ABSTRACT
Research on African-American discourse, verbal genres, and interactions has been voluminous, covering the fields of linguistics, folklore, anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, and literary criticism. The way African Americans talk to each other not only reveals how languages are socially constructed (e.g., Volosinov 1973; Bakhtin 1981), but that speech events, activities, participants, and context affect language in complex and often unpredictable ways (cf. Goffman 1974; Hymes 1974; Gumperz 1982; Ochs 1992). An analysis of how language has contributed to the social construction of the African-American experience is especially illuminating since omnificent African-American verbal styles and repertoires continue to flourish, in spite of American middle-class values which both criticize and fetishize the culture and language. The concrete result of this dualism is a dominant culture which describes African-American speech as bad, uneducated, unintelligible, etc., while wantonly imitating and celebrating its wit, creative vitality, and resilience.
