School Daze Discourse

School Daze conveys social and political issues like the identity crisis amongst post-Civil Rights educated African Americans, some of which are battling Apartheid at a Black college. Individuals in this film utilize dialects, accents, and body language to help convey their identities to others. People adopt a more or less formal tone of voice to suit a situation. To illustrate this, if I were working in retail and speaking to a customer over the phone, I would adopt a “phone voice” – a tone that signals formality and politeness. Tones can be used to distance two people engaging in a conversation (linguistic divergence) or they can be used to build and solidify a relationship through a conversation (linguistic convergence). Linguistic convergence aids two people who aim to cooperate with one another. This is exhibited in the disciplinary scene where Dap is speaking to President McPherson and Cedar

The two groups appear to buck at one another while speaking up against the other. When Leed retorts that he and his men may not have Dap’s “ed-u-ca-tion” he articulates every syllable in that word to appear more eloquent and standard in his speech. Leed is performing linguistic convergence to find a common ground to Dap when he speaks to him about college and education as he sees Dap as different than him: a privileged college boy. On the other hand, when discussing the generational gap, Leed’s speech is less standard and is approaching toward the AAVE end of the continuum through use of his “r-less” dialect and variable deletion that is exhibited in the beginning of his statement, “We was born here…” The generational difference compliments the educational gap between the old Black men and the younger, more articulately spoken Black