White performances

Sociolinguistic research has increasingly turned to examining the use of both the grammar and speech events of black speech by non-Blacks. This phenomenon called language crossing is defined as “the use of language varieties associated with social or ethnic groups that the speaker does not normally ‘belong’ to” (Rampton 1995:14). Although the literature has focused on phonological features, there has been very little research on the prosodic features used by language crossers. This paper seeks to partially fill this gap by examining the intonational patterns of white actors who voice film characters who at some point in the film can be characterized as “acting and/or sounding black”.