Over a half century of sociolinguistic work has addressed various aspects of the speech of African Americans, often called African American Language (AAL) or African American English (AAE). While linguists were studying AAL for educational and theoretical linguistic purposes, demographic changes in the United States, including the Great Migration of African Americans, in combination with long-standing segregation, were creating situations in urban environments that helped establish and fortify what we know of as AAL in twenty-first-century America. The current chapter focuses on the twentieth-century development of AAL, using evidence from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall and Farrington 2021), a publicly available corpus of conversational speech, with data from several African American communities, including the Lower East Side of New York City (Manhattan), Princeville, NC; Rochester, NY; Valdosta, GA; and Washington, DC, to highlight the influence of the Great Migration on AAL and the development of regional sound patterns.

One of the recurring themes in medieval agricultural manuals, which are mainly based on ancient agronomic knowledge, centres around the correlation between the geography of a region and the effects of this geography on the growth of various plant types and their specific requirements. In Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya (Nabatean Agriculture), compiled in 291/903 in Lower Mesopotamia, Ibn Waḥshiyya (d. 318/930) proposed two reasons to explain this relationship. First, he argued that everything in the world possesses a nature (ṭabʿ ) composed of the four elements of fire, air, water and earth. The differences between the nature of each region and each plant explain, for instance, why the dust that covers a vine's leaves is harmful to the plant in ‘the whole clime of Bābil (Babylonia)’, while it might be beneficial in another region. His second explanation contends that the unique properties (khuṣūṣiyyāt) of each region are connected to its position ‘in respect to the rotation of the sun and the other stars which rotate in the sphere (al-falak)’. While the present book does not aim to provide an in-depth analysis of the various cosmological and philosophical aspects of agricultural manuals, such examples attest to the perception of agriculture as a human engagement with nature which is strongly dependent on the geography. A primary explanation for this concern, as mentioned by Ibn Waḥshiyya, is the recognition that the most crucial factors influencing plant growth include water, air, the ‘warmth of the sun’ and notably, soil. However, as several scholars have emphasised, the scholarly literature on gardens of Islamicate regions has often overlooked the relationship between gardens and their surrounding landscapes.This oversight is particularly evident in the conceptualisation of ‘the Islamic garden’, which as Petruccioli pointed out, ‘has been considered a specific, self-contained entity removed from its context – its surroundings, the city, and the environment’.

Problem: The idea of continuity in garden traditions

Studies on ‘Islamic’ garden history have followed two paradigms whose generalising and essentialist character has drawn criticism from various scholars over the years. The first argues that the concept and types of gardens in the Islamic period – drawing on extant examples only from the fifteenth century onwards – were of ancient Persian origin, thus presupposing the idea of a continuous tradition. The second paradigm brings together gardens from different regions with Islamic rulers as ‘Islamic’ gardens, foregrounding a religious attribute for gardens in an extremely large and disparate geographical area including Arab Spain, North Africa, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the adjacent Persian-speaking regions up to India, despite the diversity of their regional and cultural traditions.

The idea of an ancient ‘Persian’ origin of ‘Islamic’ gardens and its continuity into the early modern period has been voiced since the beginning of the twentieth century. It mainly relates to the interpretation of the term chahārbāgh, found in the Persian textual sources from the fifth/eleventh century onwards, as a formal type of garden, indicating a garden divided into four quarters by two cross-axial water courses or paths. It is argued that this type can be traced back to pre- Islamic Iran, continued throughout the medieval Islamic periods and was transferred to other Islamic-ruled regions as well. Some scholars have also related the fourfold layout and chahārbāgh to the mythical Garden of Eden, from which, according to some traditions, such as the book of Genesis, four cosmic rivers, two of which were the Euphrates and Tigris, flowed towards the four corners of the earth.