Chapter Two: The Notion of Orality in the African American Literatureviewed

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The Linguistic Aspect of Orality

Dialect can also be seen as an integral part within orality because all the folklorist elements are told vernacularly including stories, tales, myths, legends, etc. Besides, Ebonics is a term that has been created in January 1973 at George Washington University by Professor Robert Williams who joined the words of “ebony” that means Black with “phonics” which means the science of sounds in an attempt to describe the African American speech as “Black sound”. This term appeared in order to avoid the negative connotations of terms like “Nonstandard Negro English”.

The table below shows the phonological and grammatical features of Ebonics

The Phonological and Grammatical features of Ebonics

For a long time, dialect was only used in everyday speech but later writers decided to integrate it within their writings. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Black English has been widely spread within the titles of many literary writings. For example, Mark Twain used heavily dialect within his novel Huckleberry Finn to distinguish between his characters and to bring to life his story. Hence, dialects are often used in literature to distinguish between characters from different regions or classes; for instance to portray the poor and uneducated characters.

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