(= A AFS 212 & A LIN 212) African American English

Catalog description

This course provides an overview of the study of linguistics through the specific lens of African American English (AAE). With an estimated 30 million speakers, AAE is a major variety of American English that is rule-governed and complex; however, it continues to be plagued by social stigma in many arenas. This course focuses on AAE's distinctive features in the areas of sound and sentence structure, as well as topics in linguistic anthropology and applied linguistics, e.g., the impact of language ideology on AAE speaking communities. Only one version may be taken for credit.