This chapter analyses a set of rarely utilised recorded interviews produced by linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s. This chapter argues that through using oral history and memory studies methods, recorded testimonies provide historians with unique opportunities to consider formerly enslaved people’s memories about, and feelings towards, slavery. In their interviews, the elderly African Americans evidenced the complex long-term emotional legacy of slavery: the lingering emotional impact of violence, the communal fear of slavery’s return, the anger about exploitative labour regimes and the pride they felt in their labour achievements. Despite this complex emotional legacy, the interviewees composed their memories with statements of survival and hope, utilising these emotions as scaffolds to create a coherent narrative of their life from slavery into freedom. In doing so, formerly enslaved people created their own emotional framework to understand and document slavery’s impact, counteracting white people’s continued attempts to present slavery as a benevolent institution and restrict African Americans’ emotional expressions.

African American English has been one of the most studied varieties of American English, for important social reasons beginning in the Colonial Period. Characteristics associated with African American English come from the Plantation Southern variety, and have been preserved in the Great Migration to northern and western cities. Language change in the complex system of speech has affected African American English, as it has all other varieties.

While the origins of African American English (AAE) have been the focus of debate among linguists for nearly a century, such interest has been aimed primarily at the vernacular end of the continuum, with dialectologists pointing to the retention of features from early British English, while creolists trace the origins to a Gullah-like creole spoken on the US plantations. Though no consensus has been reached regarding the origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a focus on the socio-historical evidence suggests that diverse ecological conditions likely yielded a range of linguistic outcomes within the context of the plantation economy. The modern-day development of African American Standard English (AASE), on the other hand, may be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, as the African American middle class emerged in racially segregated neighbourhoods, where increased economic opportunity was met by systemic efforts to disenfranchise upwardly mobile African Americans.

This chapter deals with the interrelationships between forms of American English and Caribbean English and creoles, both past and present. Close demographic connections between the North American mainland and what was to become the Anglophone Caribbean have existed since the earliest days of colonial settlement. Later, American linguistic influence spread in the region through institutional links, occasional visits or migration by Caribbean nationals for work or education, and tourism as well as television. During the present age of globalisation, American English has extended its range and impact considerably, both worldwide and in the Caribbean. At the same time, individual Caribbean creoles such as Jamaican have also influenced the development of English in North America, by way of diaspora communities, the global success of reggae, dancehall and Rastafarianism, and the use of ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ on the web.

This chapter uses social psychological techniques to explore the attitudes and perceptions of college students about the concept of "sounding Black" and how various circulating labels both reflect and inform such perceptions.