Creaky Voice: Yet Another Example of Young Women's Linguistic Ingenuity

When I taught linguistics to undergraduates, I would start each semester off by asking students what sort of assumptions they would they make about a speaker who said, "I ain't got no money." The responses were always similar—"ignorant," "uneducated," "stupid." If I pressed, one brave student would eventually come forward and say "African American."

After writing up the list of associations on the board, I'd point out that for nearly a thousand years, double negation was standard in English. "I ne saugh nawiht" in Middle English; "I don't see anything" in Modern English. Today, one can find it in French, which negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to either side of the verb, as well as in Afrikaans, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages. The point: There is nothing inherently "ignorant" or "stupid" about double negation; judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves.