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FREEDOMWAYS                   FIRST QUARTER 1973

the speech of Afro-Americans (Dillard's "Black English") with the English of simple white folk. His reproaches of those scholars who sought to find the origins of American Afro-English in English regional dialects rather tan in an African-English contact situation would have been more effectively pointed by his use, by way of example, of the term "Afro-English" instead of "Black English."

This is what Dillard has to say about the origin of American Afro-English:

...[S]ome indication of a specifically West African variety of English goes back to the sixteenth century. Today there is a clear-cut case of variety of American English, related to West African varieties in Gullah, which is spoken on the Sea Islands off Georgia and South Carolina. French Creole, mutually intelligible with Haitian French Creole, is spoken in Louisiana and Southeastern Texas. Both of these languages are related to the Caribbean Creoles. Recent research presents evidence that the English of most American Blacks retains some features which are common to both Caribbean and West African varieties of English.

Dillard goes on to show that during the 1960's a group of linguists, unburdened with preconceptions about where American Afro-English had its origins, have pointed out that this form of English is different in Grammar (in syntax) from the standard American English of the mainstream Euro-American culture. Moreover, these recent researches demonstrate that it is to West Africa and not to Britain that one must look to find the direct origins of American Afro-English.

Like the West Indian varieties, American Black English can be traced to a creolized version of English based upon pidgin spoken by slaves; it probably came from the West Coast of Africa—almost certainly not directly from Great Britain.

It might be here commented that the attempt by the linguists whom Dillard criticizes to disassociate American Afro-English from Africa is the analogue in linguistic studies to the efforts of American historians to disassociate African-Americans from an African historical and cultural patrimony. Such an attitude, rooted in the inveterate racism which permeates American life and culture, requires that African-Americans be consistently conceptionalized as un-original, uncreative (except in singing, dancing and clowning for the entertainment of white folks), and dependent on soiled, inappropriate and ill-fitting cultural hand-me-downs from the big white house with


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