Phonological Characteristics Produced by Afro-American: A Multicase Study of Afro-American Popular Movies

ABSTRACT

Since no humans speak alike, language that is produced always various. This is because of the characteristics of language which are dynamic and varied. In relation to the language variation, it is very interesting to observe and analyze the way of Afro-American delivering their speech. The researcher finds that Afro- American has unique phonological characteristics. The problems that have to solve are: (1) what are the types of phonological characteristics of English words produced by Afro-American’s oral language in Afro-American movies? and (2) How is the phonetics transcription of Afro-American’s oral language in Afro- American movies?

To answer the problems, the researcher adopts a various theoretical perspectives on the field of the phonology, especially in the area of segmental sound which consist of vowel, consonants, diphthong, and the knowledge about the organ of speech of human and the sounds which are produced. Methodologically, the researcher applies a multicase study as his research design. The data are gathered by skimming and reading processes to find the phonological characteristics in the scripts of Afro-American movies.

The findings show that there are fourteen types of phonological characteristics which are already found in this research. They are: the deletion of diphthong /ai/, the change of interdental sound / / to the stop sound, the omission of /r/ sound, the vocalization of /l/ sound, the shifting of the nasal sound /G/ to the other nasal sound /n/, the change of one of interdental sound / / to the alveolar stop sound /t/, stopping the interdental voiceless fricative sound near the nasal consonant, the deletion of final consonant, the deletion of second consonant in final consonant position, the substitution of the prefix sound /str/ to /skr/, the deletion of reduplicated consonant, labialization of the interdental fricative sound, the deletion of /l/ sound before labial, and final consonant or obstruent are devoiced.

The phonological characteristics which are found in Afro-American are only produced between their own communities. This characteristics also show that the variation that exist in the English language of Afro-American has become an identity since white people are marginalized the black people or Afro-American. Thus, they make language as one of the media to express themselves from the social segregation that they suffered.

It is suggested that this research will be more interesting for the next researchers to explore more on the suprasegmental sounds that contain: stress, pitch, tone, intonation etc because this research also related to the suprasegmental sounds as a part of phonological study.

It is also suggested for the next researchers to have more patience to conduct the research about phonological characteristics, because it needs back and forth process to collect and analyze the data of the research that related with the sounds transcription. The next researchers have to concern more in the sounds that uttered by the object of the research in order to get complete analysis of the phonological characteristics that has been researched.