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.

Most sociolinguistic research in American cities has focused on particular speech communities or communities of practice within cities. But cities are sites of contact between speech communities, and a sociolinguistic description of a city qua city would have to examine the results of such contact. Drawing on research conducted in Pittsburgh, PA, this chapter considers the sociolinguistic outcomes of urban encounters: immigrants’ language contact and the founder effect, the varied effects of African Americans’ contact with the speech of white people, the language ideological effects of mobility with respect to a city, and the role of visual artefacts in the circulation of linguistic features and language ideology across speech communities.

The Principle of Error Correction (PEC) holds that changing people’s harmful misconceptions about language can reduce the effects of racist beliefs and practices in society (Labov 1982). In a recent piece, Lewis (2018) critiques this claim in asserting that getting rid of ignorance does little to rid society of racism. Rather, we need to look at how society allocates privilege and status based on racial hierarchies. Considering Lewis’ proposal, this chapter asks whether trying to change people’s ideologies about African American Language (AAL) is an efficient strategy for combating racist beliefs about African Americans and whether there are better ways to achieve this. I question my positionality as a European American teacher educator working in the Bronx and share my ambivalence about the utility of the PEC. I discuss a series blog responses by New York City public school teachers of color which frame the sociolinguistic categorization of AAL patterns as part of systematic and age-old attempt to set apart and belittle the cultural practices of black Americans. These reactions raise questions about how we as sociolinguists construct AAL as a bounded set of practices (Makoni & Pennycook 2005).

This essay investigates the slang that emerged from jazz scenes during the twentieth century. A music history characterized by continual stylistic change and innovation is echoed in a corresponding ‘slanguage’ created by jazz musicians. Jazz slang permeates American culture and reflects the experience of Black musicians who created new worlds within language itself. Jazz slang has provided a venue for protesting white supremacy, exploring artistic playfulness, and expressing the energy of improvisation. This essay engages the reasons for jazz slang’s creation, scholarly and societal perceptions of the language, as well as some of the major conditions contributing to its dissemination.