bermuda. Journal of Sociolinguistics 23(3). 223–243. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12345.Search in Google Scholar
Hannerz, Ulf. 2004. Soulside: Inquiries into ghetto culture and community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511841057Search in Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. 1995. The voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and self in a modern Mexicano narrative. In Bruce Mannheim & Dennis Tedlock (eds.), The dialogic emergence of culture, 97–147. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.book-chapter.Search in Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. 2008. The everyday language of white racism. New York, NY: Wiley Blackwell.10.1002/9781444304732Search in Google Scholar
Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious language: Gender and linguistic modernity in Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520939066Search in Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith T. 2001. “Style” as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In John R. Rickford & Penelope Eckert (eds.), Style and sociolinguistic variation, 21–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.book-chapter.10.1017/CBO9780511613258.002Search in Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G. 1994. Race rebels: Culture, politics, and the Black working class. New York, NY: The Free Press.Search in Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott. 2004. Dude. American Speech 79(3). 281–305. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-79-3-281.Search in Google Scholar
Kosse, Maureen. 2018. Recontextualizing Disney’s raciolinguistic sins: Alt-right uses of “Black” and “Jewish” voices. Paper presented at the 117th annual American Anthropological Association Meeting. November 17, 2018: San Jose, CA.confproc.Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Search in Google Scholar
Leeman, Jennifer. 2004. Racializing language: A history of linguistic ideologies in the U.S. census. The Journal of Language and Politics 3(3). 507–534. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.3.3.08lee.Search in Google Scholar
Liebow, Eliot. 2003. Tally’s corner. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield Publishers.Search in Google Scholar
Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. New York, NY: Routledge.10.4324/9780203348802Search in Google Scholar
Love-Nichols, Jessica. 2018. There’s no such thing as bad language, but: Colorblindness and teachers’ ideologies of linguistic appropriateness. In Mary Bucholtz, Dolores Inés Casillas & Jink Sook Lee (eds.), Feeling it: Language, race, and affect in Latinx youth learning, 91–111. New York, NY: Routledge.book-chapter.10.4324/9781315099729-5Search in Google Scholar
Mitchell-Kernan, C. 2001. Signifying and marking: Two Afro-American speech acts. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader, 151–164. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.book-chapter.Search in Google Scholar
Morgan, Marcyliena. 2002. Language, discourse, and power in African American culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511613616Search in Google Scholar
Omi, Michael & Howard Winant. 1994. Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York, NY: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Paris, Django. 2011. Language across difference: Ethnicity, communication, and youth identities in changing urban schools. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511978852Search in Google Scholar
Pollock, Mica. 2004. Colormute: Race talk dilemmas in an American school. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Prince, Sabiyha. 2014. African Americans and gentrification in Washington, D.C: Race, class and social justice in the nation’s capital. New York, NY: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Rahman, Jacquelyn. 2003. “Golly gee!”: The construction of middle-class characters in the monologues of African American comedians. Paper given at NWAV 32, Philadelphia, PA.Search in Google Scholar
Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London, UK: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Rampton, Ben. 2009. Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and stylization. Language in Society 38(2). 149–176. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404509090319.Search in Google Scholar
Reyes, Angela. 2016. The voicing of Asian American figures: Korean linguistic styles at an Asian American cram school. In Samy H. Alim, John R. Rickford & Arnetha Ball (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 309–326. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.book-chapter.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625696.003.0018Search in Google Scholar
Reyes, Angela. 2017. Inventing postcolonial elites: Race, language, mix, excess. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27(2). 210–231. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12156.Search in Google Scholar
Rickford, John R. & Russell J. Rickford. 2000. Spoken soul: The story of Black English. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.Search in Google Scholar
Rickford, John R. & Sharese King. 2016. Language and linguistics on trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other vernacular speakers) in the courtroom and beyond. Language 92(4). 948–988. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0078.Search in Google Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan. 2016. Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2). 162–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12116.Search in Google Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan. 2019. Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780190634728.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 1996. Monoglot standard in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In Donald Brenneis & Ronald H. S. Macaulay (eds.), The matrix of language: Contemporary linguistic anthropology, 284–306. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.book-chapter.10.4324/9780429496288-18Search in Google Scholar
Stack, Carol. 1974. All our kin. New York, NY: Basic Books.Search in Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520946194Search in Google Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 1996. Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race, and class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Search in Google Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2001. The complex diversity of language in the U.S. In Ida Susser & Thomas C. Patterson (eds.), Cultural diversity in the United States: A critical reader, 190–205. New York, NY: Blackwell Publishing.book-chapter.Search in Google Scholar
Vinson, Chuck (dir.). 1997. Steve Harvey: One man. Original air date: December 20, Home Box Office.Search in Google Scholar
Williams, Brett. 2001. A river runs through us. American Anthropologist 103(2), 409–431. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2001.103.2.409.Search in Google Scholar
Zimman, Lal. 2014. The discursive construction of sex: Remaking and reclaiming the gendered body in talk about genitals among trans men. In Lal Zimman, Joshua Raclaw & Jenny Davis (eds.), Queer excursions: Retheorizing binaries in language, gender, and sexuality, 13–34. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.book-chapter.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937295.003.0002Search in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Racialization and the national body: (Re)defining selves and others in changing contexts of liberal democratic governance
- “#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter
- “They are just a danger”: Racialized ideologies in Northern Italy and the Philippines
- Talking “like a race”: Gender, authority, and articulate speech in African American students’ marking speech acts
- Racialization and gender in Tumblr: Beyoncé as a raciolinguistic semiotic resource
- Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae
- Commentary
- Commentary: On affect and race under capitalism
- Book Review
- Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Racialization and the national body: (Re)defining selves and others in changing contexts of liberal democratic governance
- “#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter
- “They are just a danger”: Racialized ideologies in Northern Italy and the Philippines
- Talking “like a race”: Gender, authority, and articulate speech in African American students’ marking speech acts
- Racialization and gender in Tumblr: Beyoncé as a raciolinguistic semiotic resource
- Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae
- Commentary
- Commentary: On affect and race under capitalism
- Book Review
- Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad