Resumen de Codeswitching: Black English and standard English in the African‐American linguistic repertoire
In this paper, Black English (BE) and standard English (SE) are treated as two different closely‐related linguistic systems which coexist in the African‐American linguistic repertoire. Each system is defined as an autonomous grammar, and the interaction between them is considered to be governed by the same principles as those that govern languages in contact generally. In the process of collecting data for the purpose of describing the BE grammar the author observed some of the informants apparently codeswitching. This paper focuses on a middle‐class female informant who appears to be a balanced bilingual. In the first few minutes of her performance she could be mistaken for a monolingual SE speaker. As the session progresses, however, she makes several notable switches to BE. Her last performance, in contrast to the earlier ones, is frequently in BE. The evidence considered in this paper is striking counter evidence to the claim that BE is spoken mainly by poor and uneducated persons.
