What is Hiding Behind Media Portrayals of Accents? (Part 2)
An applied case study of how media portrayals of accents can affect which groups people want to join--and for what reasons.
Based on the last two newsletters, I’ve had discussions about when language is appropriated versus when it is just being used. There isn’t a hard-and-fast rule and context really matters. In Part 2, we’re going to look at a famous sociolinguistic paper which highlights using another group’s language to be perceived a certain way.
This week, we’re diving into a famous sociolinguistic paper, “Yorkville Crossing” by Cecilia Cutler. It’s about a teenage boy, Mike, who uses African American English as a key part of his rebellious phase.
Meet Mike
Mike is the main character of this research paper. He’s White. He’s fifteen years old. He’s from one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of New York City. He attends a prep school. And he speaks with African American English phonology and gets involved in gang violence. Let’s rewind.
According to Rose, African American English (AAE) has a history of being perceived as “a symbol of rebellion” by White middle class youth. One of these youths is Mike. Growing up in New York City, Mike was in lose contact with AAE, and he would try to hang around people he believed to be representative of this “rebellious” culture. Most of his contact with AAE, though, came through hip-hop music and gangster movies, which Cutler notes romanticize inner-city life.
Around the age of 13, inspired by these medias, Mike began to alter his language and style: His vocabulary and pronunciation of words began to resemble AAE, and he would wear baggy pants and reverse baseball caps.
Along with the change in style and language, Mike tried to hide his upper-middle class background. He, for example, would give out his brother’s Brooklyn phone number instead of his home Manhattan number. Cutler interprets this as trying to draw a connection to poverty to be more authentic in his new image (p. 429).
And to enhance his authenticity, he created a tag name (which he would graffiti on expensive buildings), he started doing drugs, and joined a gang. He would get in fights and he eventually got kicked out of school.
Let’s Focus on the Language
Mike used things he associated with Black culture—from baggy clothes to drugs and violence—but a key element was AAE. In part 1, we talked a little about the history of AAE. While I’m a big fan of studying language in-context, let’s go over the phonology and syntax of AAE out of context to later examine how Mike picked and chose certain aspects of AAE:
There’s certain phonological differences from standardized English
Here are some common phonological changes:
These are some of the possible changes between standardized English and AAE. For example, ask might be pronounced as /æks/ in AAE. On the right, I listed the phonological description of the sound change. This is to show you that these are changes that are common and natural in many languages, including standardized U.S. English (same type of phonological change, but with different sounds).
There are also grammatical differences
AAE also has a consistent grammar. Some grammar rules include:
Omission of a copula verb:
The car __ red.
The girl __ happy.
Habitual be (used to show an action is repeated, but gives no indication of whether it’s happening now, something like usually or often):
He be late to school.
Remote past been (used to show the action has been completed for a long time):
I been knowing how to drive.
Negative concord (used in many languages, but not standardized English, refers to needing two negatives to negate something):
Can’t nobody say that.
Mike’s (Attempt at) AAE
When learning to mimic a new variety, it’s easier to mimic in a superficial way: going for common words and marked phonological differences1. It's a lot harder to learn grammar (remember, Mike is learning AAE from the media, not from a textbook).
An example of a superficial change is in the introduction, Cutler includes a transcript of a conversation between Mike and his best friend. Mike says, I gotta ask (/æsk/) my mom, but then later tries to recover and say I gotta ask (/æks/) my mom. I find it to be a good example of Mike being in the early stages of trying to acquire a variety and going for the most marked examples.
Over time, Mike seems to speak more and more with an AAE phonology. Some examples that Cutler gives:
Pronouncing the with a schwa. For example, saying /ðə/ apple, instead of /ði/ apple (which today is true of many U.S. dialects).
Not pronouncing /r/ before a vowel. For example, saying /fɔ/ owls, instead of /fɔr/ owls.
Pronouncing th as a stop. For example, in word initial pronouncing the as /də/.
General prosodic features (like rhythm and intonation) that approximated AAE.
He also used lexical features (words) from AAE in his speech. In terms of grammar, it seems like Mike was limited and would use AAE grammar only in fixed phrases, memorizing things like what up? (p. 431).
How Mike was Received
Mike, who learned about AAE mainly through music and media, wanted to be accepted and was perplexed when he wasn’t. For example, he was upset when people inside the AAE community would show Black pride because he, as a White boy, felt excluded (p. 437). He would also be angry when people would call him fake. In other words, Mike couldn’t see the difference between him and the community, which manifested in anger when he wasn’t accepted by the community.
Mike’s Choice
What this paper shows is that language is a powerful marker of—not only who you are—but also who you want to be.
In the end, Mike ended this phase of his life—at age fifteen, he transferred to another private high school. And at the time the article was written, Mike attended a private college. He went back to using something approximating standardized English.
For Mike, his Black phase, was just that—a phase, a story he might tell at dinner parties over laughs. He was able to enter a commodified, simplified version of Blackness—which he equated to drugs and violence—out of choice.
He wore Black culture like a fashion trend and then changed out of it when he was done with it. And Black people can’t do that, a fact that Mike never seemed to grapple with when he wasn’t accepted by the group.
As Cutler concludes, the origins of Mike’s behaviors are complex. One key element is that media sells associations between language and perception in a commodified way that hides the trauma and separation that cause languages like AAE to form and survive in the first place.
Thank you!
Thank you for reading this lesson! Please let me know if you like these deep-dives into famous papers. And let’s continue the discussion in the comments:
What are your general thoughts about Mike after reading this article? Where do you think this case study stands on the using another group’s language to language appropriation spectrum?
In what ways did the media affect Mike and facilitate Mike to reach his goals?
Keep Reading
This paper is exclusively based on “Yorkville Crossing” by Cecilia Cutler. You can read the article here.
I also used this site for the information on AAE syntax and this site for the information on AAE phonology.
Marked refers to it being obvious to the ears; something sounds different; it sounds marked. It can also mean that it sounds like a certain variety. Mike used /æks/ because it’s commonly associated with AAE, the variety he was trying to mimic.