This volume is a careful assembling of the depth and breadth of John Russell Rickford’s work, a pillar in linguistic research on African-American English (AAE) and creole studies. It provides an insightful introduction to the novice seeking to scientifically investigate understudied, even stigmatized languages like pidgins and creoles and is a testament of how empirical methods-experimental, statistical and computational-can be used to identify hitherto undetected regularities through the study of variation, language attitudes and evolution. With this volume, Rickford seeks to revitalize the stagnant conversation around creole emergence and variability, especially in light of the ongoing reconceptualization of the field of linguistics where quantitative data are prevalent. This delightful ensemble, reprinted in some cases with substantial revisions and empirical data, remains foundational in what the author would certainly describe as variationist creolistics.
Following a foreword by Gillian Sankoff, Rickford takes the reader on a biographical journey, explaining how his passion and dedication for AAE and creoles, consistently stigmatized languages, were to become the epicenter of his career. At the outset, Rickford deplores the paradigm shift in research methodology in the field of Pidgins and Creoles from comprehensive sociolinguistics investigations to the almost exclusive focus on synchronic commonalities in order to vindicate a deductive theory of creolization; one that barely, if at all, reckons the relevance of context in the shaping of languages. Nonetheless, Rickford expresses appreciation for pre-American Structuralism, where shared interests between sociolinguistics and creole studies provided significant contributions to methodological and theoretical concerns in linguistics and more efficient educational language policies.
In reading the opening and closing chapters, one is struck by the rarity of the endogenous creolist’s perspective on conducting fieldwork in an often versatile context. More than biographical essays, these chapters are valuable vade mecums to anyone conducting empirical research and are especially suited for young researchers engaging in fieldwork. While Rickford details the frustrations that fieldwork can bring, he also acknowledges the gratifying and enriching experience of first-hand data and their role in assessing theoretical issues and methodologies in the field. Along with practical advice on the basics of the sociolinguistic interview (also addressed in Chapters 4 and 15), data collection and the positing of explanatory theories, Rickford articulates his abiding commitment to the Labovian paradigm, where quantitative methodology is used to identify the systematic indexing of social stratifications in language use.
Chapter 2 features a paper coauthored with Elizabeth Traugott on language attitudes toward speakers of nonstandard language varieties like pidgins and creoles. Because these languages emerged in highly stratified societies, they were incipiently perceived as uneducated and vulgar compared to their lexifying language. Despite their heavy stigmatization across the ‘official’ spheres of society (e.g. mass media, education, government), the status of these languages has paradoxically evolved to the extent that they are embraced by many speakers as an index of identity, solidarity and emancipation. With the addition of novel data, Rickford and Traugott show that the shift in attitudes depends on the particular contexts in which pidgins and creoles exist e.g. coexistence of the lexifying language, effects of political and socioeconomic change.
Chapter 3 is a rebuke to the alleged intellectual and expressive inadequacy of pidgins and creoles. In this paper, Rickford demonstrates that like any language, pidgins and creoles have the linguistic resources that allow their speakers to create complex structures and express abstract notions. The recurrent bias, he argues, stems from traditional reductionism which very often fails to identify grammatical subtleties that only micro-level analyses can reveal. Although, trying to distance himself from linguistic reductionism throughout the volume, Rickford, like many creolists, remains seduced by the pidgin-to-creole life cycle which, as he himself notes, is a much-debated topic.
Chapter 4 reflects on a crucial shortcoming arising from the traditional distinction between linguistic competence and performance by revisiting the phenomenon of pronominal variation in Guyanese. Sociolinguistics has historically been concerned with performance, hence focusing on systematic distributions in usage. However, the practice of solely working with spontaneous data may mask the speaker’s competence. As Chomsky initially indicates, the motivation for such a distinction comes from speech errors and context-dependent phenomena that may affect the core structure of a language. For Rickford, a good sociolinguistic interview should not only observe language in its actual use but also use elicitation and repetition techniques used within the generative-transformational framework. In other words, he believes that performance can substantiate and enrich theoretical findings or claims. The value of sociolinguistic recordings, in particular, of situational code-switching, is also addressed in Chapter 11.
Chapters 5 and 8 address the early intercrossing between sociolinguistics and pidgins and creoles studies. Rickford stresses both the positive and negative outcomes of such a connection. He also reflects on the growing disconnection between the two fields and their shortcomings in not applying models and empirical methods that have proved successful in addressing important linguistic questions.
Chapter 6 follows up on the power of implicational scaling to empirically address linguistic phenomena in sociolinguistics and creole studies. While Rickford praises the fine-grained analyses that implicational scales produce, he cautions the linguist about consequences of insufficient data and testing, the importance of frequencies and accurate explanations to variation.
Co-authored with Angela Rickford, Chapter 7 asserts the importance of versatility in teaching languages in bilingual settings, the argument being that the learning of linguistic variation may allow the student to better identify and learn the standard variety. The identification of linguistic similarities and differences may in fact alleviate language-based discriminations like those seen in the justice system. This is tackled in Chapter 12 through Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the murder case of Trayvon Martin. Sharese King and Rickford, authors of this chapter, offer a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Jeantel’s speech showing the negative biases that are often associated with varieties like AAE.
In Chapter 8, Rickford praises Le Page’s extensive scholarship on sociolinguistic variation in the Caribbean. Building on Le Page’s Acts of Identity, Rickford considers both the social and linguistic constraint on the distribution of the first person subject pronoun in Guyanese in Chapter 9. He argues that one can provide an accurate description of a sociolinguistic variant if and only if the linguistic constraint governing its distribution is properly identified. In Chapter 13, on the other hand, he emphasizes the importance of context in conceptualizing theoretical and methodological concepts in research. Next to contextual singularity, community ideologies and linguistic practices constitute other areas that should be studied in all their diversity rather than from uniformity. Linguistic practices and ideologies of specific language communities are detailed in Chapter 14. In effect, Rickford shows that members of different communities index social values differently while sharing similar norms and knowledge.
Coauthored with Robin Melnick, Chapter 10 provides a quantitative take on subject–auxiliary inversion in AAE and Appalachian on the one hand and some Caribbean creoles on the other. The study highlights the importance of empirical data when making generalizations about creoles. Here, it is shown that contrary to previous claims, subject–auxiliary inversion is subject to very similar constraints across varieties and as such cannot be used as a feature distinguishing the creole origin of a language such as AAE.
Overall, this volume is an excellent testimony of how empirical research with meticulously designed methodologies and concepts, specific to the object and context of study can shed light on the often-biased linguistic take on contact varieties.
