African American Language : Language Development from Infancy to Adulthood

From birth to early adulthood, all aspects of a child's life undergo enormous development and change, and language is no exception. This book documents the results of a pioneering longitudinal linguistic survey, which followed a cohort of sixty-seven African American children over the first twenty years of life, to examine language development through childhood. It offers the first opportunity to hear what it sounds like to grow up linguistically for a cohort of African American speakers, and provides fascinating insights into key linguistics issues, such as how physical growth influences pronunciation, how social factors influence language change, and the extent to which individuals modify their language use over time. By providing a lens into some of the most foundational questions about coming of age in African American Language, this study has implications for a wide range of disciplines, from speech pathology and education, to research on language acquisition and sociolinguistics.

Mary Kohn is Associate Professor in English at Kansas State University. Her work examines linguistic variation across the lifespan, youth language practices, and regional sound change. Her book, The Way I Communicate Changes But How I Speak Don't (2015), is available through the American Dialect Society.

Walt Wolfram is a William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, and has pioneered research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s. He has published more than twenty books and over 300 articles. The recipient of numerous awards, Dr Wolfram was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

Charlie Farrington developed the Corpus of Regional African American Language, in collaboration with Dr Tyler Kendall. His numerous publications address regionality in African American Language, lifespan change, and sociophonetic variation.

Jennifer Renn is Associate Research Scientist in the College of Education at Purdue University, Indiana. Prior to joining Purdue, she was the Director of Linguistic and Cultural Diversity at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington DC, where she directed the English for Heritage Language Speakers Program and worked in K-12 English language assessment research.

Janneke Van Hofwegen's research focuses on understanding human behaviour and stylistic expression through the lens of language and group/individual identity. Her research on lifespan change and sociophonetic variation among minority ethnic and LGBT communities has been published in Language Variation and Change and Journal of Sociolinguistics.