De-sign by De-fault among linguistically disenfranchised populations | John Baugh | Design@Large

Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. I'm going to talk for maybe around 40 minutes and then we can open up the discussion after that. I'm going to begin by sharing my screen. When this presentation was first put together and I saw that it was hosted by the Design Lab at San Diego State, I immediately tried to think of clever ways that the linguistic work on discrimination might fit into a discussion about design. Then it dawned on me that if I used a hyphen and thought of languages as being composed of signs, that the designing of minority linguistic groups might be a way to think about introducing this subject. Hopefully that will prove to be the case. I'd like to acknowledge my sponsors throughout the years. I was very fortunate to receive extensive support from the Ford Foundation throughout my career. They were kind enough to provide funding for me to attend graduate school, they supported 10 years of research on linguistic profiling, five within the United States, another five internationally. You can see the other federal foundations as well as some private foundations that have been very generous to me throughout the years, and I wanted to acknowledge that. But I also wanted to thank my sponsors today and the faculty members from the Design Lab who were kind enough to reach out and ask me to participate in the discussion today. I want to give a special shout out to my colleague from graduate school, Anastasia Zintea, who is a retired professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. She and I were very close friends in graduate school and throughout the rest of our lives. Some linguists may remember the ascendancy of US English through the efforts to try to promote English as an official language within the United States, and very often Anastasia and I would be on the circuit together debating Stanley Diamond and other proponents of that. She is a cherished friend, and a lot of her work on bilingual issues within the United States has inspired a great deal of the work that I do. So I want to acknowledge her and thank her very much for all of the support and friendship she's given me through the years. I'm going to begin on a personal note because my linguistic journey began in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. I was born in Brooklyn, New York when my dad was going to Pratt after the GI Bill, and we moved to Philadelphia until I was about six years old. From there we moved to Los Angeles, and initially I attended an inner city school. This is a picture of me with my classmates, and you'll see that the only European American is our teacher. There are no European American students. The mixture of African American students and students of Chinese and Japanese descent was a reflection of the neighborhood at that time. We lived not that far from the University of Southern California, so if you know the Los Angeles area back in 1958 when this picture was taken, we lived in a minority community, but a racially diverse minority community where many of my classmates were learning English as a second language and many of my fellow African American classmates were speakers of what linguists now call African American Vernacular English. I had the special benefit of parents who were both college educated. My mother was an elementary school teacher, and my father, who had once worked for RCA in Camden, New Jersey, took a job with Hughes Aircraft Company where he spent most of his career. Because they were successful, they made a decision in 1959 to move to the San Fernando Valley, and my exposure to a different set of linguistic circumstances took place there. This is the following year, 1959. There are no students of color with the exception of me. In the age of Barack Obama, it's important for this audience to know that I'm not biracial. Obviously I have white blood, but the white blood in my family came into the family so long ago that I have no idea who my white ancestors are on either side of the family. My father's side of the family as well as my mother's side of the family tried very much to trace the ancestry, but they only got far enough back to discover that female slaves had been impregnated by white slave owners, and we weren't able to trace the family beyond that. Many people that look like me have an immediate biracial ancestry. I do not. The racial mixing in my family goes so far back that I actually have a very strong African American identity that I'm proud of, and you'll learn more about that as we move through the presentation. I'm going to give you a chance to look at this abstract yourself. I'll be discussing the linguistic legacy of the African slave trade, but I also want to call attention to Anastasia's work where the expression 'TWB' or 'Talking While Bilingual' grows out of outstanding studies that she did looking at linguistic discrimination on the job against Spanish speakers who were penalized for speaking Spanish by employers that wanted to create English-only workplaces, even though the use of Spanish was not problematic in any way. I'm not just mentioning this in the context of this lecture because she taught at UCSD. Her work is of value to me everywhere I go in the world, so it's just a coincidence and a happy one that she's at UCSD. Before I begin, I realize that there are a lot of folks on the Zoom that are not linguists and don't have a background in linguistics, so I'd like to begin by at least sharing my elevator speech definition of what linguistics is. Linguistics is the science that tries to determine what all human languages have in common. We're very fortunate today because you actually have a sign language interpreter who is providing insight into another linguistic modality other than my talking. Languages don't have to be conveyed through your voice, but linguistic systems are equally complex whether they're spoken or signed. What you see in red is phonetic transcription. Even if you've never been exposed to phonetic transcription previously, you can see how linguists would write 'what is linguistics' in phonetic transcription. That particular tool is extremely beneficial in our science because it provides an opportunity to write down any human utterance either in a language that's known or a language that's not known, and for languages that don't yet have writing systems, thanks to the phonetic alphabet we can provide that. I'd also like to pay tribute at this point to some of the founding figures in linguistics. A lot of people may not remember that today is actually International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated, and that transformed the world. Those who are linguists will recognize that many of the pioneers in the field were Jewish in their heritage. I've listed some. Can you see my entire screen or is the right side blocked off with other images? The right side is blocked off. Okay, here's what we're going to do. Can you see all of that now? Perfect. Okay, all right. So let's go back. You can see that whole image now, right? Okay, good. Pioneers in linguistics: starting in the upper left you have Franz Boas, moving to the right on the upper level Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Roman Jakobson. Next row down: Joseph Greenberg, Joshua Fishman is right in the middle, and another sociologist, Irving Goffman, is on the right. On the bottom, iconic leaders in the field: Zellig Harris and his student Noam Chomsky, and Uriel Weinreich with his student William Labov, who was my dissertation supervisor. Irving Goffman was also one of my professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Their pioneering work in the field of linguistics was extraordinary. Those that know the history of this science well enough will appreciate that at the time that Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield were working, they also had to overcome anti-Semitic discrimination within the academy. It's very easy to lose sight of the fact that Jewish scholars were the victims of discrimination back then, but that was very much the case in the Anthropological Association. They simply outworked the rest of the scholars in the field. The science that they produced was first-rate, and they provided the example for underrepresented scholars that followed. We now have excellent work being produced by scholars from diverse backgrounds, but we have the Jewish pioneers in the field to thank for setting that standard. I want to begin with a disclaimer because many of the images that I'm going to be using are for educative purposes. There are some that are problematic, but they are all helpful to my attempt to discuss this issue as thoroughly as I possibly can. Some of the images potentially might be offensive. It's not my intention to offend when I share those things. Going all the way back to the beginning of this country, colonization was the circumstance that gave rise to the first linguistic contact. Not only do you see differences in technology in this particular depiction—the sailing ship, the weaponry, the tools, the clothing differences—but from a linguistic point of view, this is one of the first images where you're seeing people that speak very different languages coming together for the first time. Prior to colonization, when you look at the linguistic landscape of the United States, many of the indigenous languages are well represented on this map. You can see that Illinois and Iowa, those languages are in the locations where those states are. Navajo is out to the west. If you look at where the state of Michigan is, you will see other languages. Choctaw, Sioux, Apache, others were part of this iconic historical linguistic situation prior to colonization. Several of the slides that follow this one will look at some of the issues that gave rise to the linguistic transformation where colonization began to displace the indigenous languages that are illustrated in this slide. We're going to begin with looking at the early settlement of the Atlantic colonies, then we'll consider the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the linguistic transformation in the United States, and what colonization from different European countries caused in terms of linguistic diversity. When you think about the settlement of Jamestown and the settlement in Plymouth, the landing in Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, one of the reasons that the dialects are very different on the Eastern Seaboard is that the settlers came from different regions. The Jamestown settlers came from London, and the settlers in New England came from Plymouth and Dartmouth, and they spoke different British dialects before they came to the United States. The settlers in Jamestown took this particular route from London to the Canary Islands where they would then replenish, and then the passage across the Atlantic and settling in Jamestown. But the reason that the dialects are different is because they came from different dialect regions in England. We're talking about white populations, so there's not an issue of racial diversity that we're talking about at that point, but there are clear linguistic differences that show up in the regional dialects along the Eastern Seaboard. At this point, I'd really like you to pause. Even though I've been talking about the linguistic evolution of the United States, a moment of self-reflection is going to be very helpful because each of you has a unique linguistic ancestry. For those who, like me, are slave descendants, you probably won't know who the family members are that first migrated to the United States, nor will you know specifically the languages that they spoke. But many other people that are on the Zoom will be aware of their family heritage and where their ancestors came from on both sides of the family, where they lived, what languages they spoke. Then there's another question: did you learn the heritage languages of those ancestors that first migrated to the United States? If you didn't, that's actually quite typical. Why? Because so many immigrant families to the United States that came of their own volition recognized that it was beneficial to their children to learn English as quickly as possible. That transformation from whatever the heritage language was to English was to try to help the ensuing generations become Americans fully integrated into the society as quickly as they possibly could. That tradition is actually beneficial in a lot of the work that I do when I try to help people understand the nature of linguistic profiling and linguistic discrimination. Why? Because depending upon the particular family, the ancestors who first arrived speaking a language other than English, chances are they were the object of linguistic discrimination. Whether they came from Poland or Italy or Vietnam or Korea, speaking with an accent as you try to learn English was often the object of ridicule. The Swedes and the Norwegians that settled in Minnesota were often criticized because of the way that they spoke. Seldom did families actually encourage their children to preserve the heritage language. The country would look very different if we had done that. In the context of the global economy, the United States would be far better off if families recognized, 'Yes, you need to learn English, but let's hang on to that German or Italian or Japanese or Chinese.' Because of the constant influx of Spanish speakers, the perception that Spanish somehow threatens English, which is wrong, is enhanced by virtue of the fact that Spanish speakers are still coming to the country in both documented and undocumented ways. If you speak a language other than English, you'll also know whether or not English was your mother tongue or was it a language other than English. But every person's individual linguistic journey is relevant to the story that I want to share. These are pictures of the groups that were attracted to life in America from around the world. You're all aware of the history of the Statue of Liberty and the call for immigrants to come and build this nation. Slaves came through a very different set of circumstances. Also, the fact that there were important wars that had linguistic consequences should not be overlooked. In the upper left hand, there's the iconic image of the Revolutionary War throwing off British colonization. These are not in temporal sequence. Next to that is Custer's Last Stand at Little Bighorn. Next to that is the Civil War. Below that is Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans, and then the black and white photo is of Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba with the Rough Riders and their famous ascent of San Juan Hill. All of these battles had linguistic consequences in one way or the other. I'd like to now shift gears and talk about the unique linguistic heritage of enslaved Americans and my forefathers and foremothers that came from Africa not of their own volition but on slave ships. This map is important for several reasons, not the least of which reminding us that the majority of African slaves actually went to Brazil. They did not come to North America. The slave trade, which was extremely lucrative, and the Dutch slave traders talked about the fact that there was an economic triangle. Their ships would leave Holland, would capture slaves, would take the slaves to the New World, would sell them, they would then get sugar, spices, tobacco, and take that back to Europe, and it became very lucrative. If you're of a certain age, you remember the Dutch Masters cigars. Those Dutch Masters cigars grew out of the slave trade, as did the enormous wealth that still is evident in Holland today. With slavery, we found a new set of linguistic circumstances. This particular drawing implies a false narrative. The false narrative is that somehow this family is being sold together. That need not be the case. I would ask any parent, and especially any mother who's watching this presentation, to imagine a situation where one of your babies could be sold as property and you would never see that child again. If you think about that seriously, you recognize the horrors of slavery and that it should never be whitewashed or that it should never be seen as somehow a benefit to those who were enslaved. Slavery remains one of the greatest crimes throughout humanity, and its consequences are still being felt in the United States today. Now I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about some of the linguistic research. Thanks to William Labov, even though many of the social sciences study minority groups, those minority groups are often marginalized. Thanks to the work that William Labov did early in his formulation of variable rules in sociolinguistics, the study of Americans has been at the core foundation of global sociolinguistics since its inception. That was an extraordinary vision, an extraordinary set of circumstances, and his contribution set the stage for the rest of the field. William Stewart, who was a contemporary of Professor Labov, was one of the first to strongly emphasize the African origins of many of the dialect features that we see in contemporary African American Vernacular English. Walt Wolfram conducted a study of Detroit Negro English in 1969 that was greatly influenced by the work of Labov. Those white scholars provided a road map that was then followed by African American leaders in the field, beginning with Geneva Smitherman, who taught for many years at Michigan State University. My classmate John Rickford at Stanford University, with his son Russell, wrote a wonderful book called 'Spoken Soul' that actually won the American Book Award. Another contemporary of ours, Arthur Spears, developed some important linguistic concepts. Arthur Spears is a graduate of the UC San Diego Department of Linguistics. He's a theoretical linguist and developed a theory growing out of the concept of camouflage forms. I know I'm getting into the linguistic weeds a little bit too deeply here, but I will. Lisa Green is the youngest theoretical African American linguist, and she's produced some of the most important work looking at not only the linguistic structures but the acquisition of African American Vernacular English among children primarily in Louisiana. Here are some brief examples. One is the use of habitual 'be' as in a sentence like 'Baby jumpin', we be dancing.' That means that usage of 'be' means that the verb happens all the time. This is a habitual event, it's not a singular momentary episode. John Rickford was the first to study the significance of stress being phonemic. What that means is that stress on the word alone is enough to change its meaning. If you look at the two sentences, the first one 'She's been married' means that she used to be married but she's not married now. But if you put heavy stress on the word 'been' and you say 'Oh, she BIN married,' not only does it mean that she is currently married, she's been married for a long time. I could go into much more detail about why that's significant, but Rickford's discovery was a huge breakthrough. Copula variability was actually the first place where variable rules in linguistics were studied. It's because that present tense marker is often not used by African Americans. So 'He happy' or 'We talk' is quite common as opposed to the standard English 'He is happy' or 'We are talking.' I was lucky enough, thanks to the help of William Labov's son Simon, who pointed out to me that this use of 'steady' was something that he had never heard before. I thought 'steady' was just like 'ain't.' I knew it was non-standard, but I thought that it was something that white people said. Simon said, 'No, I've never heard this before.' So it actually led to one of my very first studies. What this means is 'He be steady running' means he's running persistently, intensely. You can also use 'steady' in sentence final position with heavy stress, so 'He be running steady' means the exact same thing in a different syntactic location. There are many, many more examples, but one of my favorites of all time came from Labov's Harlem research where one of his informants said, 'It ain't no cat can't get no coop.' Back then in Harlem, a lot of the young men kept pigeons on their roof in coops. This sentence was stated in response to 'What about cats getting into the coop?' 'It ain't no cat can't get no coop.' Perfectly logical, understandable. But what's misunderstood is the Ebonics controversy. Robert Williams, the late professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, was the person who coined this term. At the time he coined it in 1973, there were no African American linguists with PhDs. I was in graduate school, John Rickford was in graduate school, but at that particular time there were no African American linguists. As a psychologist, one of the things that Professor Williams was contemplating was the bigger picture of the African slave trade. It isn't that the slaves were just brought to the United States and exposed to English. What was the bigger picture? A lot of people don't realize this, but the term 'Ebonics' is used to describe the entire linguistic landscape for the African slave trade. What you can see on this slide is that Ebonics in Brazil was in contact with Portuguese, Ebonics in Haiti was in contact with French, Ebonics in the Dominican Republic Spanish, Jamaica English. The European contact depending upon where the slaves were taken was very, very different. Williams' attempt to combine 'ebony' with 'phonics' looks at this international situation, not just the linguistic situation in the United States that eventually gave rise to inferior segregated education until 1954, and then even after 1954 the schools were segregated and not providing equal educational opportunities. Nevertheless, African Americans were striving to improve their circumstances and conditions, and that had linguistic consequences as well. As a result of that, you find that there's a linguistic continuum that grows out of the special circumstances affecting the individual African American that you're speaking with: when they were born, where they live, their own identity, what their aspirations are. What this model shows is that the vast majority of speakers of African American Vernacular English primarily live, work, and play with fellow African Americans for the most part from the working class, but it's possible to move along this continuum towards Standard English. In fact, it's a reflection to a certain extent of my own life journey from having lived in Brooklyn, born in Brooklyn Hospital at Flatbush and DeKalb, moving to an inner city black community in Philadelphia, eventually moving to a multi-racial neighborhood in Los Angeles, then out to the suburbs in the San Fernando Valley. By the time I was a professor at Stanford University, I had very limited day-to-day contact with other African Americans. This dynamic is one that shows a tremendous amount of linguistic diversity among African Americans, and it's a fluid situation, it's not one that's static or in any way constrained. Thinking about the other linguistic circumstances that affected other groups, we see that the colonization that took place by the French as well as the Spanish resulted in large territories that weren't only influenced by English. In addition to the fact that the settlement, the westward settlement of the United States, coincided with the Industrial Revolution which influenced the rapidness with which linguistic change could take place. Remember, the original 13 colonies were established at a time when the best way that you could get around was by horse and buggy. But once steam engines were invented and larger sailing ships, that westward movement took place far more rapidly. Some of the iconic events that really did begin to transform the country was the Louisiana Purchase impacting with France, Andrew Jackson's displacement of the Cherokee Nation from the Carolinas to Oklahoma, the Trail of Tears where thousands died through that displacement, the Tennessee Volunteers that had the Battle of the Alamo over Texas where Spanish and English were on a collision course, and then the Gold Rush in California resulted in this mad dash to the West Coast where the settlement of the country in between took on a very different look than might have otherwise been the case. When we think about the displacement of these indigenous populations, that westward movement resulted in the decline and elimination effectively of so many of the indigenous languages that I pointed out previously. But Spanish, the colonization from the King of Spain, was quite substantial as you can see here. In 1819, the amount of territory where Spanish-speaking conquistadors were dominating the political and social circumstances was quite substantial. As a result of that, we found a situation where the perception of enemies to the nation was really relative. For many indigenous people, Geronimo and Sitting Bull were freedom fighters. The same can be said about Francisco Villa, Pancho Villa. But they were perceived to be enemies of the United States, and as such rewards were put out for them. At this point, I'd like to shift gears slightly and share a couple of videos where linguistic and cultural stereotypes are quite evident.

[Video clip plays]

Before I move on to the next slide, the first slide: Chief Iron Horse was not a Native American. The actor that portrayed him was actually of Italian descent, but in Hollywood he got so many jobs as an actor playing a Native American that he actually pretended that he was a Native American for the rest of his acting career until he passed away. The Granny Goose commercial embodies some of the worst potential stereotypes of the Mexican bandito. I know that they were trying to be humorous, but advertisers in the United States at different points have been far from sensitive to the linguistic circumstances or the plight of minority populations that were suffering. Along those lines, we see that other populations also suffered tremendously as they came to this country. Everyone knows that the railroads would not have been built but for the Chinese laborers that you see illustrated in the upper eye. At the time that the iconic Chinese laundries were in abundance on the West Coast in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the labor that was associated with cleaning clothes was some of the hardest work that you could ever do. I don't have an image presented here, but if you remember the iconic image of the railroads coming together to drive in that last spike in Utah when the crews from the east and the crews from the west met, there are no Chinese depicted in the photograph at that moment, which was exceedingly racist because the Chinese laborers were the ones that were put on the most dangerous jobs. More Chinese died in the building of the railroad from the Pacific than whites by any means. The dynamiting of tunnels and their mistreatment, which is depicted in the cartoon in the upper left, is legendary and unfortunate. What's worse, they're not the only people of Asian descent to be discriminated against. During World War II, we had internment camps where many of my classmates that you saw in the elementary school picture, their parents were taken to these internment camps. Japanese Americans lost their property, lost their businesses, and were forced to live in these concentration camp conditions until the end of the war. It's worth pointing out that we were also at war with Germany, and to the best of my knowledge there were no German concentration camps for German Americans. This was explicitly and overtly racist, and the consequences for many of these Japanese American families were devastating. It's not just a linguistic issue, it's a racial issue as well. But when we look at the linguistic landscape of the United States, what we see over time is a tremendously diverse population. How we talk to one another defines who we are, and American English is as rich, diverse, and lively as Americans themselves.

[Video clip plays]

The reason that 'Do You Speak American?' was so powerful at the time that it first came out is because so many different Americans could identify with a lot of the regional and ethnic dialects that were on display there. As we fast forward to the future though, and think about recent events, there's a lot to contemplate. As I get older and think about the very special circumstances that affected us during the past year, many of which are depicted in this illustration, I'm concerned. 'E Pluribus Unum' is on the money, but is that really the case for those of us that live within the United States? I hope so, and with your help, I hope that as we move toward the future we'll have opportunities to reunite the people and the states of America. For those of you that are not from San Diego that are on the Zoom, these are two iconic images from San Diego. The one on the left is the Hotel del Coronado on Coronado Island. It's one of the oldest classical hotels in the United States. When the Queen of England stays in San Diego, that's where she stays. If you have a chance to go there, do so. It's opulent, it's elegant, it's quite nice. Then there's the arboretum in Balboa Park depicted on the other side. Balboa Park is one of San Diego's most visible landmarks. I know a lot of this because having grown up in Los Angeles, San Diego was one of the favorite places that we would go to get away on the weekends. I want to thank you for your time and your attention, and especially again to those of the Design Lab for the opportunity to speak with you today. Thanks very much.

That's a great question, and it depends on a lot of things. I'm not trying to hedge. Can you read the question again?

Right. English is not a tone language. Several of the languages—I mean, Chinese is a tone language, right? Depending upon the tone that's being used, the same word will have a different meaning. The closest thing that I presented to tone in this presentation grew out of John Rickford's study on the use of stressed 'been.' What we think happened there is that some of the African languages which are tone languages were spoken by the slaves before they were exposed to English. The slaves didn't have the benefit of going to school, and so as they were learning English, Professor Rickford's work might suggest that tone was actually being integrated into the acquisition of English. That's really quite fascinating. So we have some evidence that English is absorbing tone, but English itself is not a tone language.

It's a two-sided story. On the one hand, I want to call out a fake industry, and it's the so-called accent reduction industry. There are a lot of people that hang shingles and they're like, 'Oh, are you an immigrant? Do you speak with an accent? Do you want to get rid of your accent? Just come study with me and I'll help you get rid of it.' Well, you know what I have to say to that? If Henry Kissinger can become Secretary of State and Arnold Schwarzenegger can become Governor of California, then how about most of us actually trying to be a little more accepting of the linguistic diversity that I showed near the end? The United States has always had a lot of different accents, but the issue of who gets discriminated against is often a surrogate for race or class or other things. There are regional differences as well. I often ask my students to go through a thought experiment pretending that there is no racial diversity in the United States, everyone is of European descent, and I ask, 'Would there still be linguistic discrimination?' And people say absolutely. Southern white Southerners and New Yorkers might not like the way they talk even if they're in the same racial background. There would be class differences, urban versus rural. So the two sides are that people who are in positions of linguistic privilege—we've often talked about white privilege, there's also linguistic privilege. Native speakers of Standard English in the United States are in a position of linguistic privilege. If you recognize that and you put forth the effort to do your best to be accepting of someone whose linguistic background is different from your own, that helps solve a lot of it. On the other side, I want the people that have been the victims of linguistic discrimination to know that it's not fair, but it's also not incumbent upon you alone to be the source of linguistic change.

That's a very interesting and important question. From time to time, I serve as an expert witness in cases where different linguistic issues come up. Very often, one of the controversial areas of forensic linguistics has to do with author identification. There was a movie that was made about the Ted Bundy case—I mean Ted Kaczynski, Ted Bundy too—but Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and the fact that the Unabomber was identified through the writing of his manifesto. Very often there can be traces of a person's linguistic background that shows up in their writing, but depending upon the evidence, it's not always a slam dunk to determine authorship in writing. One of the cases that I worked on, a man who was African American did have some of the linguistic features that I talked about. For example, in the writing he would say 'that we be doing things' or other things in the writing. So I was able to confirm that the author was in all likelihood an African American, but I couldn't say which specific African American wrote that phrase. So there are some things you can identify from writing, but it's often very difficult to identify the specific writer of a text message or a threatening note.

The answer is no, it's not going to become accentless. It's a fair question. For years and years, people just assumed that with the advent of television, radio, and television, linguistic homogenization would take place. But you talk very much like the people that you interact with in your day-to-day life, and as a result of that, that's how the regional accents get perpetuated. Also, you may be reading questions, but I see somebody with their hand up on my screen. I don't know if you want to...

Yeah, that's a great question. The answer is yes, to an extent, but it's less pervasive than you might imagine. At one iteration, what you find is when slaves begin to leave the South because of the Industrial Revolution, and you're finding black communities in Chicago and New York and Boston and Detroit, there was racial segregation there. So to a certain extent, there's some linguistic fossilization where you still see the use of 'be' and other things. But as there's social stratification, as people get more education, they are influenced by those local norms. There's another dimension of this that you didn't bring up but which is relevant: the fact that at that time when you had Jim Crow and explicit overt racial segregation, the voluntary immigration by blacks from other parts of the world was really quite limited. Once the Civil Rights Movement was more successful in the United States, you then started seeing more and more people of African descent moving to the United States from Brazil, from Africa, from other parts of the Caribbean. They call themselves African Americans. When we start talking about African American English and you take someone like Barack Obama, who is African American but who doesn't trace his linguistic ancestry to enslaved Americans in any way, you're looking at a much more complicated linguistic picture. The term 'African American Vernacular English' actually becomes inadequate because what I've been talking about for most of this presentation is a vernacular dialect spoken by slave descendants of United States slave descendants whose ancestors came from Africa. That's a very different population altogether. But your point is well taken that even if you look at the slave descended population by itself, if the slave descendants went to Seattle, if they went to Los Angeles or they went to Chicago, if they went to Boston, the more educated they are, the more that that vernacular dialect starts to get influenced by local regional norms. Thank you very much.

My pleasure. Thank all of you. Thank you. Take care.