A SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF “DOUBLE-CONSCIOUSNESS”: ENGLISH AND ETHNICITY IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore aspects of the relationships between English and “ethnicity” in the global African experience, as intergroup and intragroup processes. The topic itself has been inspired, in part, by the notion of “double consciousness,” a concept usually associated with W.E.B. DuBois to describe that peculiar tendency of the black person … of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (DuBois 1997, 38). Though DuBois was specifically describing the African American condition of being, the concept itself is equally relevant to the rest of the black world: In the latter case, however, the two-ness would involve the schism between “Negroness” and “humanness” within a context in which the terms of that humanness are defined by the “racial” (i.e., European) other. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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