Educational CyberPlayGround ®

West Indian English Creole and African American Vernacular English

The Center for Applied Linguistics http://www.cal.org/ebonics/
Ebonics Information Page

Justice Department Seeks Ebonics Experts

The Linguistic Society of America http://www.lsadc.org/ebonics.html
January 1997 statement on the issue:

Views of linguists and anthropologists on the Ebonics issue (Part 2)
http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/LingAnthro2.html

Ebonics Information Page
Center for Applied Linguistics Ebonics Information Page. The following are resources that CAL has been disseminating to those interested in information... http://www.cal.org/ebonics/

A publicly-accessible Corpus of
a) African American Vernacular English
b) West Indian English Creole are available for any researcher to work with, but they may only be consulted on the premises of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa, providing that the researcher agrees to abide by certain ethical guidelines to protect informant privacy and confidentiality.
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/mille/1fra1.htm This is the main initiative in Europe for developing language resource corpora for minority languages.

Creoles and Pidgins

The Language Varieties Network http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gavinm/home.htm
discussion of pidgins and creoles and other stigmatized varieties with a focus on educational issues.

PIDGINS AND CREOLES ARCHIVE (PCA)
A distribution point for research papers on Pidgins and Creoles hosted by the University of Siegen, Germany, managed by Ingo Plag and Sabine Lappe. PCA aims at facilitating research in Pidgin and Creole languages. Posting in PCA is open to all who wish to disseminate their work on Pidgins, Creoles, and other contact languages. Papers in the Archive are unedited, unreviewed, unsolicited, and self-selected.

The Voices of Living History - PDF File

A review of accounts given by 12 former slaves and one white woman - of the antebellum plantations, the Civil War and the post-war period. Taken from Sutcliffe 1998 African American Vernacular English: Origins and Issues (pages 68-95 slightly abridged). Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading, England.

Internet Movie Database Ltd
A movie database where films can be searched according to a number of different criteria, including language. Our search for films in Creole gave three matches (one each in Haitian, Cape Verdean and Guinea-Bissau Creole). One more film with Haitian dialogue was listed under Haitian.

Creole Movies <><> Haitian Movies

Appendix: Glossary of Languages
An appendix to the above containing alternative names of various pidgins and Creoles.

All The Creoles

THE DICTIONARY OF LOUISIANA CREOLE:
Edited by Albert Valdman, Thomas A. Klingler, Margaret M. Marshall, and Kevin J. Rottet.

Foreign Language Database

The Human Languages Page
The Human-Languages Page is a comprehensive catalog of language-related Internet resources. Online language lessons, translating dictionaries, native literature, translation services, software, language schools, or just a little information on a language you've heard about.

Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
A statement that argues for the protection and encouragement of minority languages.

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
All science, says Plato, begins with astonishment. But it is rare that one stops to think how one's own language works - it is simply there to serve us. Our awareness is raised under special conditions: when we suffer language impairments, when we talk to children learning the language, when we are not sure whether someone said one thing or another, when we cannot find the words to express ourselves, or when we struggle with other languages. Mostly, however, speaking is effortless and understanding automatic. The study of these most natural of tasks is psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics is also concerned with how languages are learned, and the role they play in our thinking. Psycholinguistics has its roots in structural linguistics on the one hand, and in experimental and cognitive psychology on the other hand. But it is also closely related to a set of other disciplines, such as anthropology, medicine - in particular neurology - and phonetics. It is customary to distinguish six subjects of research within psycholinguistics.

DARE - Dictionary of American Regional English
Who are the main users of the Dictionary? We assumed from the start that librarians and teachers would be significant users. That has certainly been true. But we've also discovered that DARE is a valuable resource for physicians (whose patients may use folk terms to describe their ailments), lawyers (who need to know when a word means one thing in one place and quite another thing in another place), and historians (who can figure out what those seventeenth-century documents were referring to), not to mention novelists, poets, folklorists, actors, and directors. And of course, it is treasured by those who simply delight in the variety, wit, and wisdom found in the quotations that illustrate each entry. See the "Notes and Quotes" column in this issue for a sampling of comments from satisfied customers.

Blues Language
The words and phrases listed below are the back-ends of hyperlinks that start in the actual lyrics on this site. Although some words and phrases may not be typical blues lingo they are nevertheless listed here because they help to clarify the meaning and context of the lyrics they are found in. Finally, the content of the list is based on having the non-U.S.-English-native speaking blues fans in mind as well.

ESL - English as a Second Language

The Plain Language Association International
provides free plain-language articles, writing tutorials, Web links, news, networking opportunities, professional support, and an e-mail discussion group.

Controlled Language Applications (CLAW) with the ANLP (Applied Natural Language Processing)/ NAACL (North American Chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics).

Controlled English languages and systems - standardization, design, and evaluation of controlled language systems. author productivity and document usability, academic, corporate and industrial perspectives, bringing researchers, developers, users, and potential users of controlled language systems from around the world. AECMA SE, Caterpillar's CTE, Boeing SE Checker, SMART MAXit Checker, GIFAS Rationalised French, Controlled German at IAI and DFKI

Language Varieties Website

Its aim is to provide accessible information to non-linguists (especially teachers and students) about pidgins, creoles, minority dialects, regional dialects and indigenized varieties. The site contains definitions, tips for using such varieties in the classroom, references and links to other sites. At present, it includes descriptions of Hawai`i Creole English, African American (Vernacular) English, Aboriginal English, Singlish (Singapore Colloquial English), Bislama, Tok Pisin and Kamtok (Cameroon Pidgin).

English Creoles:

Americas
North American Black English, Bermuda, Bahamas, Gullah, Western Caribbean, Eastern Caribbean, The Guianas

English Creoles: Africa
Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon

English Creoles: Asia and the Pacific
Singapore Australia New Guinea and Melanesia Bonin Islands Hawaii Pitcairn/Norfolk

The Ethnlogue A catalogue of more than 6,700 languages spoken in 228 countries explained pidgin and creole entries in the database.

The History of Words

InLibris
A search tool for over 40,000 links in its own directory of literary resources on the internet. According to the In Libris homepage one can "search Inlibris for etexts, writers, agents, books, ezines, prizes, publishers, workshops, genres, dictionaries, bookstores, libraries, hypertexts and other literary and language- or book-related sites.

CIA World Factbook,
and
United Nation's Infonation

The Portuguese dialects found in Africa, Asia and Oceania can be categorized into Creole and non-Creole forms. The Creole forms were derived from interaction with indigenous languages and are most often considered separate languages because of the important differences between them and the (non-Creole) mother tongue.

Anthropology, Folklore

The American Anthropological Association http://www.aaanet.org/

Society for Linguistic Anthropology http://www.aaanet.org/sla/index.htm

Anthropology Resources on the Internet: http://www.aaanet.org/resinet.htm

The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress (Ex-Slave Recordings are very important for AAVE): http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfshtml/

World Music