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Language teacher becomes researcher 

By Barbara Black

Jacqueline Peters's experience as a teacher of English as a second language made her an outstanding student of sociolinguistics. Now she's breaking new ground as researcher.

Peters has had great success teaching English to Quebec francophone natives and immigrants. Wanting more theoretical training, she enrolled at Concordia.

The shock and dismay of her North and Sub-Saharan African students when they encountered québécois gave her the title for her first presentation at an applied linguistics conference: “C'est pas la neige, C'est la langue.” In it, she said that her students from Africa felt sidelined by their “foreign” French. The paper aroused considerable interest.

She was encouraged by Professor Annette Teffeteller and part-time teacher Kate Riley to take sociology and anthropology courses, as well as tutorials in sociolinguistics, which emphasizes dialectology, language contact and language variation and change. In her honours linguistics program, Peters examined a broad range of topics, from bilingualism in ancient Greece and Rome to the structure and origin of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).

A possible addition to the AAVE Diaspora used among a certain group of Canadian English-speakers will be the subject of her MA at the University of Toronto under preeminent Canadian sociolinguist J.K. Chambers. Peters theorizes that a new Canadian “ethnolect” is being formed by young black Canadians, particularly in the inner city Jane-Finch Corridor of Toronto.

Is this development a result of an AAVE influence, the way African-American rappers, hiphop, and movie stars talk? Is it a temporary phenomenon, and their speech will flatten out into a Canadian Standard English as they get older? Or is a Canadian Standard dialect, with an overlay of other influences, developing into a “sociolect,” as the residents of Jane-Finch become more numerous and more isolated from the white, affluent Toronto around them?

All these questions fascinate Peters, and she intends to start collecting raw data this summer as a pilot project — from her own extended family.

“My uncle in Hamilton has a strong working-class Jamaican accent. His oldest son is a business school graduate, with speech aiming for middle-class Canadian Standard. The second son's speech is typically Canadian working-class. But the youngest son uses one of the biggest shibboleths of AAVE, the metathesis or transposition of adjacent consonants, as in ‘aks’ for standard ‘asks’.” Other features of AAVE are interdental fricatives (dis for this), simplifying consonant clusters (fin’ for find, kep’ for kept, and trut’ for truth), and the dropping of the copula (she go instead of she is going).

These features appear to be common in Jane-Finch, an area so distinct that she's heard Torontonians talk about finchin'. “You can find out about it on the website janefinch.com,” she said with a laugh. “That's how much of a phenomenon Jane-Finch is. Everybody is so excited I'm coming to study this neighbourhood.”