Journal of English Linguistics

This article argues that the recognition of individual variation is helpful for understanding sociolinguistic variables. While past researchers have argued that variables are comprehensible only if each individual in a social group uses variables at the same frequency as all other individuals, the author shows that this conception of the variable ignores crucial information in the social study of language: that social groups are composed of people with widely different interests and ideas of “self.” Data from the speech of fourteen young, African American residents of a rural community on the North Carolina coast are presented. The author demonstrates that there is considerable evidence for the existence of individual variation in speech, given that this variation is constrained by the linguistic structure used by the surrounding speech community. The sociolinguistic variable is thus a set of possibilities in speech rather than a statistical whole that reflects exactly its parts.

Cajun English is spoken in French-dominant rural areas of south Louisiana. The authors present morphosyntactic evidence to show that Cajun English is a vernacular originating in the Louisiana Cajun speech communities and is not the result of dialect spread or faulty language learning. The features of Cajun English reported on are (1) -S Absence, (2) -ED Absence, (3) IS Absence, (4) ARE Absence, and (4) WAS Leveling ( was in Standard English were contexts). A comparison of the results of this study with a large number of similar sociolinguistic studies reveals that Cajun English differs both quantitatively and qualitatively from other varieties of Southern English. In many cases, the amount of deletion, especially for the older speakers who learned French as their first language, is well above any other reported results; the qualitative difference is revealed when the authors examine the widespread deletion of final consonants in general.

By examining the Hip Hop poetics on Pharoahe Monch's album, Internal Affairs (1999), this article demonstrates the linguistic inventiveness and innovativeness of contemporary African American lyricists. As poets, Hip Hop MCs (rhymers) have both built on and expanded far beyond the American poetic tradition, using a form that is highly intertextual and that demonstrates multilayered poetic complexity. While Hip Hop MCs draw upon alliteration and assonance and other traditional rhyme forms, they also employ new rhyme strategies that require new categories of knowledge, such as compound internal rhymes, primary and secondary internal rhymes, chain rhymes, back-to-back chain rhymes, and bridge rhymes. Hip Hop MCs also employ various literary techniques, such as wordplay, simile, metaphor, narrativity, flashback, role-play, suspense, irony, and imagery in their lyrical compositions. Often constructing these rhymes in a multirhyme matrix, Hip Hop MCs offer a vast corpus of literary and linguistic texts to be analyzed.