This article reports on a sociolinguistic study into the prevalence of African-American English (AAE) features in the lyrical language use of blues artists, relying on data from different social and national backgrounds and time periods. It adopts a variationist linguistic methodological approach to examine the prevalence of five AAE forms in live-performed blues music: /aɪ/ monophthongization, post-consonantal word-final /t/ deletion, post-consonantal word-final /d/ deletion, alveolar nasal /n/ in < ing > ultimas, and post-vocalic word-final /r/ deletion. Mixed effects logistic regression analysis applied to a corpus of 80 performances finds no statistically significant association between national/ethnic background and variant use, and indicates that blues artists, from different eras and nationalities, are highly probable to realize the AAE variant of the analyzed variables, regardless of their sociocultural background. By building on early scholarly work on language and music, existing studies considering the use of AAE by non-members of the African-American community, and current theorizing on authenticity, style, and indexicality, this study hence provides tentative support for the existence of a standard blues singing style, which involves performers using AAE forms as a stylistic-linguistic strategy to index artistic authenticity.

中文翻译：

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通过音乐实现本地索引性的全球化：非裔美国英语和布鲁斯

本文报告了一项社会语言学研究，调查了布鲁斯艺术家抒情语言使用中非洲裔美国英语 (AAE) 特征的流行情况，该研究依赖于不同社会和国家背景以及时期的数据。它采用变体语言学方法论来研究现场演奏的蓝调音乐中五种 AAE 形式的流行情况：/aɪ/ 单元音化、后辅音词尾 /t/ 删除、后辅音词尾 /d/ 删除、齿槽音< ing > ultimas 中的鼻音 /n/ 和声后词尾 /r/ 删除。对 80 场表演的语料库进行混合效应逻辑回归分析发现，民族/种族背景与变体使用之间没有统计学上的显着关联，并表明来自不同时代和民族的布鲁斯艺术家很可能意识到分析变量的 AAE 变体，无论其社会文化背景如何。通过建立早期关于语言和音乐的学术著作、考虑非裔美国人社区非成员使用 AAE 的现有研究以及当前关于真实性、风格和索引性的理论，本研究因此为 AAE 的存在提供了初步支持。一种标准的布鲁斯演唱风格，表演者使用 AAE 形式作为风格语言策略来衡量艺术真实性。