Language & Communication 35 (2014) 43–54

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Language & Communication

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Linguistic repertoire and ethnic identity in New York City

0271-5309/$ - see front matter � 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.12.007

E-mail address: kbecker@reed.edu

Kara BeckerReed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland, OR 97202, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 28 January 2014

Keywords:EthnicityRepertoireAfrican American EnglishNew York City English

a b s t r a c t

This paper expands on the ethnolinguistic repertoire approach to consider the use of abroad linguistic repertoire by a single speaker in the construction of a multivalent identity.African American speakers in North America are often analyzed from an ethnolectal per-spective, and placed in contrast to (white) speakers of regional varieties of AmericanEnglish. A close analysis of three features – one that is traditionally ethnolectal (copulaabsence as a feature of African American English), one that is traditionally dialectal(BOUGHT-raising as a feature of New York City English), and one that is potentially either(non-rhoticity in the syllable coda) – reveals intersectional identification practices thatgo beyond ethnicity and regional identity. The results of a variationist analysis of a commu-nity sample of speakers from the Lower East Side of Manhattan is contrasted with a micro-analysis of the repertoire of a single speaker, with the repertoire analysis demonstratingthe fluid nature of speaker identity and of the boundaries between ethnolect and dialectin New York City.

� 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The notion of ethnolinguistic repertoire (Benor, 2010) has been used productively in recent sociolinguistic scholarship topromote a perspective on ethnic identity as socially constructed and fluid (Benor, 2010; Eckert, 2008b; Fought, 2006;Newman, 2010; Sharma, 2011, 2012). Defined as ‘‘a fluid set of linguistic resources that members of an ethnic group mayuse variably as they index their ethnic identities,’’ (Benor, 2010, 160) the ethnolinguistic repertoire provides an alternativeto a static, ‘ethnolectal’ view of the linguistic productions of pre-defined ethnic group members. This paper supports an ethn-olinguistic repertoire approach in place of an ethnolectal one for African American English (AAE) in New York City, and ex-pands on this approach in analyzing one speaker’s use of a broad linguistic repertoire (Gumperz, 1964) that utilizes bothethnolinguistic and regional dialect features in the construction of a multivalent identity (Mendoza-Denton, 2002;Schilling-Estes, 2004) of which ethnicity is just one part.

Traditionally, the term ethnolect has been used to describe the variety of a mainstream language spoken by an ethnicimmigrant group and marked by substrate influence from the L1 during a period of transition from bilingualism to monolin-gualism in L2 (Clyne, 2000; Wolck, 2002). A broader application of the term opposes speakers of a marked ethnic group to themainstream regardless of the status of community bilingualism and substrate transfer, reinforcing what Fishman calls the‘‘rigid boundary distinctions between that which is ethnic and that which is not ethnic’’ (Fishman, 1997, 342). In earlier peri-ods in the US, ethnolects were primarily the varieties spoken by ‘white ethnic’ groups, which at the time stood in contrast tomainstream American English (Fought, 2006). More recently, an ethnolect approach has been used to describe the linguisticpractices of non-white ethnic groups, a practice that has received criticism in sociolinguistic scholarship (Benor, 2010; Eckert,2008b; Fought, 2006; Jaspers, 2008; Newman, 2010) for its presentation of ethnic identity as fixed. Scholars observe thatdesignating non-white speaker groups as ethnolects only serves to reinforce what has been called a white/non-white binary

44 K. Becker / Language & Communication 35 (2014) 43–54

in North America, in which non-white speakers are marked and stand in contrast to a supra-ethnic category of whiteness thatis privileged and unmarked (Bucholtz, 1999, 2011; Cutler, 2008; Fought, 2006).

Eckert (2008b) further notes that descriptions of ethnic minority varieties in North America cast the regional dialects spo-ken by the majority in some locale as ethnic varieties by virtue of contrast. However, because of the unmarked status ofwhiteness, only speakers of ethnolects are marked with respect to ethnicity:

‘‘The designation ‘‘ethnolect’’ can be part of a more insidious practice. In the dominant discourse of American dialectology,the white Anglo variety is considered a regional dialect, while African American and Latino varieties are considered ethnicdialects. . .the dichotomy between regional and ethnic varieties and the lack of attention to regional varieties of AfricanAmerican and Latino speech underscores a deterritorializing discourse of subordinated racial groups’’ (2008b: 27).

The result is an opposition between a marked and marginalized ethnolect of non-white speakers on the one hand and anunmarked, white regional dialect on the other. Variationist sociolinguistic scholarship has by and large verified a distinctionbetween white and non-white varieties for the English spoken in North American cities, as noted here: ‘‘The speech commu-nities in most northern cities are in fact two distinct communities: one white, one nonwhite’’ (Labov, 1994, 54).1

African American English (AAE) is the quintessential ethnolect in North American sociolinguistics. Despite the qualifica-tions that not all speakers who are African American use AAE, and that non-African Americans use features from AAE, its veryname captures a variety defined by ethnic identity. An early focus on identifying the unique structural features common tocommunities of AAE speakers across mainly northern US Cities (Fasold, 1972; Labov, 1968, 1972a; Wolfram, 1969) sparked amassive body of scholarship on the variety, much of which investigates AAE’s relationship to coterritorial white varieties.This relationship is viewed largely as unidirectional, so that AAE is seen to converge with or assimilate to mainstream Amer-ican English, or to diverge from it (Ash and Myhill, 1986; Bailey and Maynor, 1989; Childs and Mallinson, 2004; Fasold et al.,1987; Labov, 2010). Much scholarship has worked to combat the rigid boundary between ethnolect and regional dialect forAAE, in particular for what Wolfram (2007) calls the supra-regional myth – that AAE is uniform across regions. Recent workhas demonstrated that African American speakers do participate in mainstream regional phonology in a wide range of NorthAmerican locales, from the South to northern cities (Fought, 1999; Wolfram, 2007; Yaeger-Dror and Thomas, 2010), and thatAfrican Americans demonstrate regional variation separate from mainstream varieties as well (Blake and Shousterman,2010a; Hinton and Pollack, 2000).

A further complication for the ethnolectal approach is the way that individual speakers are considered in relation to groupconcepts like ethnolect and dialect. Given that AAE has been depicted as a static ethnic variety spoken by African Americans,it follows that individual speakers will also remain fixed inside this static categorization; i.e. they will be viewed first andforemost as speakers of AAE. Indeed, the relationship between African American and white speakers is exemplified in theconcept of ‘crossing’ (Rampton, 1995) which suggests that a speaker’s movement between AAE and white varieties canand should be described. As Joseph notes,

Descriptions of ‘crossing’ tend to reinforce conservative views of the power of the categories people are supposed to ‘stick’to. My own working assumption . . .is that ‘crossing’ is less remarkable a phenomenon than is the perception that thereare categories rigid enough to be crossed. (Joseph, 2004, 171)

With respect to AAE and (white) American English, it is white speakers who are more commonly depicted as crossers(Bucholtz, 1999, 2011; Cutler, 2003), most likely due to the marked status of white use of AAE and its implications for issuesof appropriation and racialization. African American speakers who ‘cross’ into white speech are more commonly described aspracticed style-shifters or as bidialectal. However, both perspectives elevate ethnic identity to the forefront, suggesting it isthe organizing principle for the analysis of individual speaker practice.

The ethnolinguistic repertoire solves many problems inherent to the ethnolect approach. It works against the notion thatlanguage used by members of some ethnic group need be analyzed as a distinct linguistic entity by accounting for instancesof intra-group and intra-speaker variation in some ethnic group not as ‘use’ or ‘non-use’ of some ethnolect, but as the selec-tive use of features from a repertoire of ethnic distinction. Sharma’s work (2011, 2012) has applied the ethnolinguistic rep-ertoire approach to style-shifting in British Asian English, highlighting the utility of the framework for perspectives on ethnicidentity outside of North America as well.

Benor acknowledges a narrow scope for the ethnolinguistic repertoire framework (2010: 161), noting its focus on thegroup and on the construction of ethnic identity. The present study seeks to expand the scope of the ethnolinguistic reper-toire by highlighting a single individual who uses more than ethnolinguistic features to construct more than an ethnic iden-tity. Here, notions of intersectionality are helpful in highlighting the complex construction of ethnic identity in individualspeaker practice, which has been shown to be informed by and constructed in combination with other aspects of identityincluding gender (Fought, 1999), socioeconomic status (Eckert, 2008b), and age (Wagner, 2014). Indeed, ethnicity is not al-ways a central aspect of the identities of people who are categorized as ethnic, nor do these people orient to ethnicity in thesame ways or in the same amounts (Hoffman and Walker, 2010; Nagy, Chociej, and Hoffman, 2014). Finally, speakers shift

1 Of course, not all work adheres to this general trend, including Wong and Hall-Lew (this volume), which investigates the use of the regional feature raisedBOUGHT by Chinese Americans in New York City and the Sunset District of San Francisco (and in the latter neighborhood, Chinese Americans are arguably theunmarked majority) as well as Wagner (this volume), which demonstrates ethnic variation within white speaker groups, in this case Irish- and Italian–Americans, in Philadelphia.

K. Becker / Language & Communication 35 (2014) 43–54 45

their alignment to aspects of a multivalent identity from moment to moment, drawing from a fluid indexical field (Eckert,2008a) of meanings for linguistic variables. In fact, the notion of repertoire use as drawing features from a linguistic ‘arsenal’(Gumperz, 1964) is quite similar to the concept of bricolage from recent third-wave scholarship (Eckert, 2004, 2012). Ana-lyzing a single speaker in a micro-analysis highlights the deployment of a broad linguistic repertoire in the service of a multi-valent identity, in ways that only reinforce the emphasis on fluidity from the ethnolinguistic repertoire and work againstfixed notions of ethnolect and dialect.

In this paper, a micro-analysis of one speaker’s use of three variables from her repertoire is contrasted with a macro-vari-ationist analysis of those same variables from a community study of Lower East Side speakers of NYCE, with the repertoireanalysis providing a dramatically different picture than the community study (Sharma, 2011). The three variables were se-lected to highlight the limitations of an ethnolectal approach to AAE in New York City: copula absence, a ‘hallmark’ variablein the literature on AAE, would normally be analyzed as ethnolectal for an African American individual; BOUGHT-raising, a sali-ent feature of NYCE, would normally be analyzed as convergence with or divergence from (white) NYCE for an African Amer-ican New Yorker; and non-rhoticity in the syllable coda, a feature associated with both AAE and NYCE, would normally forcea choice between ethnolect and dialect. Analysis of these features in co-occurrence demonstrates the limitations of boundedcategories like ethnolect and dialect and promotes a repertoire approach for investigations of the role of ethnic identity inlinguistic production.

2. Ethnicity on the Lower East Side

The Lower East Side has always had a diverse ethnic make-up, although that diversity has shifted from a population com-posed primarily of white ethnic groups to one with a majority of non-white ethnic groups. From its inception, the neighbor-hood has served as a port of entry for newly arrived immigrants to the United States, and has maintained a level of ‘‘rapidsocial change’’ (Labov, 1966) characterized by the high turnover of residents of various ethnic groups. Before the Civil Warthe area was dominated by enclaves of Irish and German, like Kleindeutschland along 11th Street (Ernst, 1949). A secondwave of immigration after 1880 from Eastern and Southern Europe brought Italians, Russians, Polish, Ukrainians, and EasternEuropean Jews (Mele, 2000). The decade of 1945–1955 marked the arrival of approximately 50,000 Puerto Ricans to NewYork City (Zentella, 1997), many thousands of whom settled on the Lower East Side. More recent immigrants to the neigh-borhood are from Asia and Latin America (a characteristic of post-1965 immigration to New York City as a whole). The influxof non-white immigrants, especially Puerto Ricans and Chinese, has been accompanied by a rapid decrease in the populationof white ethnic residents, descendants of the first and second waves of immigration. Other white residents are increasing innumber, however, as part of an enormous flood of gentrifying transplants. Labov (1966: 105) reports census data from 1960for his survey area of the Lower East Side: 63% was made up of ‘‘European stock’’ (the two largest groups were Jewish, at 27%,and Italian, at 11%). Puerto Ricans made up 26% of the population, African Americans 8%, and other non-white (largely Chi-nese) 3%. According to 2010 census data, today the neighborhood is approximately 33% white (non-Hispanic), 34% Asian, 26%Hispanic, and 7% African American, and is the fourth highest racially diverse neighborhood in New York City.2

Labov’s seminal work on the Lower East Side in the 1960s demonstrated ethnic differentiation for features of NYCE. Hisanalysis looks primarily at the three ethnic groups large enough to be studied in his sample: Jews, Italians, and African Amer-icans. Jewish speakers were found to produce significantly higher BOUGHT vowels than Italians, while Italians produced higherBAT vowels for the tense set of the NYCE short-a split (/æ:/ before voiced stops, voiceless fricatives, and front nasals) thantheir Jewish counterparts. Yet the groundbreaking analyses from the work – findings of social stratification in the communityaccording to socioeconomic status and contextual style – collapse Jewish and Italians with other white Lower East Siders(Labov, 1972b). This collapse of white ethnicities into a supra-white category is in line with the broader move towards apan-ethnic whiteness in American culture, outlined above. It also aligns locally with an assimilationist view of ethnicityin New York City that was popular in the 20th century, drawing on the city’s place in the popular imagination as an immi-grant melting pot (Zangwill, 1909). As Becker and Coggshall (2009) argue, two kinds of erasure (Gal and Irvine, 2000) oc-curred. First was the erasure of distinct white ethnic groups and their language use, as these groups were expected toflatten linguistically within the classic three-generation model. Labov (1966) notes this move away from white ethnic iden-tification on the Lower East Side, observing that the ‘‘three-cornered structure of Jews, Irish and Italians’’ had collapsed into awhite group, ‘‘now contrasted as a whole with Negro and Puerto Rican groups’’ (1966: 248). The second erasure was that ofany speakers from non-white ethnic groups, who were not considered in descriptions of NYCE (Becker and Coggshall, 2009).The collapse of speakers into a supra-ethnic white group has remained common in contemporary sociolinguistic dialectology(but see Wagner, this volume), as has the exclusion of non-white speakers from dialectological sampling (Labov et al., 2006),especially African Americans.

In New York City, sociolinguistic scholarship has maintained a contrast between AAE and NYCE. African Americans inLabov (1966) were found to not participate in NYCE phonology and so were largely excluded from analysis. During the sameperiod, Language in the Inner City, which made a strong argument for a distinct, legitimate, and systematic AA(V)E, described

2 Census data for the Lower East Side are notoriously hard to compile given the lack of consensus as to the neighborhood’s boundaries and the dozens ofcensus tracts that sit within those boundaries. The numbers cited here were provided by the office of Manhattan Community Board #3 (www.cb3manhattan.org),the boundaries of which correspond closely to the sampling area of Becker (2010).

Table 1Lower East Side speakers stratified by age, gender, and ethnicity (Becker, 2010).

Year of Birth 1924–1951 1952–1973 1974–1990

F M F M F M

African American 2 2 2 2 2 1 11Chinese 1 0 1 2 2 3 9Jewish 3 3 2 4 2 1 15Puerto Rican 2 3 3 3 3 1 15White 3 3 2 2 1 2 13

Total 22 23 18 63

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the speech of African Americans in Harlem (Labov, 1972a). More recent work has investigated the linguistic production ofblack New Yorkers, a salient racial category that includes African Americans as well as Caribbeans (Blake and Shousterman,2010b).

The community sample of Lower East Side residents in Becker (2010) is made up of interviews from a diverse sample ofspeakers that reflects the contemporary ethnic diversity of the neighborhood. In the early part of the sociolinguistic inter-view, participants were asked to self-identify with respect to ethnicity, and these emic labels were used in combination withthe etic category designations from the US Census (see Hoffman and Walker (2010) for a discussion of the importance ofrelating emic and etic ethnic identifications). Three macro-social categories were used to fill cells (Wolfram and Fasold,1974) – ethnicity, gender, and age – resulting in the sample shown in Table 1.

Members of what were once the white ethnolects from Labov (1966) now by and large identify as white, with the excep-tion of fifteen Jewish speakers who saw their ethnic identity as similar but not identical to a white identity. The Chinesespeakers here are of Cantonese heritage, although two participants included in this category are of mixed heritage (one halfChinese and half Korean, one half Chinese and half Filipino) but identified as only ‘‘Chinese.’’ Although many residents of theLower East Side used the terms African American and black seemingly interchangeably, the term African American is used inthe sense of (Baugh, 1999) to distinguish these speakers as all having roots in the American South, as opposed to the largepopulation of racially black New Yorkers whose roots and ethnic identifications are linked to a Caribbean or African identity(Blake and Shousterman, 2010b). Finally, the term Puerto Rican is adopted despite the fact that many Lower East Side res-idents, including some in-group members, refer to this ethnic category as ‘Spanish.’

3. Speaker profile

One speaker from the community sample in Becker (2010) is Lisa, recorded in 2008 at the age of 29. Both of Lisa’s grand-mothers moved to the Lower East Side from Harlem when her parents where children, and her parents later met in theneighborhood, married, and had four children. Lisa grew up in a large housing project along the East River. Her personal nar-ratives about childhood align with descriptions of the period of ‘disinvestment’ on the Lower East Side in the 1970s and1980s that resulted in extreme urban blight, poverty, and increased crime (Mele, 2000; Turner, 1984).

Lisa describes a childhood spent stepping around crack vials, witnessing police harassment, shootings, and other crimes,and watching family and friends fall prey to crime and drug addiction. Yet she simultaneously works to construct these ‘hardtimes’ as ‘better times,’ using a discourse of nostalgia (Hill, 2010) to opposes this earlier period of authenticity and commu-nity with the current problems resulting from gentrification.

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In Lisa’s case, her identity as a legitimate Lower East Side resident and her concerns about her community led her to beginvolunteering with a local housing activism organization, and then to work there full time as a community organizer.

With respect to the etic categories used in constructing the community sample described above, Lisa is young, female,lower middle class, generation 3.5 (born in New York City, with one or more grandparents born in New York City and bothparents local), and African American. Yet when she was asked to self-describe her ethnic background, she resisted the labelAfrican American.

Lisa’s own self-identification calls into question the practice of categorizing speakers into fixed ethnic categories for thepurpose of variationist analysis. Though she (begrudgingly) acknowledges that both of her parents are from the South and sowould be considered African American, she critiques the term as too limiting and notes instead that she prefers to think ofherself and others as ‘‘different shades of brown,’’ so that people around her form one ‘‘tinted’’ group (line 16). Despite this,Lisa was placed into the African American group in the sample above, in direct contrast to her own request; ‘‘I hate to usethose boxes and squares if we have to’’ (line 2). Lisa’s case makes clear the potential pitfalls of ‘binning’ speakers into macro-social categories for variationist analysis, a practice that is unavoidable for drawing connections between linguistic variablesand social predictors using inferential statistics, but may be used in combination with micro-analyses like that offered below.

These qualitative excerpts highlight aspects of Lisa’s multivalent identity, including her changing socioeconomic status,her devotion to her occupation, her anti-gentrification stance, and her ethnic identification as a ‘brown’ person. These com-plex identifications highlight the problems inherent in placing her in a single cell (above) for variationist analysis – young,female, African American. And if she is multivalent with respect to her identity, we should expect her to be multivalent in herlinguistic practice as well. What follows is a sampling of Lisa’s use of resources from her linguistic repertoire, demonstratingthat an ethnolectal analysis is insufficient to account for her patterns of linguistic production.

48 K. Becker / Language & Communication 35 (2014) 43–54

4. Copula absence and ethnic identity

Categorized as African American, the common point of departure of an ethnolectal analysis of Lisa would be to identifythose features of AAE produced during her interview. Phonologically, she produces monophthongal /ai/ before voiced obstru-ents and word-finally, various vowel mergers before nasals and liquids, and high rates of consonant cluster reduction, amongother features of AAE phonology (Thomas, 2007). This is in line with the findings of Coggshall and Becker (2010) who foundthat African American New Yorkers produced phonological features of AAE like /ai/ monophthongization. At the morphosyn-tactic level, Lisa utilizes paradigm leveling, habitual be, remote past been, and copula absence. Copula absence is a hallmarkfeature in studies of AAE that is the subject of a number of variationist analyses (Blake, 1997; Rickford and Price, 2013;Rickford, 1999; Rickford et al., 1991). Because it is generally not used in other varieties of North American English, researchersworking on AAE often use copula absence as a diagnostic of ethnolectal behavior. Here, Lisa’s rate of copula absence3 acrossan 80-minute interview is 20%. This overall rate is similar to those reported for other adult female African Americans: Foxy Bos-ton, a highly vernacular AAE speaker in her teens (Rickford and McNair-Knox, 1994) uses 35% copula absence at age 34, and hermother, aged 42 (in 1987) uses 18% (Rickford and Price, 2013).

The following passage illustrates Lisa’s use of copula absence using the standard notation of ‘count’ [C] forms along with‘don’t count’ [DC] forms. Instances of copula absence are underlined.

The instances of copula absence in this narrative (n = 6) account for a high percentage of Lisa’s total copula absence(n = 41) across her 80-minute interview. Yet the aspect of identity that is the topic of this excerpt is not ethnicity, as mightbe expected for an AAE feature in an ethnolectal, or even an ethnolinguistic repertoire, analysis. Instead, Lisa’s identificationas a New Yorker, and specifically her alignment with other individuals who share that regional identity, is constructed in partthrough her copula absence: note in particular the repetition of phrases that utilize the first person plural as well as copulaabsence, ‘‘we £ all from New York,’’ (line 10), ‘‘if we £ farther away’’ (line 11), ‘‘we £ really together’’ (line 12), ‘‘we £ fromNew York’’ (line 12–13). Her regional solidarity with others is location dependent, too: she first recounts teasing upstate NewYorkers for claiming a New York identity within the US, saying ‘‘they all Ø bragging about they Ø from New York,’’ (line 9),then goes onto note that when abroad she connects with these upstaters: ‘‘But then if we Ø farther away, like if I’m in Pan-ama, South America, and somebody’s from New York, now we Ø really together.’’

While at the level of a variationist analysis of ethnolectal behavior, Lisa uses copula absence in accordance with otherspeakers of AAE, in this excerpt a supposedly ethnolinguistic feature is used to construct a place identity, an aspect of iden-tity tied to localness, authenticity, and region (Becker, 2009). This unexpected use of a marked ethnolectal feature highlightsthe range of indexical meanings a feature like copula absence may draw from, as well as the range of identifications that Lisamay choose to make when using features from her repertoire in interaction.

3 This rate was calculated using the Straight Deletion formula from Rickford et al. (1991), which is (Deletions/(Full Forms + Contractions + Deletions). ‘‘Don’tcount’’ forms were excluded following Blake (1997).

K. Becker / Language & Communication 35 (2014) 43–54 49

5. Raised BOUGHT and regional identity

An ethnolectal approach to Lisa’s use or non-use of the local white variety NYCE would see that usage as an indicator ofthe extent of her assimilation to the regional dialect. Recent work in New York City has found that non-white New Yorkers,including African Americans, do produce features of NYCE, contrary to the findings in Labov (1966). One feature is a raisedand ingliding BOUGHT vowel (Hubbell, 1950; Labov, 1966; Labov et al., 2006), which has been documented in the speech ofAfrican Americans (Coggshall and Becker, 2010), Latinos (Slomanson and Newman, 2004) and Chinese Americans (Wong,2007; Wong and Hall-Lew, this volume). Raised BOUGHT is part of a larger set of long and ingliding vowels in NYCE, andwas found to raise along the periphery of the vowel tract in a change in progress from below (Labov, 1966).

A variationist analysis of the Lower East Side community sample finds an overall reversal of this change, such that mostLower East Side speakers are lowering BOUGHT in apparent time (Fig. 1). Further, BOUGHT height is conditioned by ethnicity; amixed-effects model fit to the F1 of the nucleus of BOUGHT selects the interaction of year of birth and ethnicity as a social pre-dictor of BOUGHT height.

The findings in Fig. 1 overall help to disrupt the boundary between ethnolect and dialect in NYCE, as they show white andnon-white speakers who behave similarly with respect to raised BOUGHT. Speakers from all ethnic groups in the sample pro-duce raised BOUGHT (using the cut-off line of F1 < 700 Hz from Labov et al., 2006), particularly older speakers of all ethnic back-grounds. In addition, Chinese and Puerto Rican speakers show similar trends to white and Jewish speakers in apparent time,reversing the change in progress for raised BOUGHT (see also Wong and Hall-Lew, this volume, for Chinese New Yorkers),although the correlations between year of birth and BOUGHT height are weaker. In contrast, African American Lower East Sid-ers are distinct from other ethnic groups in maintaining BOUGHT-raising over time, so that young African American Lower East

Fig. 1. Height of BOUGHT by year of birth for five ethnic groups.

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Siders produce some of the highest means for BOUGHT in the sample. An ethnolect approach might take the difference inapparent time findings for African Americans as evidence of divergence from local white speech; yet divergence normallyfinds non-white speakers moving away from dialectal features. Here, it is African Americans who maintain the NYCE feature,while white New Yorkers move away form it. An ethnolect approach might then need to argue that raised BOUGHT is now amarker of New York AAE. But a repertoire approach allows for a different perspective, one that views features not as theproperty of any ethnic group, but as potential resources for the conveyance of indexical meanings. The perceptual experi-ment in Becker (2011) identified an indexical field for raised BOUGHT connecting the feature to macro-sociological meaningslike older, white ethnic, and Brooklynite, as well as negative personal attributes (meanness and aloofness), suggesting thatthis NYCE feature is used to construct a local, regional NYCE persona.

A micro-analysis of Lisa’s use of raised BOUGHT finds her drawing on these NYCE meanings in complex ways. Lisa’s mean forBOUGHT is 683 Hz (above the cut-off for a raised BOUGHT), and she ranges in the production of 26 tokens from 515 to 860 Hz. Thefollowing narrative has two instances of BOUGHT that differ by almost 200 Hz and are produced only 60 s apart. The two tokensare in bold. In addition, copula variation is notated as in Excerpt 4, with count [C] and don’t count [DC] forms, and instancesof copula absence underlined.

A number of complex identifications are apparent in this excerpt. One is ethnicity, as Lisa describes an encounter with aLower East Side resident, a white woman whose ethnicity is commented on in lines 2, 4 and 5. Yet this woman’s ethnicity isintimately connected with her authenticity as a Lower East Side community member in ways that unravel in the narrative.Lisa at first glance identifies her as ‘‘a old school white person, you know like the white people that’s been here for years, oneof the white people that’s been here for years and they don’t – they Ø tight in the bar too’’ (lines 4–7). Quickly, however, Lisarealizes that this white woman is a more recent transplant, and a confrontation ensues over issues of gentrification. Whatemerges from this narrative is that on the Lower East Side, ethnic identities interact directly with socioeconomic class,age, and lifestyle practices. Older white residents (‘‘old school’’ white people) are most likely working- or middle-classand native to the neighborhood, and many align themselves with an anti-gentrification position similar to Lisa’s. Youngwhite residents are likely to be upper middle-class, gentrifying transplants who express views similar to the character inLisa’s narrative.

Here, the two productions of BOUGHT occur in two very different instances of stance-taking (Jaffe, 2009). In the first, Lisa hasyet to realize that the ‘‘old school white person’’ she has invited to sit down is actually a gentrifier, and her stance is one ofsolidarity. She produces a non-raised, non-NYCE BOUGHT (one with a high FI). In addition, this non-raised BOUGHT co-occurs

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with copula absence, used in much the same way as in Excerpt 3 above, to align with another New Yorker (‘‘I thought shewas one of us,’’ line 6). Later in the narrative, Lisa is now in opposition to this white gentrifier over local issues of housing andsocioeconomic status. She cites her own background during the ‘hard times,’ saying ‘‘My mother fought for the change,’’ (line21) ‘‘and the reason we lived here was not because of choice, we was forced to’’ (line 22). Lisa’s regional identity as anauthentic local East Sider is relevant here, as is her own socioeconomic status as a non-gentrifier and her occupation as aneighborhood housing activist. The use of raised BOUGHT, then, captures an instance of Lisa’s multivalent identity that incor-porates at least ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and regional identity. Of particular interest is the co-occurrence of copulaabsence with the non-raised token – ‘‘We Ø talking, we Ø drinking,’’ so that both features – a non-raised BOUGHT and copulaabsence – may draw on meanings that allows speakers to achieve relationship building and solidarity. A raised BOUGHT, incontrast, takes an oppositional stance, but one that all the same incorporates aspects of identity that are relevant in the Low-er East Side context, and that cannot be separated from each other – ethnicity, socioeconomic class, political stance, personalqualities like aloofness, and more. This is a true indexical field for raised BOUGHT and speaks to the difficulty in categorizinguse of this feature, for Lisa, as either accommodating or not accommodating to a local white norm.

6. Non-rhoticity in the syllable coda

Non-rhoticity in the syllable coda presents an interesting opportunity to explore the boundaries of ethnolect and dialectin New York City, as the variable is a documented feature of both AAE and NYCE. The presence of variable non-rhoticity inLisa’s speech, analyzed from a –lect perspective, would force a choice: is Lisa’s non-rhoticity ethnolectal – an AAE thing – ordialectal – an NYCE thing?

Variable non-rhoticity has long been a noted feature of AAE as a result of the variety’s emergence in the non-rhoticplantation South, and remains in use by African Americans in non-Southern locales where the regional dialect is fully rhotic(Thomas, 2007). In areas where the regional dialect does show variable non-rhoticity, like New York City, it has been sug-gested that this ‘shared’ feature can have an additive effect for AAE speakers (Wolfram, 2007): compare the near-categoricalnon-rhoticity documented for African American New Yorkers (Labov, 1968, 1972a) with the much lower rates found for Afri-can Americans in Detroit during the same time period (Wolfram, 1969). Blake and Shousterman (2010b) found an overallrate of 40% rhoticity (or [r-1]) for 4 African American New Yorkers, a rate higher than for the Caribbean New Yorkers in theirstudy.

From a dialect perspective, rhoticity is increasing in NYCE. Labov (1966, 1972b) documented a change in progress towardsrhoticity in NYCE, one that has continued but has not yet reached completion (Becker, 2009; Labov et al., 2006; Mather,2012). A variationist analysis of the Lower East Side community sample finds continued progress towards rhoticity, with po-sitive correlations between year of birth and mean [r-1] for all ethnic groups except African Americans (Fig. 2).

Similar to the picture for raised BOUGHT in Section 5, these overall results find white and non-white speakers alike partic-ipating in the NYCE change in progress towards rhoticity, with Puerto Rican and Chinese Lower East Siders demonstratingincreasing [r-1] in apparent time. And like for raised BOUGHT, African Americans are the only ethnic group to maintain useof this variable in apparent time. But unlike for raised BOUGHT, because non-rhoticity is a documented feature of AAE, an eth-nolect perspective can simply conclude that these African American Lower East Siders behave like AAE speakers across NorthAmerica, using non-rhoticity at greater rates than coterritorial whites. Lisa’s behavior also looks like ethonlectal behavior atthis level of analysis: her rate of [r-1] across 300 tokens of coda /r/ is 35.5%, much lower than the rates used by speakers ofother ethnicities in her age cohort on the Lower East Side, and similar to the rates found in Blake and Shousterman (2010b).

Becker (2009) conducted a micro-analysis of non-rhoticity for seven white Lower East Siders and found that speakers in-creased their use of non-rhoticity when discussing topics related to the neighborhood. That is, even in the context of overallparticipation in the community change towards rhoticity, speakers shifted in the direction of non-rhoticity to construct aplace identity that allowed them to index qualities of localness and authenticity. Schilling-Estes (2004) also investigated mi-cro-variation for non-rhoticity between an African American and a Lumbee speaker in North Carolina, identifying condition-ing factors related to ethnicity, locality, and solidarity. A micro-analysis of variable non-rhoticity in Lisa’s narrative fromExcerpt 5, where complex identifications of ethnicity, region, and socioeconomic status were accomplished through theuse of raised BOUGHT and copula absence, demonstrates that Lisa does more than participate in ethnolectal behavior. Firstwe can look at the use of variable non-rhoticity in co-occurrence with non-raised BOUGHT, which was argued above to indexlocal solidarity. Variable non-rhoticity is noted for presence – [r-1] – and absence – [r-0].

Fig. 2. Mean [r-1] by year of birth for five ethnic groups.

52 K. Becker / Language & Communication 35 (2014) 43–54

In Excerpt 6, Lisa utilizes much [r-1], suggesting that rhoticity, similar to non-raised BOUGHT and copula absence, can beutilized to construct a stance of solidarity or to downplay distinct aspects of identity. Conversely, in the stretch of speechsurrounding the raised BOUGHT, Lisa uses many instances of [r-0]:

Presumably, the white gentrifier in the narrative is r-full (being non-local and of a higher class status), and given the con-

tinued change in progress towards rhoticity in New York City, non-rhoticity has most likely shifted to become marked inNYCE. Here, non-rhoticity is available to emphasize ethnic and class-based differentiation through the construction of lin-guistic distance (Schilling-Estes, 2004). In addition, non-rhoticity works in conjunction with raised BOUGHT to assert a distinctLower East Side identification that incorporates issues of socioeconomic status, age, ethnicity, and more. Despite the fact thatboth are features found in NYCE, the identifications here are about more than regional identity. Further, to see non-rhoticityin combination with raised BOUGHT complicates an ethnolectal picture for non-rhoticity from the community analysis above –if non-rhoticity were an AAE thing, why would a speaker use it in co-occurrence with a marked feature of NYCE? Of course,the difficulty in ‘assigning’ a variable like non-rhoticity to either AAE of NYCE demonstrates the inherent problems in cate-gorizing variables as solely ethnolinguistic or dialectological.

K. Becker / Language & Communication 35 (2014) 43–54 53

7. Conclusion

This paper highlights the limitations of an ethnolectal perspective on AAE and on the varieties spoken by marked, non-white ethnic speakers in North America more generally. In addition, it emphasizes the need for continued questioning of thefixed analytic boundaries between ethnolect and regional dialect that reinforce asymmetries of markedness, and of the roleof ethnic identity in group members’ own identifications and practices. To approach speakers who are African American as,first and foremost, speakers of AAE is to elevate ethnic identity above other aspects of speaker identity for these individuals.This promotes an a priori assumption that ethnic identity is the organizing principle for African Americans, and that onlywithin the ethnic group come identifications related to age, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.

An ethnolectal perspective is further problematic in failing to account for the complex identifications that emerge in amicro-analysis of a single speaker, Lisa. While Lisa’s overall linguistic behavior is in alignment with other African Americansin the community sample and so with an ethnolectal perspective on African American New Yorkers, relying on this level ofanalysis alone obscures the ways that Lisa makes use of linguistic variables to construct a multivalent identity that bothincorporates and moves beyond ethnic identity. In this case, the repertoire analysis, which demonstrates the use of suppos-edly ethnolectal features to construct more than ethnic identity, and supposedly regional dialect features to construct morethan regional identity, paints a very different picture than the community level, variationist analysis (Sharma, 2011). Therepertoire analysis also allows for an analytic move beyond notions of crossing or assimilation for African American individ-uals – notions that have the potential for depicting speakers as simply ‘jumping’ from one category to another, whether fromethnolect to regional dialect or from one ethnic identity to another.

The three variables investigated here – copula absence, raised BOUGHT, and non-rhoticity – demonstrate together the fluidboundaries between ethnolect and regional dialect and between ethnic identity and other aspects of identity. Each variable’sbehavior at the community level supports an ethnolectal picture of AAE in New York City, i.e. that AAE in NYC is character-ized by use of morphosyntactic features like copula absence, and the maintenance of BOUGHT-raising and non-rhoticity despitechanges away from these features in NYCE. Yet the micro-analysis of Lisa’s use of these variables gives pause to this neatethnolectal view. Further, each variable challenges its prior categorization as either ethnolinguistic or dialectological. Whilethe use of a recognizable AAE feature like copula absence might be assumed to construct ethnicity, just as a recognizablefeature of NYCE might be assumed to construct regional or local identity, the concept of indexicality (Eckert, 2008a; Ochs,1992; Silverstein, 2003) highlights the role of mediating social meanings that interrupt the mapping of a linguistic featureto a macro-sociological category. Here, variables draw on an indexical field of meanings, including authenticity, locality, andstances of solidarity and opposition, that come to construct aspects of speakers’ intersectional identities. These three specificvariables highlight the fluid boundaries between ethnolect and regional dialect. Specifically, ‘ethnolectal’ or ethnolinguisticfeatures do work outside of ethnicity, and ‘dialectal’ features do work outside of regional identity or locality. This observationallows for expansion beyond an ethnolinguistic repertoire approach to a broader repertoire approach and reinforces notionsof intersectionality in the speaker construction of ethnic identity.

Acknowledgements

This paper could not have been prepared without the hard work and collaboration of research assistant Lydda Lopez(Reed College ’12). Many thanks go to Malcah Yaeger-Dror, Gregory Guy, and Lauren Hall-Lew for their hard work in bringingthis volume to fruition, and to Sonya Fix and anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback. A final thanks to Kathleen Astonfor help with the coding of copula absence and non-rhoticity. All remaining defects are my own.

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