“Okaaay Sis!”: African American Language, Multimodality, and Black Women’s Gesture

About the presenter
Sovoya Davis is a Linguistics PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her current research investigates language-related gesture shared between Black American Sign Language and African American English, centering Black deaf and hearing women.

About the presentation
Despite gesture’s role as an integral component of human language (Abner et al., 2015; Perniss, 2018), research gaps persist. Most gesture research focuses on its relationship to spoken language, and few studies examine sign language and gesture. Emmorey (1999) was the first to explore gesture accompanying sign language, with additional insights provided by Duncan (2005). In addition to a gap on gesture and sign language, there is minimal research on sociolinguistic variation in gesture (Kita, 2009). To this point, the gestural aspect of language use in African American communities is severely understudied. African American English (AAE) and Black American Sign Language (BASL) are two language varieties used by Black people in the United States. BASL and AAE have an extensive language contact history, and share some linguistic features (Lucas et al., 2015; McCaskill et al., 2011). Only a handful of co-speech gestures in AAE have been documented (McClave et al., 2007; Goodwin et al., 2010; Rickford & Rickford, 1974). Gesture research on BASL is even more scarce (but see McCaskill et al. 2011 for some preliminary observations).

Considering these disparities, there is a need for more study on the gesture-sign relationship, and overall, more research on gesture in African American languages. BASL and AAE are minoritized language varieties that developed under the influence of racial segregation in the U.S (McCaskill et al., 2011). Lingering racism and ableism has contributed to prioritizing unimodal spoken language research, mainly on languages with more prestige. Following Henner and Robinson’s (2021) Crip Linguistics framework, I take a multimodal and intersectional approach to studying human language to avoid reproducing hierarchies rooted in racism and ableism.

Using quantitative and qualitative methods, I analyze 82 gestures produced by Black deaf and hearing women in videos gathered from social media and HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show (ABLSS).

The women were categorized into one of two groups: the Black ASL or the AAE group. The Black ASL group consists of 10 Black women, nine who are deaf, and one hearing child of deaf adult(s). The AAE group consists of eight hearing women, all appearing in skits from ABLSS.

In this study, I identified six gesture types characteristic of Black women’s language, all of which were frequently produced by both groups of women. The six gesture types include two head gestures and four hand gestures. Each group produced 41 gestures respectively, spread across these gesture types. Each instance of gesture production was examined to see if they appeared with features of Black language, themes and topics related to femininity and/or womanhood, and themes and topics related to Black culture.

If linguistic features of AAE (Smitherman, 1994; Rickford & Rickford, 2000; Green, 2002; Spears, 2009; Weldon, 2021; Lanehart, 2022) were present across any of the language modalities when the gesture was produced, the gestures were counted as appearing with Black Language. These features ranged from lexical items (e.g., “word”), phonological patterns (e.g., g-dropping), morphosyntactic features (e.g., negative concord), and discourse practices (e.g., roasting). ASL signs unique to the Black deaf community were also marked as Black language.

Gestures were counted as appearing with aspects of femininity/womanhood if they co-occurred with themes (e.g., sexism), topics (e.g., manicured nails), and language (e.g., “bitch,” “queen,” etc.) that were relevant to the overall video or the immediate discourse context. Similar to counting femininity/womanhood, gestures were counted as co-occurring with aspects of Black culture if themes (e.g., Black media), topics (e.g., Juneteenth), and discourse features (e.g., throwing shade), was relevant to the video or immediate discourse context.

Findings from this research show that these gestures co-occur highly with features of Black language (90%) and topics related to Black culture (86%), femininity, and womanhood (81%). The appearance of topics related to both Black and feminine identity with the analyzed gestures produced across both groups, supports that these gestures contain social meaning connected to race and gender identity. Overlapping themes and topics emerge across videos for both AAE and BASL groups. Some examples of these terms are “baddie,” “tea” (roughly meaning gossip), discourse marker “girl,” (Spears, 2009) and “sis”. When looking at topics related to Black culture alone, a similar pattern of high gestural co-occurrence can be seen across both groups, reinforcing the relationship between Black identity and the social meaning of these gestures for both speakers and signers.

Although the six gesture types co-occurred frequently with Black language in both groups, co-occurrence was highest for the Black ASL group. A range of linguistic features related to AAE that have been previously attested were used across both groups. In the Black ASL group, these features appeared across modalities (sometimes simultaneously), including signs, speech, and written captions. Considering BASL descriptions include AAE borrowings, the robust appearance of AAE alongside these gestures, along with the fact that they were frequently produced by Black deaf signers is evidence that the gestures themselves are a component of Black ASL. Additionally, metalinguistic commentary in the data about how these gestures are necessary when signing BASL supports that some of these gestures are an important component of this language. Also, Consistent production of these gestures with Black language, even when Black or feminine identity were not mentioned, indicate the gestures are a component of BASL. Based on these results, I argue that these gestures are not only part of BASL and AAE, but they also index Black and feminine identity. In closing, I emphasize the importance of a multimodal approach to language research about social meaning and identity. The results of this study further exemplify the relationship between language and social identity. As mentioned above, gesture is an integral part of language, and since language is inextricably linked to social identity, gesture also shares that connection. Language is an important aspect of expressing Black identity, and both BASL and AAE illustrate this. Gesture is one way Black hearing and deaf women utilize their linguistic resources to express facets of their social identities.

Keywords: African American English, Black American Sign Language, Gesture, Black Women, Sociolinguistics, Indexicality

Selected References
Abner et al. (2015). Gesture for linguists.
Calhoun et al. (2021). Attracting Black students to linguistics through a Black-centered Introduction to Linguistics course.
Duncan. (2005). Gesture in signing: A case study from Taiwan Sign Language.
Emmorey (1999) Do signers gesture? Gesture, speech, and sign.
Green (2002). African American English: a linguistic introduction.
Green (2004). Research on African American English since 1998: Origins, description, theory, and practice.
Goodwin & Alim (2010). “Whatever (neck roll, eye roll, teeth suck)”: The situated coproduction of social categories and identities through stancetaking and transmodal stylization.
Henner & Robinson (2021). Unsettling languages, unruly bodyminds: Imaging a crip linguistics.
Kita (2009). Cross-cultural variation of speech-accompanying gesture: A review.
Lanehart (2022). Language in African American Communities.
Lucas et al. (2015). The intersection of African American English and Black American Sign Language.
McCaskill et al. (2011). The hidden treasure of Black ASL: Its history and structure.
McClave et al. (2007) Head Movements in the Context of Speech in Arabic, Bulgarian, Korean, and African-American Vernacular English.
Perniss (2018). Why we should study multimodal language.
Rickford (1974) “Cut-Eye” and “Suck-Teeth” African Words and Gestures in New World Guise.
Rickford & Rickford (2000). Spoken soul: The story of black English.
Smitherman (1994) Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner
Spears (2009). Theorizing African American Women’s Language: Girl as a Discourse Marker. African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education and Identity.

Sponsors: University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute, Language Sciences, Language Ideologies and Linguistic Discrimination group

Contact: Kelly Wright, Language Sciences; Dianna Murphy, Language Institute

The UW-Madison Language Institute is committed to inclusive and accessible programming. American Sign Language interpreting and live professional captioning (CART) services will be provided by the McBurney Disability Resource Center.