Hangin' around the general store on a warm afternoon, sipping a Dr. Pepper, listening to the townsfolk tell jokes and talk about their lives.
Nice work if you can get it - and Guy Bailey has.
Bailey, dean of UNLV's College of Liberal Arts and a professor of English, has spent many days of the last 11 years at the general store of a small East-Central Texas town, just listening to the residents chat.
Well, OK, there's really more to it than that. Bailey, whose field is linguistics, not only listens to the residents; he and a colleague also tape record the conversations and later transcribe and analyze the recordings to find out what they reveal about African-American Vernacular English as it is spoken in this small farming community.
Why?
Bailey wants to help settle a long-standing dispute among linguistics experts concerning the origin of the African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) spoken today by some African-Americans. He is also interested in tracing how it has evolved.
And, he wants to be on hand to follow its further evolution as the types of communities where AAVE has its roots - small farming towns in the American South - fade into history as more and more of their residents move to cities in search of jobs.
His research has a practical application, too - one that is tied to the
current controversy over Ebonics, a term recently coined to describe
AAVE. The debate over Ebonics surrounds the issue of whether AAVE
should be used in schools to aid in teaching students how to speak
standard American English; some believe it should even be acknowledged
as a second language.
Regardless of one's stand on the Ebonics controversy, Bailey says information he and others are compiling about AAVE should be of help to America's teachers, many of whom have students in their classrooms who speak AAVE. The better such teachers understand AAVE, he says, the better they can help their students learn standard American English.
Bailey began his study of the speech of the people of the town he calls Springville in 1986 when he was an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. Springville is a fictitious name he assigned the rural community for his research purposes. Because the scholarly articles he has written about his research include lengthy transcripts of actual conversations, giving the town a fictitious name was the only way to preserve the residents' anonymity, he says. Otherwise, given the personal details often contained in the recorded conversations, the speakers would be too easily identifiable, he says.
Springville is a small enclave of about 125 people, located "on some of
the best cotton-farming land in Texas," Bailey says. It's what once
would have been known as a "tenant farmer community," whose residents
were sharecroppers who farmed a piece of someone else's land for a
share of the proceeds. Because the sharecroppers were typically in debt
to the landowner for money loaned to buy seed and for other purchases
made at the town's general store (which was typically owned by the same
landowner whose land they farmed), they tended to stay put. "Most
people stayed in debt and couldn't leave, so it was kind of a debt
peonage," Bailey says.
He notes that although most research on AAVE has been done in big American cities - where African-Americans began moving in large numbers during and following World War II - it was in towns such as Springville that AAVE, which was first heard among slaves on Southern plantations, persevered into the 20th century.
So it was one of these towns that Bailey felt he needed for his research. In effect, he was looking for a place where he could study an older form of AAVE than that spoken in large cities today. To do that, he needed to listen to the speech of people who never had moved to the city.
"Historically, AAVE was a rural Southern variety of speech. Until 1910, 90 percent of all African-Americans lived in the South, and 70 percent of them were in the rural South. By rural South, I mean communities of less than 2,500 people."
But finding such a town wasn't easy, Bailey says.
"Most of these old tenant communities have disappeared in the South. What led to their disappearance was the mechanization of agriculture. The mechanized farming didn't really hit the South until after World War II, but when that happened, there was really no need for laborers." As a result, many of the residents of the tenant farming communities began moving away to look for work.
After some searching for a town where he could find "the oldest, most conservative variety of AAVE," Bailey settled on Springville, a town wedged between two rivers. It has only one paved road and exactly two places of business - the general store and the beer joint. It also has a school serving grades one through eight. When Bailey first arrived in 1986, the school had 63 pupils, making it the smallest independent school district in Texas. Some of the adults work in nearby towns. Others farm on a small scale.
Bailey was lucky in his discovery of Springville. He happened to know the daughter of the woman who owns the general store and all of the land in town. She made the initial introductions for him, and he eventually became friends with another woman who works at the post office, which is located inside the general store.
Bailey's colleague, Patricia Cukor-Avila, who joined his study in 1988 as a graduate student and who remains involved today as a professor at the University of North Texas, made friends with the woman who runs the general store. She, in turn, introduced them to her neighbors. Soon, the project was underway.
While many of the initial interviews were one-on-one with residents of the town, what Bailey really wanted was to listen to the townspeople talk among themselves.
"One of the goals of this research is to study language that people use with each other rather than with outsiders. In other words, you're trying to look at natural linguistic interaction of residents of this community," Bailey says.
"There's something called 'the observer's paradox' in linguistics," explains Bailey, who earned a doctoral degree in English linguistics from the University of Tennessee. "The observer's paradox works like this: If you're a linguist, you want to know how people talk when they talk to each other, but the minute you interject yourself into the picture, they don't talk like they talk to each other. They talk like they talk to a stranger, or an English teacher or something."
Little by little, Bailey and Cukor-Avila, gained the trust of the townspeople. The investigators and their tape recorders became an accepted part of the community.
"It got to the point that we could just go to the store and sit down and turn the tape recorder on, and people would come in and talk to us," he says, adding that what's even better is that they've also been able to make many tape recordings in which they are barely participants. "We're there - in and out - but we're not really major participants.
"Now that we've developed good relationships with these people, we're often invited into their homes for social gatherings," Bailey says. "For instance, one guy who we've interviewed almost every year since 1988 invited us after a few weeks to his house for a barbecue, and he invited one of his best friends. So we have some great linguistic interaction between those two men who have been friends for 60 years.
"We do very little talking. It's mostly them talking to each other and recounting old stories. That's the kind of thing we're ultimately trying to get."
Bailey says that although he initially explained his study to the
Springville residents, he isn't sure how much of it they truly
understand or how much they really care.
"The truth of the matter is, they're more than happy to talk to us, they got to like us, and they understood that we were doing some kind of study of Springville. We were different and interesting and a diversion," he says, adding that being a diversion might have helped the team's success in Springville. "Not much happens there."
As for the researchers, Bailey says that over the years they've become interested in more than the residents' speech patterns.
"Actually, we became pretty interested in the content of what people had to say, because as you become more and more part of this community, you become interested in their day-to-day lives and how people are doing - whether somebody has kicked a cocaine habit or whether somebody's garden is working."
Between the research that has been done on modern-day AAVE in big cities and his own work on the older form of AAVE most often used in Springville, Bailey had data on AAVE as spoken during most of this century.
The problem he faced, however, was that there was little information on AAVE available before that time. "The question was: What did AAVE sound like in 1870 or 1900?
"We don't really have much evidence on the language of the first African-Americans in the U.S. because, first of all, there were no tape recordings and, secondly, they were forbidden by law to read and write. Some of them learned anyway; there are a few things that were written by African-Americans in the 1800s, but we just don't have many texts."
That robs linguists of one of their most valuable tools.
"If we wanted to study white speech in the 1800s, we could go back and look at old letters - letters of people who didn't have much education - and we could make inferences about their language based on written documents," Bailey says.
But then Bailey discovered something unexpected that helped him fill the void.
"It just so happens that there were some mechanical recordings done with former slaves. These people were born in the 1840s, '50s, and early '60s. The recordings were done in the 1930s and '40s as part of the WPA [Works Progress Administration] Slave Narrative Projects," Bailey says.
Although the recordings had since been transferred to reel-to-reel tape and had been stored at the Library of Congress for decades, linguists hadn't used them, he says.
"Basically, there are seven hours of about 11 or 12 people who were interviewed on tape. The sound quality of most of the tapes is pretty good. And it just so happens that several of these people were slaves on plantations not far from Springville."
The discovery of the recordings was a real boon, according to Bailey. Between the people on the recordings and the current residents of Springville, Bailey now has speech information on people born from the 1840s to the 1980s.
"So we have basically 140 years of African-American Vernacular English. That's a pretty good place to start off in making some inference about historical development."
The controversy over the origins and evolution of AAVE dates back decades, Bailey says, coinciding roughly with the integration of American schools in the 1950s and '60s. When integration began occurring on a wide-spread basis, for the first time large numbers of African-American children had white teachers, who for the first time found large numbers of African-American children in their classrooms, Bailey points out.
"Educators encountered speech patterns that they hadn't encountered before, and they were totally baffled. So sociolinguists - and that's what I am, a linguist who studies language in society - began working on African-American English in an attempt to explain to educators how that language, how that dialect, works."
As for the origins of AAVE, two theories have persisted, Bailey says.
"Theory number one held that AAVE was derived from non-standard English dialects spoken by whites and that many of the non-standard features had disappeared in white speech but were preserved in black speech," he says.
"The second theory held that black speech, or AAVE, actually began as a kind of Creole language and what happened over the years was that it had become de-Creolized, so that it was very similar to American dialects but not identical to them."
A Creole language, Bailey explains, is a language that began as an amalgam of two languages - for instance, the English spoken by slave traders and the language spoken by the people living in western Africa when the slave traders arrived - but then evolved into a separate, more complex language.
After his years of research on AAVE, Bailey has come to believe that neither theory is entirely accurate - or entirely without merit.
"There is some evidence for that Creole hypothesis. In African-American Vernacular English the 'to be' verb can often be deleted. Somebody will say, 'She my sister,' or 'She a tall girl.' The 'is' is deleted. This deletion of 'to be' is probably a relic of this Creole history.
"However, many of the features [of the language] of young African-Americans that are commonly known are really pretty recent developments. For example, the use of the unconjugated 'be,' as in, 'They be working,' is something that linguists call 'habitual be.' That 'habitual be' does not appear in the speech of the oldest people," Bailey said. "It appears in the speech of people born after World War II. In fact, this is an innovation that took place in big cities after World War II when African-Americans moved there. It since has spread to small communities like Springville.
"At the same time, there are also some older features of white dialects that were preserved in black speech, for instance, the pronunciation of 'ax' for 'ask.' That occurred in many varieties of white English and was borrowed into black speech," Bailey says.
"What we found out is AAVE has a really complex history, and you can't understand that history unless you understand the kind of Creole origins, but at the same time also understand the more contemporary innovations," he says. "It's not as if it were a Creole language that's just becoming more like other varieties of American English. It's a language that has its own independent trajectory and development. To some extent it's influenced by other varieties of English, and to some extent it goes its own way.
"AAVE is not becoming white speech, it's not being lost, and it's not becoming more like white speech; it's developing in its own merry way."
Bailey says he thinks one of the most important goals of those people arguing today about Ebonics should be to find "a way of helping school teachers have more respect for the language that the kids bring to school."
"The kids aren't bringing broken English to school. They're bringing a systematic variety of English that's developed just like any other variety of English," Bailey says, noting that AAVE, or Ebonics, has its own set of complex rules as does any dialect. "I think it's helpful for teachers to understand exactly how that language operates and where it comes from.
"It's just like teaching a foreign language. You can teach people a foreign language better if you understand how that language differs from their language. If I understand exactly how Spanish differs from English, and I can point out those differences, then it becomes much easier for you to learn Spanish," he says. "By the same token if I can sit down with an African-American kid and explain exactly where the differences are between standard English and his speech, it really makes the task of teaching standard English easier.
"The real point here is trying to use the most successful techniques for teaching kids standard English."
To listen to Bailey discuss linguistics in general and his work in Springville in particular is to listen to a man talk about a pursuit he obviously relishes.
Yet, he ended up as a social linguist as many people end up in their careers - through a series of chance events. Majoring in English at the University of Alabama because it was an easy subject for the avid reader, Bailey took a linguistics course from James McMillan, one of the premier linguists of his generation. Soon Bailey was hooked.
McMillan's classes, coupled with Bailey's own experience with the English language, set him on his career path.
"I grew up in a part of the country where outside of that area the language is not highly respected," says Bailey, whose speech still reflects more than a trace of his Alabama roots. Throughout his life he has heard comments from non-Southerners indicating - or sometimes stating outright - that anyone with a Southern accent must be stupid.
"I think probably the thing that first attracted me to language was the fact that it carries social consequences, and I was on the negative end of some of those social consequences," Bailey says. "For me, it became an interesting thing to study.
"I used to tell my classes that the only thing I'd rather do than linguistics, if I could have had my choice of professions, would have been to play professional baseball. On the other hand, shoot, I'd be retired by now and looking for work," Bailey says with a laugh.
According to Bailey, his work in Springville is the ultimate in fun - next to playing center field for the Atlanta Braves. "That's the way I take vacations. I'll go back to Springville and spend a couple of days doing field work.
"Doing the research, writing the articles - there's no work to it at all, really. It's a lot of fun. That's why I can still do it as dean, because I enjoy doing it," says Bailey, who came to UNLV from the University of Memphis in 1995 to head the College of Liberal Arts. "It's something that whether I get a reward for it is irrelevant now.
"There's a kind of real excitement and fun about creating knowledge. And, basically, when you do research, that's what you're doing. You're in the process of creating knowledge."
And, as far as Bailey is concerned, there is more knowledge yet to be created in Springville.
Initially, he thought that the town was on the decline and that his study might be brought to a forcible end when most of the residents either moved away to find work or died.
But then things started happening in Springville. For one, oil was discovered in 1994. While that directly profited only one person - the woman who owns the general store and all the land in town - it brought a variety of new people into town on a regular basis.
Another change occurred at the school. Because the Springville school was viewed as safer than the school in the county seat, a number of parents from the county seat began bringing their children out to the Springville school. With 120 students now enrolled, the school district is building a new school.
How these changes will affect language in Springville, Bailey isn't sure. But one thing is clear: he's eager to find out.
"In spite of the fact that we thought the community would die, it's kind of gotten a second lease on life," Bailey says. "It will be interesting to see what happens."
