Aspects of Intonation in Black English

Abstract

AN IMPORTANT OBJECT of recent sociolinguistic research has been an American dialect spoken primarily by adolescents in the speech communities in Northern urban areas. This dialect is presently called black English. Sociolinguists such as Labov et al. (1968), Dillard (1972), and Shuy, Wolfram, and Riley (1967) have presented convincing evidence that English is widespread throughout the urban North and that it varies little in its segmental characteristics whether it occurs in New York City, Detroit, Washington, Los Angeles, or other urban areas. Such research has presented convincing evidence that English is a systematic dialect with its own rules of semantics, syntax, and segmental phonology-a dialect having possible roots in West African languages. While the semantic, syntactic, and segmental phonemic structure of English have all been described in some detail, its suprasegmental characteristics-stress, rhythm, and intonation-have been largely overlooked in most studies. At the same time, investigators have consistently recorded the impression that these suprasegmental features are probably just as distinctive in English as the other, more carefully described, features of syntax and segmental phonology. Intonation, the patterns of pitch used in speech, is one of the suprasegmental features of English that has not received much close examination in sociolinguistic research. Yet it appears to be one of the most important features for the communication of attitude in all social situations. Most sentences or phrases can be uttered with several different intonation contours, according to the speaker's momentary feeling about the subject matter. Kenneth Pike (1945: 22) has remarked that often react more violently to the intonational meanings than to the lexical ones; if a man's tone of voice belies his words, we immediately assume that the intonation more faithfully reflects his true linguistic intentions. Thus, when the characteristic intonation patterns of English differ from those of white speech, we may expect some fairly serious miscommunication of attitude between blacks and whites. For example, it is commonly said that English has a wider range of intonation than white speech and that whites can easily misinterpret the excited sound of blacks in conversation. Newsweek (21 Feb. 1972, p. 79) reports that several years ago a white policeman arrested several youths on the street in Indianapolis

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