Description:

Title: Appropriation, Misuse, and Erasure: Realities of African American English on the World Stage

Abstract: African American English (AAE) has been a topic of interest for decades (Labov 1972). The language variety has grown in interest across fields, such as education, psychology, law studies, and more. An important unexamined question until now is this: Have perceptions of African American English changed as the awareness of the variety has spread? While knowledge of AAE has grown in public consciousness, the perceptions of the variety have not changed; that is to say, speakers of AAE, across age groups and gender identities, are still treated disproportionately based on how they speak. Linguistic discrimination reigns supreme, despite the consciousness-raising regarding the variety. Even more, we assert that the awareness of the variety has led to cooptation of the variety, resulting in erasure of the origins of the variety, and emboldened language users to use and misuse AAE in public contexts (Ilbury 2020). In this talk, I'll describe how AAE is represented and misrepresented in comedy and media portrayals (Calhoun & Yoo 2024), how AAE on the internet perpetuates inaccurate forms and thus inaccurate perceptions of the variety, how AAE is stereotyped as it exists with AI (Zellou & Holliday 2024, Hofmann et al. 2024), how health practitioners maintain discriminatory practices toward AAE users (Hendricks et al. 2021), and finally, describe the neurophysiological and behavioral evidence that points toward perceptions of AAE being processed as different, on a slippery slope to perception as deficit (Weissler 2022). The decades of research on AAE have increased massive awareness about this English-variety existing as a full language. What is crucial now is a step beyond this, such that daily consumption of with the internet, AI, and media can veer beyond caricaturing AAE speakers and the variety as a whole, and move toward authentic representation and diminished discriminatory practices.