The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English

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The Historical Evolution of Earlier African American English is written by Alexander Kautzsch and published by Walter de Gruyter. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 3110907976 (ISBN 10) and 9783110907971 (ISBN 13).

Based on a 500,000 word corpus of early sources collected from ex-slave narratives, ex-slave recordings, and interviews with hoodoo priests, this book reconstructs the English spoken by African Americans between 1830 and 1920. By means of detailed quantitative analyses, three linguistic features (negation patterns, copula usage, and relative marker choice) are interpreted along the lines of temporal change, regional diversity, and variation across gender. Additionally, some 300 non-standard letters written by African Americans in the 19th century are compared to the main corpus in order to identify differences between speech and writing.