Word Up! A Focus on the African American Lexicon

Instructors: Dr. Tracey Weldon (American Dialect Society Professor)

In this course, students will examine the history, culture, and use of the African American lexicon through the lens of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE), a first-of-its-kind project underway by Oxford University Press in partnership with Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research (www.odaae.com). Students taking this course will learn about the significance of the African American lexicon as a means of racial and cultural expression in the African American speech community, from current and trendy slang to enduring terminology passed down from one generation to the next. Students will explore the breadth of the African American lexicon across various semantic domains, including food, sports, music, and religion, and will consider the ways in which such terms vary across dimensions such as age, gender, region, and social class. Students taking this course will have an opportunity to hear, first-hand, from members of the Oxford Languages lexicography team about the rigorous historical methodology used to trace words back to their earliest known attestations. And they will hear from members of the ODAAE advisory board – comprised of some of the leading scholars of African American English – about the linguistic and cultural significance of the African American lexicon to African American English, American English, and varieties of English spoken around the globe. Finally, through early access to some select entries, students will have an opportunity to explore ways in which the dictionary can be used by teachers and scholars as a new and exciting resource in the study of African American English.

Keywords: Sociolinguistics, Variation, Corpus Linguistics, Language Change, Lexicon

Instructors

Dr. Tracey Weldon (American Dialect Society Professor)

American Dialect Society Professor

University of South Carolina

Dr. Tracey L. Weldon is a Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina, where she currently serves as Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Faculty Development in the College of Arts and Sciences. As a quantitative sociolinguist specializing in African American language varieties, Weldon has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in Linguistics, including African American English, Language and Gender, Survey of Linguistics, and Varieties of American English. She has published many scholarly articles and book chapters, including papers in American Speech, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, and Language. And she has given numerous conference presentations and invited talks, including recent keynote addresses for the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL). Weldon is an Associate Producer of the Emmy award-winning NSF funded documentary “Talking Black in America,” which was released in 2017 by the Language & Life Project at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Middle Class African American English, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. And she serves as an Executive Editor and Advisory Board member of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English.