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Sociolinguistic Interview Essay

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Irving and I sit across from each other at a vintage `60's Formica table, my trusty recorder in hand. He is a black male in his mid 20's who grew up in a region of Atlanta called the "SWAts" (South West Atlanta), for the most part, except for the five years that he spent in a little Georgia town called Hogansville with his grandmother. After high-school, he joined the Army and then went on to college. This is where we are now. Irving and I are both in the same AAVE class, and we discussed some of the topics that have been brought up in that class over a banana and a bowl of cereal. After Irving explained his background to me, which situations in his life he felt had the strongest influence on his idiolect. He had learned his speech …show more content…

"It's [SE's] a weapon that you use wherever you need to go if you're black. (II.3)" After his grandmother taught him "correct" speech at such an early age, I was certain that when he returned to Atlanta there had to be a pretty significant difference in his speech vs. the urban kid's speech. He went on to explain the term "proper" to me. According to Irving, "proper" is the term that most African-Americans use to describe a fellow African-American who speaks Standard English, or they at least speak a more standard dialect than the accuser. This is how people described Irving in his childhood. "I did use to get in trouble for speaking proper,' (I.2)" he admitted. Irving was quick to point out that he didn't feel that he was not a speaker of AAVE, but rather that the people he surrounded himself with spoke it more heavily than he did. This lead way to Irving's spectrum theory (I.2). The spectrum theory is that everyone's pattern of speech falls somewhere on a continuum. There is no true speaker of AAVE nor a true speaker of Standard English. To illustrate further, let's put the clear speakers of Standard English on the left of this spectrum, and the clear speakers of AAVE on the right. It would depend on if someone fell to the right or left of your own position on that scale whether you considered them an AAVE or an SE speaker. Also, their distance from your position would indicate how severe you

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