Code-Switching in the Oral Life Narratives of African-American Women: Challenges to Linguistic Hegemony

Abstract

In an essay published posthumously in The Sanctified Church (1982)1 Zora Neale Hurston said that after sheer drama, the second most notable characteristic of Negro expression is the will to adorn. She went on to say, Perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator (Hurston, 1981, p. 50). This pronouncement, with its casual suggestion of indifference to received notions of correctness, anticipated the present-day scholarly interest in the cultural and political significance of the durability and vitality of lowprestige ethnically based dialects. I suspect my own interest in this propensity for adornment in Black English Vernacular began when I was a child and my father, a master storyteller from Mississippi, talked about cullud boys makin they way through graveyards at dusk, and my great-grandfather, a runaway slave whom no one heard tell of sence. About four years ago, in deciding upon a dissertation project in anthropological linguistics, I decided to formally investigate patterns and significance of code-switching and other contextualization cues in the oral life narratives of African-American women. This decision derived

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