Research Summary

African American English and Haitian Creole

The two languages I have done the most research on are Haitian Creole and African American English (AAE), more on the latter. Another term used for AAE is African American Language (AAL). I don’t use AAL because it suggests that AAE is the only language, or heritage language, of African Americans—that is, African American descendants of U.S. slaves or free persons who arrived in the U.S. before around 1800. Some African Americans speak, or have as a heritage language, some language(s) other than AAE, for example, Louisiana French, Louisiana Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, Afro-Seminole, or Gullah—not to mention some Native American languages.

The bulk of my research on Haitian Creole has been based on tape-recorded speech of native speakers engaged in routine activities such as preparing and eating meals, planning church activities, and sitting around talking in one of their homes. I refer to this recorded speech as natural speech since the recorder of the speech was a member of the friendship groups recorded (with their knowledge and consent). What I call natural speech can be contrasted to other kinds such as interviews and reading of words or texts. The second type of data I’ve used is notes taken from discussions with the recorders, language consultants who provided additional language as well as cultural data and commentary. In researching AAE, I have mostly used data from my own native speaker knowledge but also data from other sources such as other native speakers’ knowledge, databases, media (e.g., interviews), and published data.

My native speaker knowledge comes from living almost three-fourths of my life in Black neighborhoods—all African American or largely and historically African American. Harlem, in New York City, is where I have lived almost forty years. I grew up in a racially segregated, all-Black (with a tiny number of exceptions) neighborhood under Jim Crow. All the schools and other institutions I was part of were rigidly segregated, too.

My writings on both languages have mostly been concerned with tense, mood, aspect, discourse, semantics and pragmatics, and communicative practices—the last covering what people actually use speech for. Several of the tense-mood-aspect (TMA) forms (also called preverbal markers) in Haitian Creole had previously been incorrectly analyzed in terms of their syntax and semantics, and not all of the basic TMA forms had been accounted for. Or, these markers had long been classified as often optional; for example, a speaker is free to use or not use a past tense marker when referring to a past event. In English, you usually have to use some past tense to refer to a past event, unlike Creole. My work has shown how these forms, when analyzed according to discourse genre (for example. conversational exchanges and narratives), are highly predictable but not so in accord with the then prevailing claims concerning their syntax and semantics. In sum, my research demonstrated that they sometimes are obligatory; otherwise, their use depends on what kind of talking speakers are engaged in. I have often had to provide new analyses of these forms’ semantics and pragmatics since previous analyses were incorrect or too imprecise to help determine when the forms are used.

I am especially proud that my co-editor, Carole M. Berotte Joseph, and I published The Haitian Creole Language (2010), the first and only book that treats Haitian Creole in its linguistic, cultural, historical, and educational contexts, suitable for a wide range of readers as an introduction to the language, including educators, social welfare workers, medical workers, and public agency personnel. Haitian, as other pidgin and creole languages—indeed as AAE also—has long been stigmatized and underutilized in the development of its speakers and their communities. We, the co-editors, see this book as a give-back to the Haitian community.

I made a difficult decision early in my linguistic career not to pursue research in quantitative (Labovian) sociolinguistic research AAE because it would not allow me an important and broad (grammar, communicative practices, and decolonial research methods) use of my native speaker knowledge in a quest to reveal the “genius” of AAE (Sapir’s notion), its pervasive plan and unique design.

Some remarks in my AAE research will allow me to elaborate what I am getting at. Using verbal systems and tense-mood-aspect as my hermeneutic entry point (for subsequently largely empirical research), I have been able to access the deeper level of grammatical analysis where grammatically camouflaged forms can be uncovered. These are forms in AAE that appear to be the same as ones in other English varieties but are unique to AAE, in terms of meaning and grammatical properties. Consider the AAE auxiliary come, which expresses strong disapproval, or indignation:

He come [disapproval marker] sneaking in my apartment. (AAE)
‘He had the nerve to sneak into my apartment.’

Now compare the camouflaged AAE disapproval-marking come to the motion verb occurring in AAE and in the English varieties:

He come [motion verb] sneaking in my apartment. (with the nonstandard, or vernacular, Simple Past come)
‘He came sneaking into my apartment.’

Both come‘s are pronounced nearly identically. Some phonetic and phonological features distinguish them. Of course indignation (strong disapproval) can be expressed with any sentence, making it difficult, without further analysis, to separate the motion verb from the disapproval marker.

We know that there is definitely a distinct disapproval marker in AAE because its grammar is different from that of the motion verb, and therefore occurs in contexts where the motion verb cannot occur. The following examples demonstrate some environments in which the motion verb cannot occur:

He come [disapproval marker] sneak in my apartment. (The disapproval marker can occur in both come V+ing and come + V constructions, but not the motion verb.)
‘He had the nerve to sneak into my apartment.

He come [disapproval marker] coming [motion verb] in my room—didn’t knock or nothing. (The disapproval marker can occur in the same clause as the motion verb.)
‘He had the nerve to come into my room—didn’t knock or nothing.’

As I have discovered more of these camouflaged forms, they have revealed that AAE subsystems of grammar such as the subsystem of tense-mood-aspect auxiliaries provide the AAE speaker with many more grammaticalized ways to express themselves than speakers of other English dialects. In other words, AAE encodes in its grammar many resources for efficient and subtle expression that are lacking in other varieties of English. The great question for linguists is why one variety of English, AAE, has developed over time to make some subsystems of its grammar startlingly more complex than the counterpart subsystems in sister varieties of English. There are answers to this question, and in my current research I am elaborating them.

This elaboration is directly tied to the fact that the grammatical subsystem complexification (the term I use) facilitates the communication of the discourse routines, stances, ideologies, and emotions that go into forming African American culture. This is all to say that African American history has shaped African American culture, which in turn has had a significant impact on the evolution of AAE grammar. It is now possible to state that AAE is a language variety that beautifully illustrates the connection between grammar and culture, and some of the details of this grammar/culture connection have been discussed in my publications. Many of these details are treated within the framework of metadiscursive principles (my term) of AAE-based speech. 

These metadiscursive principles are discussed notably in Spears 2001 and 2009 and include some drawn from previous work of eminent African American English scholars such as Geneva Smitherman, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Marcyliena Morgan, and Lanita Jacobs. These principles include, e.g., signification,the use of intermediaries, figurative language, and/or semantic license to make, e.g., negative remarks about parties within hearing distance, without naming them specifically (example: “Yeah, some people always telling they business”); call-response, the back and forth between a speaker (or singer) and their audience, as exemplified in the traditional African American sermon; directness, incisive, unmollified utterances, content-wise often concise, but often rhetorically embellished, which usually appear harsh to nonmembers of the African American community (example: “You better check yourself, you can’t be wearing them kind of pants up in the church”); augmentation (examples: “Gaw-ahhd” [‘god’, rhymes with LAW-odd], “eduMAcation,” “giiiiirrrrrl!,” “maaaaaan!” [‘man’], “bootay” [‘booty’, ’buttocks’]; and performativity, important in everyday, mundane speech contexts. 

This framework has additionally been essential for my analyses of the use of so-called obscenity in AAE-based speech, notably the N-word and similarly much discussed words such as “m*th*rf*ck*r” and “b*tch”as well as ass-words, as in “smart-ass”and “can’t play no ball-ass.” My key publication on ass-words (Spears 1998) has led to others’ later work on camouflage forms (in DP, noun phrases basically) and imposters (Collins, Moody, and Postal 2008; Levine 2010; Collins and Postal 2012; Irwin 2015; among others). I have stressed in this line of work that uncensored speech is a better term to use than obscenity since what is obscene is relative and much of AAE speech considered obscene is not obscene as uttered in certain African American social contexts: it has been or apparently always has been normalized (Spears 1998).

Finally, I note that sites of grammatical complexification, uncovered in the quest for the genius of the language, reveal a treasure of items highly useful in detailing AAE history, particularly its relationship to Western Hemisphere and other Atlantic creole languages. For example, a good number of the AAE forms that I have brought to the attention of AAE scholars are counterparts of Atlantic creole language forms. A number of AAE forms had been misanalyzed and, when correctly analyzed, turn out to have creole counterparts. There is now a basis for a neocreolist hypothesis on AAE origins, backed up by linguistic evidence I have uncovered in present-day AAE varieties, as opposed to evidence based on documents and social history, which form the evidentiary foundation of almost all AAE history treatments.

While I do not imply that this kind of research and results mentioned can in principle be done uniquely by native speakers, native-speaker status immeasurably facilitates it (other things being equal), thereby fore fronting the urgency of bringing native speakers of all types of language varieties—based on racioethnicity, gender, socioeconomic-class, sexuality, religion, ability (e.g., stuttering), shared interests, etc.—into linguistics. In pursuing diversity, we pursue inclusion and excellence in building the research, and consequently intellectual, foundation of our discipline.

Race, Skin-Color, White Supremacy, Anti-Blackness, and Decoloniality

My research and writing on race, skin color, language, and ideology have been from a global and instrumental theoretical standpoint, involving conceptual and terminological elaboration, explanation, and prediction for activism.I have regularly emphasized in my work the importance of skin color in the analysis of race.Also, I have emphasized that race is not a scientific concept but a sociocultural one: the meaning of race terms—and terminologies—vary from society to society; think of the US and Brazil (Spears 1999).

This strand of my research extends beyond language into symbolism and has been highly useful in my legal and other consulting. I have strongly advocated connecting this type of research to macro global political, economic, and ideological systems, using my background in political science, economics, and international relations. I have also urged that linguists, anthropologists, and others engage in theorizing and making use of lived experience, while emphasizing history, global comparisons, and holism (Spears 2021). My writings on race, language, and ideology are unique in stressing and investigating interlinkages between race/skin-color, language, and ideology and other systems and institutions impacting them.

In producing this work, I have developed the notion of hierarchies of dominance, in fleshing out intersectionality. My analyses have predicted future changes in the U.S. racial/colorist system, notably involving a currently evolving change in the conceptualization of whiteness, which in turn is linked to the evolution of white supremacy over a longer period of time. Changes in the category of whiteness are produced as other race/color elements of the white supremacist system are (re-)produced, revealing white supremacy as a dynamic system where tout se tient (‘everything holds together, every element affecting the others’), as the highly influential early linguist Saussure might have put it.

I have also investigated the role of white supremacy in the evolution of U.S. society and domestic and foreign policy and made predictions (some of which have already come true). Additional key elements in my work are my (1) notions of positing and constraining ideologies (new terms for an already circulating, unnamed distinction); (2) illustration of the utility of quantitative analysis of symbolism (notably in film), not solely language, as related to racism, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity, socioeconomic class stratification, etc.; and (3) exemplification of how racial/skin-color ideologies are interwoven into language structure itself (Spears 2020), which linguistic anthropologists have long been aware of.

In my first writing squarely centered in decolonial studies (“Shallow Grammar and African American English: Evaluating the Master’s Tools in Linguistics,” 2023), I fully integrate grammatical research into decoloniality. I take as inspiration the well-known quotation of the renown African American lesbian essayist and poet Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 2007). I deconstruct her blunt admonition in terms of its literal and figurative meanings and then deploy those meanings to investigate my career and those of other scholars of color in linguistics and closely allied disciplines. In addition, I explore the meanings, uses, and politics of native speakerhood, the political economy of research funding, and the “legibility” of nonwhite scholars’ research that falls significantly outside of the theories, methodologies, and aims promoted by white “masters.” One important conclusion is that decolonial epistemic thinking and research requires a how-to component—how and where best to do decolonial work, given that it most easily flourishes in particular kinds of research/work environments.  Consequently, ethnographic investigations and understandings of work environments are a necessary part of the decolonial project. 

Language contact/ pidgin and creole languages (French- and Iberian-lexifier creoles); sociolinguistics; anthropological linguistics; African American English; language, race, and ideology; language and education, controversial words and expressions.