The notion of a “speech community” has long been recognized as problematic since competent language users who are geographical neighbors may be linguistic distant cousins at best. They assume they share a common code, but their ability to enter into fruitful exchanges may at times be limited. Our data derive from an ethnographic group interview recorded in 1969 involving a university professor and a group of inner-city teenagers enrolled in an urban alternative high school. The meeting took place in the home of a young black social worker less than a mile away from the professor's residence located in a medium-sized California city. The researcher had asked the social worker to arrange the group discussion to give him an opportunity to tape informal Black English conversation. Communication problems at the meeting provide striking evidence of the interpretive difficulties that can arise even among long-term residents of the same urban environment.

Although linguists concerned with Black English have concentrated on phonological and grammatical differences, the problem here is rather one of conversational conventions embodied in prosody and formulaic speech which draw upon knowledge specific to the Afro-American cultural traditions in the United States.

In attempting to isolate the relevant conversational conventions, we begin by focusing on empirical evidence of conversational breakdown occurring in the course of the discussion. Our purpose is to identify culturally specific contextualization cues that have signalling values for individuals familiar with the Afro-American tradition but that are not noticed or interpreted by the middle-class white interviewers.

Conversational conventions are those organizational filters that the listener uses when making the connection between speaker's intent and meaning.