Creaky Voice: Yet Another Example of Young Women's Linguistic
Ingenuity  If you want to see where the language is going, you
find a young, urban woman.  Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters  When I
taught linguistics to undergraduates, I would start each
semester off by asking students what sort of assumptions they
would they make about a speaker who said, "I ain't got no
money." The responses were always similar—"ignorant,"
"uneducated," "stupid." If I pressed, one brave student would
eventually come forward and say "African American."  After
writing up the list of associations on the board, I'd point out
that for nearly a thousand years, double negation was standard
in English. "I ne saugh nawiht" in Middle English; "I don't see
anything" in Modern English. Today, one can find it in French,
which negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to
either side of the verb, as well as in Afrikaans, Greek, and a
number of Slavic languages. The point: There is nothing
inherently "ignorant" or "stupid" about double negatio