Breaking Bread Series #2: African American Language with Dr. Lisa Green

The stream of research on African American Language (AAL) has continued to flow steadily, stemming from the necessity in the 1960s for researchers to prove that the variety was a legitimate linguistic system and, from that point forward, having to continue to defend that claim. Over the years, in defense of AAL, insightful revelations about the sentence structure, sound system, and composition of meaning have been made; however, issues related to the intersection of language of speakers in African American communities and social factors continue to be in the forefront. In this talk, Dr. Lisa Green will frame the past fifty+ years of research on AAL in terms of cycles and then discuss research on linguistic patterns in children developing AAL, as a means of shining the light on what we have learned from the cycle and how to move forward.

Dr. Lisa Green, Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics at UMass Amherst, is the founding director of the Center for the Study of African American Language at UMass Amherst as well as the Associate Dean for Graduate Education in Humanities & Fine Arts.

Join the Office of Institutional Equity & Belonging, and the Freel Library for our new series focused on coming together across cultures, breaking bread (literally and figuratively), and learning about one another’s experiences in the name of building a better world.

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Co-hosted with: Multicultural Education Recourse Center

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