Methods and Design
I will analyze these Queen Latifah songs, focusing on her use of African American Vernacular English in indexing, phonology, lexicon, and code-switching. She exhibits these features in spoken language and well as her music.
I have included two interviews with Queen Latifah, one on a program with a Black host, the other on a show with a White host. There is a clear distinction between the two dialects she uses with the different hosts.
This clip is an interview of Queen Latifah (QL) on Sway Calloway's SiriusXM radio show (published to YouTube January 2014).
In this interview, of and by an African American former rapper, QL fully utilizes features of AAVE - lexicon, phonology, indexing, and use of AAVE from a male speaker's paradigm, since African American Women's Language is not available for her in this format.
The host, Sway, points out that Latifah hasn't embarrassed the community yet and that they (African Americans) have to be bilingual. He seems to be referencing the need for knowing and utilizing more than one dialect of English. She doesn't understand that to be his point and instead comments on how she learned how to behave at a young age. He is correct in his point. African Americans have to be multi-dialectal in this country. Standard English is what is used on employment applications, in schools and government; it's the language of academia, the medical profession, social services, and more. Black churches and social clubs would provide some linguistic "safety" for most African Americans.
11:13 - QL says "you know what I mean?" as a way of checking in to see if Sway can relate to her comment. This is not an uncommon phrase in AAVE used as a method of connection between speakers.
This is an interview on The Ellen Show (published to YouTube January 2016). Queen Latifah utilizes Standard, white women's English with Ellen. This dialect is vastly different from the dialect she uses when with other black speakers. Her phonology is very strongly a white English phonology. She uses a few features of AAVE, such as the diminutive "girl" during the opening greetings. She demonstrates a few lexical features, "and I had to, like, do him dirty", in reference to bragging about her defeat of her "dearest friend", Marlon Wayans.
At :15 she omits a postvocalic /r/ in the word "for", making it "fuh".
Time glide reduction?