Viewing page 73 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

BOOK REVIEWS

DO AFRO-AMERICANS SPEAK A DISTINCTIVE SPEECH FORM?

BLACK ENGLISH: ITS HISTORY AND USAGE IN THE UNITED STATES.
By J.L. Dillard. Random House, New York. xiv; 361 pages. $10.00.

IN ATTEMPTING to discuss what J.L. Dillard calls "Black English" a number of questions arise to be answered. Does there in fact exist a distinctive structurally and functionally systematic speech form which is, as Dillard avers, "the language of about eighty percent of Americans of African ancestry in the U.S.A." or is there simply the matter of an inept and ignorant distortion of educated American English by uneducated Afro-Americans? If "Black English" does in fact exist, to what extent and in what ways does it differ from the speech of other Americans? How did this speech form originate, and are there are analogous forms to be found elsewhere than in the United States? These questions, and others, are answered by Dillard with an impressive display of linguistic scholarship, almost evangelical zeal, and frequent coruscations of exegetical wit. 

J.L. Dillard, a Euro-American, was born in Texas, and holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas. He has taught in universities in the United States, in Latin America, and in Africa where he was associated with United States AID in Yaounda, Cameroun. Dillard has written for a number of scholarly journals in the field of linguistics, and is at present continuing his researches and teaching at the University of Puerto Rico.

It is unfortunate and hardly excusable that Dillard-who as a sociolinguist must know better-persists to apply the demeaning slave-designation "Negro," as adjective and noun, to the people whose distinctive linguistic expression he so painstakingly explicates and so enthusiastically champions. Indeed, he does also employ the term "Afro-Americans," thus indicating that he knows more humanistic, more dignifying designation; terminological consistency in this regard would have been additional convincing evidence of that goodwill toward the African-American community that his labor intimates, and his frequently polemical tone might have been less likely to appear as excessive protest. It is but fair, however, to recognize that the dialect geographers at whom he aims his barbs of criticism were indeed misled, and hence misleading when they simplistically equated 

71