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[This is a guest post by Walt Wolfram, with Caroline Myrick, Jon Forrest, and Michael J. Fox.]

Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches are without peer in their public recognition and rhetorical significance. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech is rated as the number one speech of the twentieth century and several other speeches are ranked within the top 100. Given King’s prominence as a speaker and his leadership role in the Civil Rights Movement, it’s ironic that his sociolinguistic legacy has been relatively unexamined and ignored. There are no analyses of how he systematically manipulated regional, ethnic, and stylistic language features in different situations other than a couple of limited studies of his pitch and intonation, including a Language Log post in 2007 ("Martin Luther King's rhetorical phonetics").

In a forthcoming paper ("The Sociolinguistic Significance of Martin Luther King Jr."), we analyze how King’s speech indexes his regional, social, and ethnic identity in speaking to different audiences in different situations. Our results are worth considering in terms of their broader implications for language and social inequality.

We examined four different speaking events with different audiences, goals, and settings, summarized in the following table:

Speech	Date	Place	Audience	Purpose
“I have a dream”	August 1963	Lincoln Monument, Washington D.C	Mixed	Inspire civil rights movement
“I’ve been to the mountaintop” [mountaintop]	April,1968	Mason Temple, Memphis, TN	Predominantly African American	Sermon, social gospel
“Nobel Prize”	December 1964	Oslo, Norway	Predominantly white	Formal Acceptance speech
Merv Griffin show	July 1967	New York City, NY	White interviewer, TV audience	Personal conversation

We carefully measured the use of socially, regionally, and stylistically marked linguistic structures in each speech event.

• The variation of unstressed (ing) in final syllables (swmmin’ vs. swimming or nothing vs. nothin’) is a frequently studied variable of English that often shows ethnicity, regionality, and style effects.
• Released /t/, the full production of /t/ in words such as bet or poverty, indexes speaker traits ranging from learnedness and articulateness to gayness and political stance-taking.
• The loss or vocalization of r in words such as fea’ for fear or fathuh for father is a well-established regional, social, and ethnic variable.
• The deletion of the final stop in clusters such as col’ for cold and bes’ for best (consonant cluster reduction, or CCR) is a well-known trait of ethnic dialects in American English. Significantly more cluster reduction is found in vernacular African American English varieties than comparable European American varieties.
• The absence of the verb be for are or is (e.g. You nice for You’re nice or She asking for She’s asking) is also an important marker of vernacular African American speech.
• Finally, we measured King’s vowel system in each speech event and compared it with black and white vowel systems in the South.

Remember that Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929, attended segregated public schools in Georgia, and received his bachelor’s degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, an HBCU in Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. King’s early social networks, peers, and community were almost exclusively black, as were the social networks of his wife, who was raised in Marion, Alabama. King was socialized into the preaching ministry early and ordained at the age of 19. After three years studying theology at Crozer Theological Seminary, a predominantly white seminary located in Delaware County near Philadelphia, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing the residency for the doctorate in systematic theology in 1953. He accepted a pastoral call to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954, serving that congregation until 1959. In 1960, he joined his father as co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta where he served until his death. King’s adult social networks were much more expanded socially than his earlier life, indicating a number of intersecting ties and relationships that presented a complex portrait of his identity as a social leader who interacted with a wide swath of people and an array of institutions.

The analysis, based on current instrumental and quantitative techniques in sociolinguistics, shows both stability and flexibility across the different speech events. King’s regional status as a Southerner is consistently indicated in his vowels; for example, in his ungliding of the /ai/ diphthong in time and side so they sounded like tahm or sahd. Other vowel features are more aligned with African American Southern vowels as opposed to European American Southern vowels. King’s r-lessness, which again marks both ethnicity and Southernness, is also quite stable across speech events, but he shows one important departure. He produces a tap or trilled variant for r between vowels when he produces an r, so that the r in “the river of life” or in ‘their names will never appear in the who’s who” are flapped or trilled rather than retroflexed or bunched:

This is a “preacherly” phonetic trait that is not uncommon among African American preachers; he uses it in all his speech events, but more often in formal events like the Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The releasing of the t in a word like poverty is also common in more formal speaking contexts such as his Nobel Prize and the Dream speech:

The fact that the tap and released /t/ are used to some extent in all contexts, even in the talk-show conversation, projects a “preacherly” persona.

Overall, the features index ethnicity, regionality, audience, and performance in the different speech events in a way summarized by the table below:

	Ethnicity (Black)	Southern	Formal	Performance	Informal
Dream	r-lessness CCR Vowels	r-lessness /ai/ungliding	ING Full be (are, is) tap r	released /t/ tap r full be
Mountaintop	r-lessness CCR be del. (you nice) vowels	IN r-lessness /ai/ungliding	tap r	tap r full be	IN be del
Merv Griffin	r-lessness be del. Vowels	r-lessness /ai/ungliding	ING		be del.
Nobel Prize	r-lessness CCR vowels	r-lessness /ai/ungliding	ING tap r full be	released /t/ tap r full be

So what’s the broader social significance of the overlapping and distinctive distribution of features across speech events? First, King’s speech is unambiguously and consistently marked as African American and Southern. His ethnic and regional identity is never compromised—regardless of the speech event. In an important way, he reflects what sociologist Michael Eric Dyson’s labels intentional blackness—“being Black through dialect, dress, and public prioritization of Black political issues” (Dyson 2008:9). At this same time, he shows stylistic flexibility in some features, using more (ING) and more full forms of be in more formal speeches.

King’s speech also reveals how embedded he is in the traditions and oratory of the black church. The tapping of r and the releasing of /t/ fall within this tradition, along with the relatively high incidence of full forms of the verb be (e.g. We are here vs. We’re here or We here), a trait of formal presentation style that goes hand-in-hand with other features of the preacherly tradition. King’s use of linguistic variables shows sensitivity to audience, interaction, and purpose, but his sociolinguistic persona is always that of the black, southern preacher.

Language Inequality and Social Justice

King never directly addressed linguistic inequality or even publicly discussed his own language variation to our knowledge. But remember that King’s approach to justice was inclusive, embodying the “injustice-anywhere-is-a-threat-to-justice-everywhere” creed. King’s speech embodied his African American and Southern identity during a period when these were among the most stigmatized and reviled varieties of English, topping the regional and social scales of “the worst English.” But ethnic and regional linguistic traits were shamelessly and confidently manifested by King, notwithstanding the low regard in which they were held (and still are). As one transformed racist noted in Beyond Fear: Twelve Spiritual Keys to Racial Healing, “I was so racist, I could not listen to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because of his accent” (Ababio-Clottey and Clottey 1999: 131). It is noteworthy that the content and rhetorical effect of King’s speeches ended up transcending the traditional associations of black and Southern speech, to the point where the New York City Daily News (January 9, 2015) described King’s speech portrayed in the movie Selma as “the rich cadences of King’s Georgia-based oratory.” This transformation should be a lesson from life.

That leads to an obvious question: Why do our public institutions—including government and public education from K-graduate school—ignore language within their increasing and broader institutional concern for diversity? Curiously, the insights of sociolinguistics are exempted or erased as institutions throughout the US celebrate Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month, Juneteenth, and other occasions where we might learn from the example of Martin Luther King’s speech. That seems a shame, because his sociolinguistic transcendence should serve as a transformative model.

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[Above is a guest post by Walt Wolfram, with Caroline Myrick, Jon Forrest, and Michael J. Fox]

January 17, 2016 @ 6:24 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and culture

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