● “was” with the plural subject: e.g. We was there too early.
● such words as “come, done, seen, knowed” for the Simple Past Tense
● “took, fell, tore, went, wrote”, etc. as the Past Participle.
Usage research has revealed that those and other non-standard forms are used most by less educated working class of rural and urban districts and frequently they are the oldest speakers. The above mentioned non-standard forms are still very common. E.g. in Anniston, Alabama “don't” was found more than 90% of the time by all the working-class groups in contrast to the upper class usage where it accounts for only 10%.
1.5. ETHNIC VARIETIES OF AMERICAN ENGLISH
As it may be expected in countries of immigration there are many millions of inhabitants in the US and Canada whose native language is not English. And there are much more people whose ethnic background is not English. In the immigrant generation and sometimes in the second generation people spoke and speak English which was/is characterized by their native language interference. But the fourth generation has become monolingual English and all signs of interference of their native mother tongue have disappeared. Yet there are some groups of speakers who speak English that is distinct from that of their neighbors.
They are:
● Native American Indians;
● Chicanos;
● American blacks who speak ethnic dialect Black English.
1.5.1. Native American English
Today the majority of the Indians are monolingual speakers of English. For most of them there is probably no divergence between their English and that of their non-Indian fellows of equivalent age, sex, education and social status. However, among Native Americans who live in concentrated groups (in reservations) there are also as many different kinds of American Indian English as there are American Indian language traditions. It is the result of the on-going influence of the substratum (the traditional languages) on English. Many of the special features of this English are such familiar phenomena as:
● word-final consonant cluster simplification,
e.g. west > wes’;
● uninflected “be”;
● multiple negation;
● the lack of subject-verb concord.
Although mainstream non-standard English has the same sort of “surface phenomena”, they are the products of “different grammatical systems”. For example, some traditional Indian languages require identical marking of the subject and verb. Indian English has such forms as “some peoples comes in”.
1.5.2. Spanish-influenced English
Hispanic Americans are one of the two largest ethnic groups. They consist of three major groups: ● Puerto Ricans /'pwE:tqu 'rJkqnz/
● Cubans
● Chicanos (or Mexican American)
Approximately 300.000 of roughly 1 mln Cuban Americans live in Dade County in Florida. Another 20% live in West New York and Union City, New Jersey. Because of this areal concentration they have been able to create unified communities with ethnic boundaries, i.e. so called Little Havanas. But integration with the surrounding native Anglo communities is relatively great. Only 6++% of the second generation of Cuban Americans, as is usually the case with the second generation Hispanics, speak English fluently with North American Accent. And only the presence of loan words such as "bad grass" - "gerba mala" may indicate the origin of speaker.
As American citizens Puerto Ricans have long moved freely between their native island and the mainland US. Most originally they went at first to New York city. Many members of their community are bilingual and only 1% of the second generation are monolingual Spanish speakers. Some research showed that those brought up in Puerto Rico speak English marked by interference phenomena.
Chicanos numbered 10.8 mln people in early 1985 and are a rapidly growing group. Chicanos are most numerous in California where they are urban population and in Texas where they are relatively rural. Spanish is more commonly maintained in the Texas environment than in California. Some of them are bilingual, others monolingual English speakers. Among the bilinguals their language is characterized by frequent code-switching which is referred to as Tex-Mex. The linguistic habits of a large portion of the Chicano community are continually reinforced by indirect and direct contact with Spanish. Most important for regarding Chicano English as an ethnic variety of American English is that it is passed onto children and serves as an important function in the speech community and has its own norms. The linguistic features of Chicano English are most prominent in the pronunciation including stress and intonation but there seems to be little syntactic and lexical deviation from English. As the with the Puerto Ricos contact with blacks may result in the use of various features of Black English. Pronunciation shows obvious signs of Spanish influence:
● the shift of stress in compounds (mini ' skirt)
● rising pitch contours
● rising pitch in declarative sentences
● devoicing and hardening of final voiced consonants (e.g. please /s/)
● realization of labio-dental fricative /v/ as bilabial /b/
● realization of / T / - / D / as /t/ - /d/
● realization central / A / as low /a/
● simplification of final consonant clusters
● merge of /t S / - / S / to / S /: e.g. / tSek / - / Sek / (check – sheck)
1.5.3. Black English
The most widely recognized and researched is American Black English. Most middle class blacks do not speak Black English and are indistinguishable form the white people. It is the poorer and working lower class both in rural South and urban North who speak the most distinctive form of this variety. It is often associated with the values of vernacular culture including performance style especially associated with black males (as boasting, ritual insults, preaching). One of the main debates connected with Black English concerns its origin. Some maintain that Black English derives from an early creol that itself derives from West African pidgin English. The term “pidgin” is used by linguists as the label for speech varieties that develop when speakers of two or more different languages come into contact with each other and do not know each other’s language. Pidgin is not the native language of any group. Where pidgins still exist, their use may be confined to the marketplace or similar domain (trade languages/trade jargons).
Black English contains grammatical categories especially of the verbs which are different from American grammar. Some scholars believe that Black English derives from the English of the white slave owners and slave drivers which ultimately derives form the English of Great Britain and Ireland. There are a great number of researchers that take the position between these two maintaining that both have had influence on Black English.
It has generally been believed that Black English has phonological system that differs greatly from that of American English though it is often similar to white southern vernacular English. They share following features:
● / I /, /e/ sound similar: pin = pen
● merger of / OI / and / O / especially before /l/: boil = ball
● merger of / I / and / x / before / N k/: / TIN k/, / TxN k/ sound as / TxNk / think = thank
● merger of / I r/ and /er/: cheering = chairing
Both Black English and Southern English are non-rhotic and simplify consonant clusters: e.g. /desk - des' - desiz/. But only Black English regularly deletes the inflectional endings /s/ and /t/, /d/: e.g. looked > look, eats > eat, Fred’s > Fred.
Some scholars have called the existence of the category of tense into question because the Past Tense marker -ed is frequently missing. However the Past Tense forms of the irregular verbs where there is no -ed are always present (e.g. wrote). A number of other grammatical features of Black English include:
● “been” as the marker of the present perfect: e.g. I been known him. – I have known him.
● “be done” is used as future resultative: I'll be done killed that man if he tries to lay a hand on my kid again.
The most discussions have centered on what is called invariant or distributive "be". In Black English there are two distinct usages of the copular "be": The first involves zero use of the copular: “She smart”, “She tired”. It is used to describe intermittent state and it is often goes with the appropriate adverb such as “sometimes”: e.g. Sometimes she be sad.
1.6. MALE-FEMALE DIFFERENCES
Many Americans have now confronted the issue of language sexism. Concern for gender equality in American society encompasses language issues along with other sociopolitical concerns. In most studies of male-female differences the term “gender” is used in the meaning of “the complex of social, cultural and psychological phenomena affected to sex” (Mc Connel - Ginet 1988). The term “sex” refers simply to female and male physiology.
One of the general findings regarding male-female differences is that women tend to use more standard language features than men, whose speech tends to be more vernacular:
· In one of the earliest studies of sex-based language variation, John Fischer (1958) showed that among the group of New England children girls tended to use more word-final –ing than boys.
· Walt Wolfram (1969) demonstrated the greater use of standard variants by African American females than males.
The second finding is that women tend to adopt innovative language features much more quickly than men. In other words, women tend to lead in linguistic change.
1.6.1. Approaches to the Explanation of Cross-Sex Difference