Books Authored

Roswell Voices: A Community Oral History and Dialect Study
William A. Kretzschmar, Becky Childs, Bridget Anderson, and Sonja L. Lanehart. Roswell Folk and Heritage Bureau, 2004.

The Roswell Folk & Heritage Bureau, Language & Life Division, in collaboration with the team from the University of Georgia, document the dialects and stories of many long-time Roswell residents, in addition to tracking community change by comparing these interviews with those of younger generations.

Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy
Sonja L. Lanehart. University of Texas Press, 2002.

How the valorization of "proper" English has affected the language, literacy, educational achievements, and self-image of five African American women—the author's grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, and herself. Through interviews and written statements by each woman, Lanehart draws out the life stories of these women and their attitudes toward and use of language.

Books Edited

African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education, and Identity
Sonja L. Lanehart (editor). Cambridge Scholar's Press, 2009.

This book is a groundbreaking collection of research on African American Women’s Language, bringing together a range of research including variationist, autoethnography, phenomenological, ethnographic, and critical, coming from a variety of disciplines, scientific paradigms, and inquiry methods while addressing a variety of African American female populations and activity settings.

Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English
Sonja L. Lanehart (editor). John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001.

This volume critically examines African American English (AAE) socially, culturally, historically, and educationally. It explores the relationship between AAE and other varieties of English, language use in the African American community, and application of our knowledge about AAE to issues in education. It seeks to challenge researchers with the complexity of defining a language and its speakers.

The Oxford Handbook of African American Language
Sonja L. Lanehart. Oxford University Press, 2015.

​The Handbook offers a survey of language and its uses in African American communities from a wide range of contexts organized into seven sections. It is a handbook of research on African American Language (AAL) and, as such, provides a variety of scholarly perspectives that may not align with each other—as is indicative of most scholarly research. ​

Other Works

Chapters in Books

These include chapters such as "African American Language and Identity: Contradictions and Conundrums" in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language, and "The Relevance of Community Language Studies to HEL: The View from Roswell" in Studies in the History of the English Lanuage III​.

Book Reviews

These include reviews of books such as The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, and Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice.

Journal Articles

These include journal articles such as "African American Vernacular English in Education: The Dynamics of Pedagogy, Ideology, and Identity" in the Journal of English Linguistics, and "Core Goals and Their Relationship to Semester Subgoals and Academic Performance" in the Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory, and Practice.

Short Journal Essays and Abstracts

These include abstracts such as "The Relationship between Long-term Educational Goals, Learning Strategies and Academic Performance", and essays such as "Let the Copula Be".