TY  - JOUR
A1  - Troike, Rudolph C.
T1  - The earliest Gullah/AAVE texts : a case of 19th century mesolectal variation
T2  - Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages : JPCL
N2  - The earliest known extensive texts in Gullah (and perhaps African American Vernacular English as well) to appear in print were published in The Riverside Magazine for Young People in November, 1868, under the title "Negro Fables" (p. 505-507). These are four animal stories, which the editor of the magazine, Horace Elisha Scudder, described in his column only as having been "taken down from the lips of an old negro, in the vicinity of Charleston" (see Appendix for the editor´s comments and the full text of the stories).2 The Story-Teller was evidently a genuine "man of words" (Abrahams, 1983), a true raconteur who could artistically embellish a simple traditional account (perhaps further embellished by the transcriber) in a variety of ways. That he commanded a certain range of Gullah is evident from particular signature features in the texts, but the absence of other typical Gullah features and the presence of shared Gullah/African American Vernacular English usages, together with the periodic appearance of standard English forms, demonstrate that these texts provide perhaps the earliest actual documentation (apart from early tertiary comments, cited e.g. in Feagin, 1997, p. 128-129) of register variation or style/code-switching among Gullah speakers. ...
Y1  - 2008
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/9932
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1111079
SN  - 0920-9034
VL  - 18
IS  - 2
SP  - 159
EP  - 229
ER  -