Rahman 2008

Rahman, Jacquelyn. 2008. Middle Class African Americans: Reactions and Attitudes Toward African American English. American Speech 83 (2).

Rahman's 2008 article attempts to fill a gap in sociolinguistic study of African American English (AAE) by examining middle-class (Kerbo 1991) black speech. She argues that both AAE and standard English (SE) features are employed by middle-class African Americans, and explores the use of these features in the significance of "sounding black" in the judgments listeners make with regard to standardness, class, and appropriateness of speech styles. Conducting a two-part experiment among middle-class African Americans at a university, comprised of a survey of 66 African Americans about their attitudes toward AAE and their understanding of it, and also a perception study of 28 speakers, Rahman finds significant effects of phonological and syntactic features of AAE. She argues for a classification of Black Standard English (BSE), a variety which employs the phonological features of AAE with SE syntactic features. Like other studies, Rahman finds there is a continuum in AAE feature use, but also in the perceptions of situational appropriateness, standardness, and social class which it conveys. She concludes that at the base of every style stands a dialect, and that many African Americans are bidialectal, able to style-shift AAE features and SE features to convey solidarity with race-peers or to demonstrate level of education and social class.