African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education, and Identity is a groundbreaking collection of research on African American Women’s Language that is long overdue. It brings together a range of research including variationist, autoethnography, phenomenological, ethnographic, and critical. The authors come from a variety of disciplines (e.g., Sociology, African American Studies, Africana Studies, Linguistics, Sociophonetics, Sociolinguistics, Anthropology, Literacy, Education, English, Ecological Literature, Film, Hip Hop, Language Variation), scientific paradigms (e.g., critical race theory, narrative, interaction, discursive, variationist, post-structural, and post-positive perspectives), and inquiry methods (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, and multimethod) while addressing a variety of African American female populations (e.g., elementary school, middle school, adults) and activity settings (e.g., classrooms, family, community, church, film). Readers will get a good sense of the language, discourse, identity, community, and grammar of African American women. The essays provide the most current research on African American Women’s Language and expand a literature that has too often only focused on male populations at the expense of letting the sistas speak.

Language in African American Communities is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the language, culture, and sociohistorical contexts of African American communities. It will also benefit those with a general interest in language and culture, language and language users, and language and identity. This book includes discussions of traditional and non-traditional topics regarding linguistic explorations of African American communities that include difficult conversations around race and racism. Language in African American Communities provides: • an introduction to the sociolinguistic and paralinguistic aspects of language use in African American communities; sociocultural and historical contexts and development; notions about grammar and discourse; the significance of naming and the pall of race and racism in discussions and research of language variation and change; • activities and discussion questions which invite readers to consider their own perspectives on language use in African American communities and how it manifests in their own lives and communities; and • links to relevant videos, stories, music, and digital media that represent language use in African American communities. Written in an approachable, conversational style that uses the author’s native African American (Women’s) Language, this book is aimed at college students and others with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics.

GOLD MEDALIST OF FOREWORD REVIEWS' 2015 INDIEFAB AWARDS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES What's wrong with black women? Not a damned thing! The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti–black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves. When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. In the '60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won't let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures. Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. “We have facets like diamonds,” she writes. “The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.”

Language in African American Communities is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the language, culture, and sociohistorical contexts of African American communities. It will also benefit those with a general interest in language and culture, language and language users, and language and identity. This book includes discussions of traditional and non-traditional topics regarding linguistic explorations of African American communities that include difficult conversations around race and racism. Language in African American Communities provides: - an introduction to the sociolinguistic and paralinguistic aspects of language use in African American communities; sociocultural and historical contexts and development; notions about grammar and discourse; the significance of naming and the pall of race and racism in discussions and research of language variation and change; - activities and discussion questions which invite readers to consider their own perspectives on language use in African American communities and how it manifests in their own lives and communities; - links to relevant videos, stories, music, and digital media that represent language use in African American communities. Written in an approachable, conversational style that uses the author's native African American (Women's) Language, this book is aimed at undergraduate students and others with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics.

Arranged alphabetically from "Alice of Dunk's Ferry" to "Jean Childs Young," this volume profiles 312 Black American women who have achieved national or international prominence.

Written by the hugely respected linguist, Geneva Smitherman, this book presents a definitive statement on African American English. Enriched by her evocative and inimitable prose style, the study presents an overview of past debates on the speech of African Americans, as well as providing a vision for the future. Featuring cartoons which demonstrate the relationship between language and race, as well as common perceptions of African American Language, she explores its contribution to mainstream American English and includes a summary of expressions as a suggested linguistic core of AAL. As global manifestations of Black Language increase, she argues that, through education, we must broaden our conception of AAL and its speakers, and further examine the implications of gender, age and class on AAL. Perhaps most of all we must appreciate the ‘artistic and linguistic genius’ of AAL, presented in this book through rap and Hip Hop lyrics and the explorations of rhyme and rhetoric in the Black speech community. Word from the Mother is an essential read for students of African American English, language, culture and sociolinguistics, as well as the general reader interested in the worldwide ‘crossover’ of black popular culture.

2003 — Honorable Mention, Myers Outstanding Book Award – The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America The demand of white, affluent society that all Americans should speak, read, and write "proper" English causes many people who are not white and/or middle class to attempt to "talk in a way that feel peculiar to [their] mind," as a character in Alice Walker's The Color Purple puts it. In this book, Sonja Lanehart explores how this valorization of "proper" English has affected the language, literacy, educational achievements, and self-image of five African American women—her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, and herself. Through interviews and written statements by each woman, Lanehart draws out the life stories of these women and their attitudes toward and use of language. Making comparisons and contrasts among them, she shows how, even within a single family, differences in age, educational opportunities, and social circumstances can lead to widely different abilities and comfort in using language to navigate daily life. Her research also adds a new dimension to our understanding of African American English, which has been little studied in relation to women.