Racial wage inequality is a persistent phenomenon. After declining between 1940 and 1980, the black-white wage gap has remained roughly constant. In 1980, black men earned an average of 73 cents for every dollar earned by white men. In 2000, the number was 70 cents (Neal 2006). One question is whether these persistent differences in wages can be explained by persistent differences in behavior.
One such difference involves speech patterns. Linguists have documented substantial differences between Standard American English (SAE), variants of which are spoken by whites (and many blacks) in the US, and African American English (AAE), variants of which are spoken by many African Americans. These differences arise at almost every level of linguistic analysis, including syntax (e.g., negation rules), morphology (e.g., rules for subject-verb agreement), phonology (e.g., the resolution of various consonant clusters), and even acoustics (e.g., vocal harmonics).
At the same time, research shows that almost no one speaks a pure form of either SAE or AAE. Rather, regardless of their primary dialect, speakers mix standard and non-standard features. The mix varies among speakers, but also within individual speakers as a function of the setting (e.g., the level of formality). Furthermore, many speakers of AAE use SAE features in their speech (Labov 1972).
Despite such variation, race is a salient characteristic of speech. Listeners can identify a speaker’s race from their speech, even small amounts of it (Thomas 2002). Purnell, Idsardi, and Baugh (1999) played a standardized single sentence speech clip for listeners that varied only in its dialectical “guise,” that is, in whether the speaker delivered the sentence using typically SAE forms or typically AAE forms. They found that listeners could identify the African-American guise with 75 to 90 percent accuracy.
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