First
Place Winner, Birmingham Educational Film Festival.
The
culture of New Orleans represents the mixing of many rich traditions:
French, Spanish, African, Irish, Italian. At the heart of this unique
culture lie its speechways, the subject of Yeah You Rite!,
a close-up video profile of a single language community. New Orleans
English has been influenced by the city's rich and varied history,
leaving it with dozens of unique words and phrases that all New
Orleanians understand but which frequently baffle visitors: words
like "lagniappe", "bobo" and "neutral ground"
as well as hard-to-translate expressions such as "king cake"
or "suck the heads and squeeze the tips" (the proper way
to eat crawfish). Yeah You Rite! is a spicy and colorful
tribute to this unique dialect.
A few of the points included in Yeah You Rite!
How
New Orleans English has been influenced by the citys rich
and varied ethnic history.
How
the local way of speaking helps bind together disparate cultures
of the city.
How
some dialects are considered more socially prestigious than others.
The
remarkable lexicon of local expressions that all New Orleanians
understand, such as "lagniappe" (a little something extra),
"bobo" (a scratch), and "neutral ground" (the
strip in the middle of a boulevard).
How
working class African Americans and whites confront social pressures
every time they speak.
If
you already use American Tongues in your classes, Yeah
You Rite! provides a fascinating case-study example of the linguistic
forces in one American city. At the same time, Yeah You Rite!
can stand alone as a richly enjoyable introduction to urban linguistics,
easily extrapolated to your own community.
Yeah
You Rite! was
supported by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
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