San Antonio College Library

"Offers a fascinating, definitive history of the use of Black English in literature, the performing arts, religion, and everyday conversation. The Rickfords also explore America's love/hate relationship with Black English and its role in our ongoing dialogue about why and how race matters"--Jacket.

In The Word on the Street, John McWhorter reveals our American English in all its variety, beauty, and expressiveness. Debunking the myth of a "pure" standard English, he considers the speech patterns and accents of many regions and ethnic groups in the U.S. and demonstrates how language evolves. He takes up the tricky question of gender-neutral pronouns. He dares to ask, "Should we translate Shakespeare?" Focusing on whether how our children speak...

Encourages readers to establish a boundary between an acceptable evolution of language and outright language misuse, predicting the consequences of the overuse of street English in contemporary writing, music, and society.

"Dialect and Dichotomy introduces and critiques canonical works in literary dialect analysis and covers recent, innovative applications of linguistic analysis to representations of African American dialect in American literature. It also proposes theoretical principles and specific methods that can be implemented in order to analyze literary dialect for either linguistic or literary purposes, or both. Finally, the proposed methods are applied in four...