African American Voices in Atlanta

Abstract

Survey research in Atlanta suggests that the usual national generalizations about race and language need to be examined in the light of local evidence. The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States preserves recordings of interviews with a number of African Americans from the 1970s, to set a historical baseline for the community. A contemporary random-sample study of African Americans in Atlanta showed that our speakers were highly variable in their vowel production. They not only did not match national generalizations, but appeared to have more of Labov's "Southern Shift" than the local non-African-American speakers who were supposed to be characterized by it. Only a minority of speakers show “mean” behavior for the whole set of vowels. Still, black/white speech relations in the Atlanta metro area create perceptions such that a child from a historic African American neighborhood in Roswell had to "learn how to talk hood" to fit in with children from the Atlanta public schools. And Atlanta, with its central place in the hip-hop community alongside New York and Los Angeles, maintains an identity on the national scene with roots in local speech. History and contemporary evidence combine to show that African American voices in Atlanta belong to a complex system in which speakers can be themselves in their neighborhoods, while at the same time they participate in historical and national trends.

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