Chapter 9: The Speech of Enslaved and Free Black Virginians

Learning Objectives

Describe why the English spoken by enslaved and free Black Virginians in the 1770s cannot be reduced to a single, uniform dialect.
Summarize the two competing scholarly explanations for the origins of African American English, and why the debate matters for interpretation.
Identify a small set of widely documented grammatical features from the historical record, and explain why they should be used selectively and grounded in a specific character's biography.

This is the most difficult chapter in the book, and it should be. Representing the speech of enslaved and free Black Virginians in the 1770s means engaging with real people whose humanity was systematically denied by the very society this whole book otherwise treats as a source of colorful vocabulary. Getting it right matters more here than anywhere else in this material, and getting it wrong risks flattening real individuals into caricature. Read this chapter as an orientation to a genuinely active field of research, not as a script.

9.1 Why There Is No Single "Slave Dialect"

By 1770, the Black population of Virginia included people at every stage of an enormously varied set of life experiences. Some had arrived recently, directly from West Africa, speaking a West African language and little or no English. Some had come by way of the Caribbean, having already learned an English-based creole there. Some had been born in Virginia to Virginia-born parents, in families that had spoken some form of English for two or three generations. A person's speech depended heavily on who they had learned English from, how much day-to-day contact they had with white speakers, and what kind of work they did — a field hand on a large plantation had far less regular contact with whites than a body servant in the main house, and their speech reflected that difference.

Because of this range, no single set of "African American" speech features from this period applies uniformly to every enslaved or free Black character. Before choosing how a character speaks, research that specific character's plausible life history — birthplace, how long in Virginia, what kind of work, and how much contact with white or English-speaking Black Virginians — the same way you would for any other character in this book.

9.2 Two Theories, Still Being Argued

Linguists have studied what's now generally called African American Vernacular English (AAVE) for well over half a century, and the question of where it came from has produced two competing schools of thought that are still, in modified forms, being argued today.

The Anglicist (or dialect) hypothesis, dominant through the mid-twentieth century, held that early Black English derived mainly from the regional British dialects spoken by white colonists — meaning enslaved and white speakers in a given area would have sounded fairly similar. The creolist hypothesis, which gained ground from the 1960s onward, argues instead that early Black English grew primarily out of pidgin and creole language contact — the simplified, blended languages that develop rapidly when speakers of many different native languages need to communicate for trade or coerced labor, which then stabilize and grow more complex as children acquire them as a first language.

Pidgin — A simplified contact language, with no native speakers, that develops between groups who don't share a common language, typically for a narrow purpose like trade. Creole — A pidgin that has stabilized and grown into the native, fully expressive first language of a community, typically the children of pidgin speakers.

Neither camp has won outright. More recent scholarship — including work by linguists such as John R. Rickford, Salikoko Mufwene, and Walt Wolfram — has moved toward more nuanced positions, recognizing that African-born and Caribbean-born speakers likely arrived with real creole or pidgin features, that regional British dialects genuinely shaped the English these speakers were exposed to, and that individual variation, immigration patterns, and demographics in a given place and decade mattered enormously. Some features long assumed to be purely African in origin have since been found in historical British dialects as well, complicating any simple story. In short: the honest, current scholarly answer is that this is still being worked out, and a good-faith historical interpreter should treat it with the same humility the field itself does.

9.3 Reading the Sources Critically

Almost everything we know about historical Black speech in this period comes to us filtered through someone else's pen — often a white author attempting to represent "Negro speech" in a play, a religious tract, or a travel account, sometimes with real care and sometimes leaning on a ready-made literary convention rather than direct observation. Even sources that seem more direct, like later reminiscences or oral histories, were frequently written down well after the fact, summarized from notes, or edited to emphasize or downplay certain speech features. None of this means the sources are worthless — it means they need to be read the way a historian reads any secondhand account: with attention to who wrote it, why, and what they might have gotten wrong or exaggerated.

One striking example: a widely performed English play from 1768 that helped set the convention for representing "Black" dialogue on stage was written by an author who had never visited the West Indies, based on speech patterns from that region rather than from Virginia or the American mainland. That single play then shaped how many later authors represented Black speech in general — a reminder that literary convention and lived reality are not the same thing.

9.4 Documented Features, Used Carefully

Scholars examining eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century sources have identified a number of grammatical features that appear, with real variation, in the recorded and reconstructed speech of Black Virginians of this period. A few of the most consistently documented:

Copula absence. The verb to be linking a subject to its description was often left out where a modern (or contemporary white) speaker would include it: he tall, she in trouble, he a big man. This is by no means universal — the same sources show plenty of examples with the verb fully present — and it remains a documented feature of some modern varieties of AAVE as well, showing real continuity over more than two centuries.
Uninflected present tense used for past. Rather than changing verb form to show tense, a speaker often let context, or a single other verb in the sentence, carry the sense of past time: he push the door, she take him by the throat.
Third-person -s absence. The standard -s ending on present-tense verbs was often left off: he say, your master use you well.
Regularized irregular past tense. Verbs like know and see were often given a regular -ed ending rather than their irregular form: I seed, I knowed.

These patterns are documented with real depth in the historical and linguistic record, and interpreters at institutions with active African American interpretation programs typically receive specialized, character-specific training that goes well beyond what a general-purpose language guide like this one can responsibly cover.

This chapter deliberately does not provide an extensive phonetic word list or a "how to sound like" checklist. Layering surface features onto a character without grounding them in that character's specific documented or plausible biography risks producing caricature rather than a real, complex human being. If you are developing a Black eighteenth-century character, work directly with your site's specialized training, current published scholarship, and — where available — documented individual voices, rather than treating this chapter as a script to perform from.

9.5 What This Chapter Asks of You

The goal here isn't to hand you a dialect — it's to give you enough grounding to approach this material seriously: to understand that "how enslaved Virginians talked" is not one thing, that the scholarship is genuinely unsettled and worth respecting as such, and that your specific character deserves the same individualized research you'd give any other person you portray. When in doubt, prioritize your character's documented or plausible individual history over any generalized pattern, and lean on your site's specialists rather than improvising from a checklist.