Browsing by Subject "Authority situation"

The topic of this study is code switching among African Americans in authority situations. This topic is explored through analyzing a set of 90 interviews collected from the Corpus of Regional African American Language, which is a corpus made up of sociolinguistic interviews. Each interviewee is African American, whereas the interviewers represent varying racial backgrounds. The interviews selected for this study are analyzed based on a set of five linguistic variables, which can be realized with an African American Vernacular English (AAVE) variant or a Standard English variant. The five linguistic variables which have been chosen for this study are double negation, the absence of ‘be’, the absence of the genitive marker ‘-s’, habitual be and the use of ‘was’ instead of the plural form ‘were’. In addition to the linguistic variables, the interviews are analyzed based on three social variables which are age, sex and level of education. The five linguistic variables are manually identified and recorded in each of the 90 interviews. Along with the occurrences of the five linguistic variables which represent AAVE, the occurrences of the standard English (SE) alternative are recorded as opportunities for the use of one of the five AAVE variants. The number of occurrences of the AAVE variants and SE variants are then added together to make up the number of total opportunities for the use of the five linguistic variables. Finally, the percentage of AAVE variants and SE variants from the number of total opportunities is calculated. The results of this study show those interviewees interviewed by African American interviewers are more likely to use the AAVE variants, whereas the interviewees interviewed by white interviewers are more likely to use the SE variants. Furthermore, under 19-year-olds, over 50-year-olds, men and those with a middle school level education are more likely to use the AAVE variants than those interviewees which represent the other social categories. Based on the results of this study, it is possible to conclude that the interviewees may feel a heightened need for code switching in situations where the interviewer is white. Furthermore, women, those interviewees with a higher level of education and those that are of a working age may also feel a need to alter their language more in authority situations, which suggests certain social factors, along with race, may increase the likelihood of code switching.