Sociolinguistic Interview

Irving and I sit across from each other at a vintage `60's Formica table, my trusty recorder in hand. He is a black male in his mid 20's who grew up in a region of Atlanta called the "SWAts" (South West Atlanta), for the most part, except for the five years that he spent in a little Georgia town called Hogansville with his grandmother. After high-school, he joined the Army and then went on to college. This is where we are now. Irving and I are both in the same AAVE class, and we discussed some of the topics that have been brought up in that class over a banana and a bowl of cereal.

After Irving explained his background to me, which situations in his life he felt had the strongest influence on his idiolect. He had learned his speech style, in part, from his parents (who are both college graduates) from his teachers and from television. The biggest influence, however, was his grandmother. "She was a huge influence, (II.2)" he replied. He went on to say that both she and his grandfather were schoolteachers. This had an enormous impact on the way that he spoke because he was always being corrected by his grandmother for using improper grammar. Although at the time she was retired, Irving's grandmother had been a kindergarten teacher -- so she was accustomed to teaching children Irving's age how to speak. I asked if the types of things that she corrected were AAVE-isms or normal, everyday kid-learning-how-to-speak-isms. "She didn't care what wordage' I used." He went on to say that his grandmother used AAVE so she was not trying to dissuade him from speaking it. She wanted for him to know how to speak correctly so that he could code-shift when necessary. There was even code-shifting within his family. There were some situations wh...

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...e be accepted in the larger. This idea not exclusively a group goal, but is even expressed on the individual level as shown in this interview. The language that the individual associates him or herself with seems to play a key role as to which group the individual wishes to belong. Speakers of SE identify with mainstream America, speakers of AAVE with the black culture created in opposition of the mainstream culture. Bi-dialectal people, like Irving, identify with the black culture almost exclusively, but seem to use SE as a tool or "weapon" within the mainstream society. Irving doesn't seem to accept standard English as anything other than a necessity. He doesn't believe that SE is an integral part of himself, but rather an extension of his ability to communicate with others. Standard English really is a weapon to Irving, and a weapon that he wields proficiently.