Enhancing Data and Tools for Research and Education on African American English

University Of Oregon Eugene, Eugene OR

Investigators

Abstract

No variety of U.S. English has received more attention by researchers, the media, or the public than that spoken by African Americans. The place of African American English, and the language of African American children in the American social landscape has often been the source of controversy, kindling far ranging debates about such topics as equity in educational policies and practices and linguistic profiling in housing discrimination. Researchers of American English have also long debated the historical origins of African American English and the ongoing relationship between language varieties spoken by African Americans and those spoken by their European American neighbors. Studies have long demonstrated the systematic and rule-governed nature of vernacular African American English, and other non-standard language varieties more generally, yet important questions remain about the origin of African American English varieties, their current and future development, and their relationships to regional European American and other socioethnic varieties. At the same time, important social and educational applications of enhanced knowledge persist about the nature of and socioeducational implications related to non-standard varieties in general and African American English in particular. One of the major hurdles in developing better knowledge about African American English is the lack of publicly available data and detailed information about the variety. Very little research data are available to scholars and educators beyond those data they collect privately for their own purposes. This award supports the creation of the first public corpus of African American English. Through the award, researchers are building a large collection of linguistically annotated spoken language data along with publicly oriented web-based resources. These resources will enable a wide-range of researchers, as well as the public, to more robustly understand the variety. Corpora such as these are also important for developing language technologies, such as speech-to-text software, and lead to better human-computer interaction.