A Meeting of Two Worlds—Oral History and Linguistics: Partnerships, Perplexities, and Potentialities in Researching African American Language

Abstract

The realms of oral history and linguistics can provide insight into the geographic, social, historical, and linguistic connections of different populations. In this article, we seek to highlight the interactions between the fields as they relate to African American Language (AAL), specifically spoken by African Americans in the Gulf South. We present a case study of how the two disciplines, linguistics and oral history, complement each other through an analysis of the Joel Buchanan Archive at the University of Florida Digital Collections. The unique grammatical features of AAL are present in many oral history interviews that we analyzed, and we argue that our findings show that oral history is beneficial for education and linguistics and that linguistics technological endeavors are increasingly important to the oral history field. Throughout our process, we address the challenges of preserving unique grammatical features in language varieties without a written standard and examine possible routes to provide consistent and linguistically accurate transcripts of an oral language variety through oral history work. AAL has a rich history within the United States, and it is an important part of Black culture. We believe our efforts make oral histories conducted in AAL accessible to the general population, provide informed guidelines for transcription and linguistic feature annotation, and streamline the collection of AAL for use in research, education, and technology settings.