William Alexander Stewart (September 12, 1930 – March 25, 2002) was an American linguist specializing in creoles, known particularly for his work on African American Vernacular English.
Working for the Center for Applied Linguistics, Stewart undertook pioneering work on creoles in the Caribbean in the early 1960s. In 1965, he discovered that reading problems of some African-American children were caused not by vocabulary or pronunciation, but by differences between the grammar of African American Vernacular English and standard English.[2][3] In the late 1960s, he explored the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, introducing the notions of polycentric languages,[1] autonomy and heteronomy.[4]
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W. A. Stewart, Linguist, 71; Studied Ebonics
William Alexander Stewart, a Hawaiian-born Scot who grew up multilingual in California and became an authority on creole languages, in particular Gullah, the West African-flavored speech of of the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia, died on March 25 at Columbia-Presbyterian Center in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was congestive heart failure, according to the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he had been on the faculty since 1973.
A professor of linguistics, he was an early scholar of what has come to be known as ebonics, the nonstandard English many African-American children hear and learn at home. He explored its grammatical differences and how these can lead to misunderstandings in the classroom.
Professor Stewart examined and wrote widely about how this creates testing problems for such children. He argued that certain grammatical peculiarities of the dialect, like ''he busy,'' meaning he's busy right now, and ''he be busy,'' meaning he's always busy, make nonstandard English into a separate language.
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Asking its young speakers to express these ideas in standard English simply could not reflect what the pupils intended to say, Professor Stewart argued. He demonstrated that speakers of nonstandard English were, in fact, speaking the remnants of a creole, melding languages of African slaves and the English of American settlers.
Creoles are languages resulting from contact between two different tongues, one of them usually being English, French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese. Professor Stewart's particular fascination lay with Gullah, the speech of a dwindling number of rural African-Americans along the Carolina coastal delta, down to the Florida border.
The Gullah ''I en bin dey, yall know,'' for example, translates to ''I have not been there, you know.'' Gullah, a word derived perhaps from Angola, draws to some degree on a mix of West African languages like Ewe, Ibo and Yoruba.
Born in Honolulu to Scottish immigrants, William Stewart grew up speaking four languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese and Hawaiian. He was an Army translator in Frankfurt and Paris in 1952 and graduated in 1955 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also received a master's degree in 1958.
After study as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pernambuco, Brazil, he was recruited as a staff linguist by the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington in 1960, a job entailing much travel in the Caribbean and Africa. By then he was fluent also in German, French, Dutch, Wolof, Haitian, Papiamento and Gullah, a dialect born in 16th-century Barbados.
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In 1965 he proposed that it was not the vocabulary or pronunciation of the African-American vernacular but its grammar that stumped some children with reading problems. Three years later, he became co-director of the Education Study Center in Washington, which helped ghetto children with their reading.
Early in his career, he lectured on Portuguese and Spanish at Georgetown University, taught at Johns Hopkins University and joined the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1968.
He started teaching at CUNY in 1973. The Graduate Center named him a full professor in 1984. At CUNY he taught pidgins and creoles, phonetics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and forensic linguistics.
Professor Stewart leaves no immediate survivors.
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