The Sociology of African American Language: A Language Planning Perspective

The current state of knowledge of African American language is examined from a broad, multidisciplinary perspective that includes its structure, history, social role and educational implications, as well as the linguistic scholarship from which it derives, as a case study of language planning. Diverse including hip-hop culture, the African American church, and the Ebonics controversy are unified by a pervasive theme of latent conflict between academic knowledge of African American language and "real world" knowledge of the same.