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Columns::October 29, 2001
It takes a village
Research figures show increase for fiscal year 2001
Research professor receives ‘MERIT’ award from NIH
Killer diagnosis
Gearing up for the future
Well-connected: Internet access is now in 96 percent of UGA residence hall rooms
E-mail distribution list being developed for major UGA news
New Peach State Poll surveys Georgians about public policy issues
College of Pharmacy names assistant dean for MCG pharmacy programs
Newsmakers
Heads up
Campus News
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| One of Sonja Lanehart’s research interests is an examination of how African-American vernacular English was affected when U.S. public schools were integrated after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. Photo by Peter Frey |
Linguistics professor examines effectiveness of vernacular speech
By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
The first thing a visitor notices about Sonja Lanehart is her intensity and steady gaze. The focused intensity has made Lanehart a rising star nationally in the study of African-American English, as well as a ferocious competitor on the tennis court. One also notices, however, an easy smile, a willingness to express doubts and a solid belief that her work matters.
It’s a pleasant Monday, and Lanehart seems happy, sitting in the library on the second floor of Park Hall, her academic home. She’s happy because her book Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English has just been published, and she has a copy in her hand. Pride in authorship slips a bit, however, as she points out that the fresh-faced little boy on the cover is her son, Isaac.
“From a scholarly point of view, I think studies of what we now call African-American vernacular English are moving in a new direction,” says Lanehart. “We still have much to learn about language use in the African-American community in the 21st century.”
The issue has been fraught with confusion and outright controversy, as witnessed by the national dialogue over the value of a black vernacular that some scholars had come to call “Ebonics.” Researchers in linguistics and sociology have, however, moved beyond the controversy into a fruitful area of study--one that is drawing top thinkers across America into the field.
Lanehart says the controversy over Ebonics had one very clear effect: It exposed the limits of linguistics to explain sociological trends and prompted a rethinking of how speech influences societies.
“Linguists couldn’t even define their own basic terms of language and dialect,” she says. “They couldn’t tell us the difference. And this is a practical issue with policy and educational implications.”
Lanehart is among the researchers, however, that are redefining the issue and taking it into productive new areas. Her next book, Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy, will be published by the University of Texas press next year. In Sista, Speak!, Lanehart uses her family as a case study for examining the benefits and risks of African-American English--in blunt language and with unflinching honesty.
In 1998, Lanehart organized a conference at UGA called “Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American Vernacular English.” It focused on the everyday language of African Americans, which is rich with sounds, sentence structures and word formations that have their roots in West Africa. Recently, Lanehart has been examining how African-American vernacular English was affected when U.S. public schools were integrated after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954.
She believes that daily language used by African-American children was affected by the adversarial relationship between white and black students and white and black teachers. She wants to see if she can look objectively at what everyday English was like for black Americans before and after integration, and see if the overall effects on communication and expression have been beneficial or not.
Lanehart also has a special interest in the language of African-American women. She is editing a volume of studies by African-American women scholars on the varied uses of language by multiple generations of African-American women across the diaspora in everyday life.
As to where her particular research fits in the academic spectrum, she cheerfully admits that so far it has straddled disciplines.
“I don’t teach literature courses, and I’m not a theoretical linguist,” she says. “Someone told me they thought I was a linguistic anthropologist, and that might be close to the mark. I’ve always used mixed methods, but it’s seemed to work well for me.”
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