In the minds of many, black street speech--the urban dialect of black Americans--bespeaks illiteracy, poverty, and ignorance. John Baugh challenges those prejudices in this brilliant new inquiry into the history, linguistic structure, and survival within white society of black street speech. In doing so, he successfully integrates a scholarly respect for black English with a humanistic approach to language differences that weds rigor of research with a keen sense of social responsibility.
Baugh's is the first book on black English that is based on a long-term study of adult speakers....
In the minds of many, black street speech--the urban dialect of black Americans--bespeaks illiteracy, poverty, and ignorance. John Baugh challenges...
Humankind has always been fascinated and troubled by the way languages and dialects differ. Linguistically based differences in point of view have preoccupied many original minds of the past, such as Kant, and remain at the forefront of language study: in philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, and other fields.
Paul Friedrich's The Language Parallax argues persuasively that the "locus and focus" of differences among languages lies not so much in practical or rational aspects as in the complexity and richness of more poetic dimensions--in the nuances of words, or...
Humankind has always been fascinated and troubled by the way languages and dialects differ. Linguistically based differences in point of view have ...
