Exploring African American Language in the Nation′s Capital

This special issue brings together a wide range of scholars of African American Language (AAL) who explore aspects of the new, freely and openly accessible, Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL). The studies provide some initial perspectives CORAAL can offer for AAL and for sociolinguistic research more generally. The authors in this issue bring new perspectives to the study of AAL, but they do this in a novel way in sociolinguistic research traditions, by each examining the same data from different perspectives. Each of the papers in the issue takes as its starting place data available in the new public corpus and uses those data to ask a combination of new and old questions.

Contributors: Ashley Balcazar, Patricia Cukor-Avila, Charlie Farrington, Ralph Fasold, Jon Forrest, Jessica A. Grieser, Christopher Hall, Nicole R. Holliday, Taylor Jones, Tyler Kendall, Sonja L. Lanehart, Jason McLarty, Thomas Purnell, Minnie Quartey, Natalie Schilling, Sali A. Tagliamonte, Walt Wolfram