lang=en
African American Vernacular English (AAVE)—also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular (BEV), or Black Vernacular English (BVE)—is an
African AmericanAfrican Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
varietyIn sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard variety itself...
(
dialectThe term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
,
ethnolectEthnolect is a variety of a language spoken by a certain ethnic/cultural subgroup and serves as a distinguishing mark of social identity. The term combines the concepts of an ethnic group and dialect....
and
sociolectIn sociolinguistics, a sociolect or social dialect is a variety of language associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group, etc....
) of
American EnglishAmerican English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
. Non-linguists sometimes call it
EbonicsEbonics is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from enslaved Africans, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America...
(a term that also has other meanings or strong connotations) or jive or jive-talk.
Its
pronunciationPronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect....
is, in some respects, common to
Southern American EnglishSouthern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast to most of Texas and Oklahoma.The Southern dialects make...
, which is spoken by many African Americans and many non-African Americans in the United States. Several creolists, including William Stewart, John Dillard, and John Rickford, argue that AAVE shares so many characteristics with
creoleA creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
dialects spoken by black people in much of the world that AAVE itself is a creole, while others maintain that there are no significant parallels.
As with all linguistic forms, its usage is influenced by age, status, topic and setting. There are many literary uses of this variety of English, particularly in African-American literature.
Overview
AAVE shares several characteristics with Creole English language-forms spoken by people throughout much of the world. AAVE has pronunciation, grammatical structures, and vocabulary in common with various West African languages.
Many features of AAVE are shared with English dialects spoken in the American South. While these are mostly regionalisms (i.e. originating from the dialect commonly spoken in the area, regardless of color), a number of them—such as the deletion of is—are used much more frequently by black speakers, suggesting that they have their origins in black speech. The traits of AAVE that separate it from Standard American English (SAE) include:
- specific pronunciation features along definable patterns, many of which are found in creoles and dialects of other populations of West African descent and which also emerge in English dialects that may be uninfluenced by West African languages, such as Newfoundland English
Newfoundland English is a name for several accents and dialects thereof the English found in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Most of these differ substantially from the English commonly spoken elsewhere in Canada...
- distinctive vocabulary
- distinctive use of verb tenses
Early AAVE contributed a number of words of African origin to Standard American English, including gumbo, goober, yam and banjo. AAVE has also contributed slang expressions such as cool and hip.
Origins
While it is clear that there is a strong relationship between AAVE and
Southern American EnglishSouthern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast to most of Texas and Oklahoma.The Southern dialects make...
, the unique characteristics of AAVE are not fully explained and its origins are still a matter of debate.
One theory is that AAVE arose from one or more slave
creolesA creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
that arose from the
trans-Atlantic African slave tradeThe Atlantic slave trade, also known as the trans-atlantic slave trade, refers to the trade in slaves that took place across the Atlantic ocean from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries...
and the need for African captives to communicate among themselves and with their captors. According to this theory, these captives developed what are called
pidginA pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
s, simplified mixtures of two or more languages. As pidgins form from close contact between members of different language communities, the slave trade would have been exactly such a situation. Dillard quotes
slave shipSlave ships were large cargo ships specially converted for the purpose of transporting slaves, especially newly purchased African slaves to Americas....
Captain William Smith:
As for the languages of Gambia, they are so many and so different, that the Natives, on either Side of the River, cannot understand each other.… [T]he safest Way is to trade with the different Nations, on either Side of the River, and having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of BabelThe Tower of Babel , according to the Book of Genesis, was an enormous tower built in the plain of Shinar .According to the biblical account, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar, where...
.
By 1715, this African pidgin had made its way into novels by
Daniel DefoeDaniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. In 1721,
Cotton MatherCotton Mather, FRS was a socially and politically influential New England Puritan minister, prolific author and pamphleteer; he is often remembered for his role in the Salem witch trials...
conducted the first attempt at recording the speech of slaves in his interviews regarding the practice of small-pox inoculation.
By the time of the
American RevolutionThe American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
, varieties among slave creoles were not quite mutually intelligible. Dillard quotes a recollection of "slave language" toward the latter part of the 18th century:
Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe; but me fall asleep, massa, and no wake 'til you come…
Not until the time of the
American Civil WarThe American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
did the language of the slaves become familiar to a large number of educated whites. The abolitionist papers before the war form a rich
corpusIn linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts...
of examples of plantation creole. In Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870),
Thomas Wentworth HigginsonThomas Wentworth Higginson was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. He was active in the American Abolitionism movement during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism...
detailed many features of his soldiers' language.
Recently,
Shana PoplackShana Poplack is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard...
has provided corpus-based evidence from isolated enclaves in
SamanáSamaná is a province of the Dominican Republic. Its capital is Santa Bárbara de Samaná, usually known as Samaná.Samaná is located on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in the northeastern part of the Dominican Republic. It is known for its mountains of which it is almost entirely formed...
and
Nova ScotiaNova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...
peopled by descendants of migrations of early AAVE-speaking groups (see
Samaná EnglishSamaná English is a variety of the English language spoken by about 8,000 people in the Samaná Peninsula, Dominican Republic. The speakers of Samaná English are the descendants of African freed persons, who came from West Africa beginning in 1824 when they were forced to learn the forms of the...
), that suggests that the grammar of early AAVE was closer to that of contemporary British dialects than modern urban AAVE is to current American dialects, suggesting that the modern language is a result of divergence from mainstream varieties, rather than the result of decreolization from a widespread American creole.
Linguist
John McWhorterJohn Hamilton McWhorter V is an American linguist and political commentator. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His linguistic specialty is creole and the process through which it forms.-Early life:...
maintains that the contribution of West African languages to AAVE is minimal. In an
interview on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, Dr. McWhorter characterized AAVE as a "hybrid of regional dialects of Great Britain that slaves in America were exposed to because they often worked alongside the indentured servants who spoke those dialects..." According to Dr. McWhorter, virtually all linguists who have carefully studied the origins of AAVE "agree that the West African connection is quite minor."
Distinctive features
Although the distinction between AAVE and Standard American English is clear to speakers, some characteristics, notably double negatives and the omission of certain
auxiliariesIn linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
(see below) such as the has in has been are also characteristic of general colloquial American English.
Phonology
There is near uniformity of AAVE grammar, despite vast geographic area. This may be due in part to relatively recent migrations of African Americans out of
the SouthThe Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
(see
Great MigrationThe Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
and
Second Great MigrationThe Second Great Migration was the migration of more than 5 million African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest and West. It took place from 1941, through World War II, and lasted until 1970. It was much larger and of a different character than the first Great Migration...
) as well as to long-term racial segregation. Phonological features that set AAVE apart from forms of
Standard EnglishStandard English refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country...
(such as
General AmericanGeneral American , also known as Standard American English , is a major accent of American English. The accent is not restricted to the United States...
) include:
- Word-final devoicing of /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/, whereby for example cub sounds like cup.
- Reduction of certain diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
forms to monophthongA monophthong is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation....
s, in particular, /aɪ/ is monophthongized to [aː] (this is also a feature of many Southern American EnglishSouthern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast to most of Texas and Oklahoma.The Southern dialects make...
dialects). The vowel sound in boil (/ɔɪ/ in Standard English) is also monophthongized, especially before /l/, making it indistinguishable from ball. Conversely, older speakers in some regions (such as the American South) may use [oɪ] in words like coach and road that have [oʊ] in SE (i.e. [koɪtʃ], [roɪd]).
- AAVE speakers may not use the fricatives
Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...
[θ] (the th in thin) and [ð] (the th of then) that are present in SE. The actual alternative phone used depends on the sound's position in a word.
- Word-initially, /θ/ is normally the same as in SE (so thin is [θɪn]).
- Word-initially, /ð/ is [d] (so this is [dɪs]).
- Word-medially and -finally, /θ/ is realized as either [f] or [t] (so [mʌmf] or [mʌnt] for month); /ð/ as either [v] or [d] (so [smuːv] for smooth).
- Realization of final ng /ŋ/, the velar nasal
The velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N....
, as the alveolar nasalThe alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar nasals is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is n....
[n] in functionFunction words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker...
morphemeIn linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s and content morphemes with two syllables like -ing, e.g. tripping is pronounced as trippin. This change does not occur in one-syllable content morphemes such as sing, which is [sɪŋ] and not *[sɪn]. However, singing is [sɪŋɪn]. Other examples include wedding → [wɛɾɪn], morning → [mɔɹnɪn], nothing → [ˈnʌfɪn]. Realization of /ŋ/ as [n] in these contexts is commonly found in many other English dialects.
- A marked feature of AAVE is final consonant-cluster reduction. There are several phenomena that are similar but are governed by different grammatical rules. This tendency has been used by creolists to compare AAVE to West African languages since such languages do not have final clusters.
- Final consonant clusters that are homorganic (have the same place of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location...
) and share the same voicingVoice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...
are reduced. E.g. test is pronounced [tɛs] since /t/ and /s/ are both voiceless; hand is pronounced [hæn], since /n/ and /d/ are both voiced; but pant is unchanged, as it contains both a voiced and a voiceless consonant in the cluster. Note also that it is the plosive (/t/ and /d/) in these examples that is lost rather than the fricative or nasal. Speakers may carry this declustered pronunciation when pluralizing so that the plural of test is [tɛsəs] rather than [tɛsts]. The clusters /ft/, /md/, are also affected.
- More often, word-final /sp/, /st/, and /sk/ are reduced, again with the final element being deleted rather than the former.
- For younger speakers, /skr/ also occurs in words that other varieties of English have /str/ so that, for example, street is pronounced [skrit].
- Clusters ending in /s/ or /z/ exhibit variation in whether the first or second element is deleted.
- Similarly, final consonants may be deleted (although there is a great deal of variation between speakers in this regard). Most often, /t/ and /d/ are deleted. As with other dialects of English, final /t/ and /k/ may reduce to a glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
. Nasal consonants may be lost while nasalization of the vowel is retained (e.g., find may be pronounced [fãː]). More rarely, /s/ and /z/ may also be deleted.
- Use of metathesised forms like aks for "ask" or graps for "grasp".
- Like other non-rhotic
English pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: a rhotic speaker pronounces a rhotic consonant in words like hard; a non-rhotic speaker does not...
varieties, the rhotic consonantIn phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...
/r/ is usually dropped when not followed by a vowel; it may also manifest as an unstressed [ə] or the lengthening of the preceding vowel. Intervocalic /r/ may also be dropped, e.g. SE story ([stɔri]) can be pronounced [stɔ.i], though this doesn't occur across morpheme boundaries. /r/ may also be deleted between a consonant and a back rounded vowel, especially in words like throw, throat, and through. is often vocalized in patterns similar to that of /r/ (though never between vowels) and, in combination with cluster simplification (see above), can make homophones of toll and toe, fault and fought, and tool and too. Homonymy may be reduced by vowel lengthening and by an off-glide [ɤ].
- Before nasal consonants (/m/, /n/, and /ŋ/), /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ are both pronounced [ɪ], making pen and pin homophone
A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose and rose , or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms...
s. This feature is also present in other dialects.
- The distinction between /ɪ/ and /iː/ before liquid consonant
In phonetics, liquids or liquid consonants are a class of consonants consisting of lateral consonants together with rhotics.-Description:...
s is frequently reduced, making feel and fill homophones. Before /r/ specifically, /uː/ and /oʊ/ also merge.
- Lowering of /ɪ/ before /ŋ/ causing pronunciations such as [θɛŋ] or [θæŋ] for thing.
In addition to these, there are a handful of multisyllabic words that differ from SE in their stress placement so that, for example, police, guitar and Detroit are pronounced with initial stress instead of ultimate stress.
Tense and aspect
Although AAVE doesn't necessarily feature the
preteriteThe preterite is the grammatical tense expressing actions that took place or were completed in the past...
marker of other English varieties (that is, the -ed of worked), it does feature an optional tense system with four past and two future tenses or (because they indicate tense in degrees) phases.
Phases/Tenses of AAVE
| Phase |
Example |
| Past |
Pre-recent |
I been flown it |
| Recent |
I done fly it |
| Pre-present |
I did fly it |
| Past Inceptive |
I do fly it |
| Present |
I be flying it |
| Future |
Immediate |
I'm a-fly it |
| Post-immediate |
I'm a-gonna fly it |
| Indefinite future |
I gonna fly it |
Syntactically, I flew it is grammatical, but done (always unstressed) is used to emphasize the completed nature of the action.
As phase auxiliary verbs, been and done must occur as the first auxiliary; when they occur as the second, they carry additional
aspectsIn linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
:
- He been done work means "he finished work a long time ago".
- He done been work means "until recently, he worked over a long period of time".
This latter example highlights one of the most distinguishing features of AAVE, which is the use of be to indicate that performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In SAE, this can only be expressed unambiguously by using adverbs such as usually.
This aspect-marking form of been or BIN is stressed and semantically distinct from the unstressed form: She BIN running ('She has been running for a long time') and She been running ('She has been running'). This aspect has been given several names, including perfect phase, remote past, and remote phase (this article uses the third). As shown above, been places action in the distant past. However, when been is used with
stative verbA stative verb is one that asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property . Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; that is, they have undefined duration...
s or
gerundIn linguistics* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun ....
forms, been shows that the action began in the distant past and that it is continuing now. suggests that a better translation when used with stative verbs is "for a long time". For instance, in response to "I like your new dress", one might hear Oh, I been had this dress, meaning that the speaker has had the dress for a long time and that it isn't new.
To see the difference between the simple past and the gerund when used with been, consider the following expressions:
- I been bought her clothes means "I bought her clothes a long time ago".
- I been buyin' her clothes means "I've been buying her clothes for a long time".
AAVE grammatical Aspects
| Aspect |
Example |
SE Standard English refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country...
Meaning |
| Habitual/continuative aspect |
He be working Tuesdays. |
He works frequently or habitually on Tuesdays. |
| Intensified continuative (habitual) |
He stay working. |
He is always working. |
| Intensified continuative (not habitual) |
He steady working. |
He keeps on working. |
| Perfect progressive |
He been working. |
He has been working. |
| Irrealis |
He finna go to work. |
He is about to go to work. |
Finna corresponds to "fixing to" in other varieties; it is also written fixina, fixna, fitna, and finta
In addition to these, come (which may or may not be an auxiliary) may be used to indicate speaker indignation, such as in Don't come acting like you don't know what happened and you started the whole thing ('Don't try to act as if you don't know what happened, because you started the whole thing').
Negation
Negatives are formed differently from standard American English:
- Use of ain't
Ain't is a colloquialism and contraction for "am not", "is not", "are not", "has not", and "have not" in the common English language vernacular. In some dialects ain't is also used as a contraction of "do not", "does not", and "did not". The usage of ain't is a perennial subject of controversy in...
as a general negative indicator. As in other dialects, it can be used where Standard English would use am not, isn't, aren't, haven't and hasn't. However, in marked contrast to other varieties of English in the U.S., some speakers of AAVE also use ain't instead of don't, doesn't, or didn't (e.g., I ain't know that). Ain't had its origins in common English, but became increasingly stigmatized since the 19th century. See also amn't.
- Negative concord, popularly called "double negation", as in I didn't go nowhere; if the sentence is negative, all negatable forms are negated. This contrasts with Standard English, where a double negative is considered incorrect to mean anything other than a positive (although this wasn't always so; see double negative
A double negative occurs when two forms of negation are used in the same sentence. Multiple negation is the more general term referring to the occurrence of more than one negative in a clause....
). There is also "triple" or "multiple negation", as in the phrase I don't know nothing about no one no more (in Standard English "I don't know anything about anyone anymore").
- In a negative construction, an indefinite pronoun such as nobody or nothing can be inverted with the negative verb particle for emphasis (e.g. Don't nobody know the answer, Ain't nothin' goin' on.)
While these are features that AAVE has in common with Creole languages, Howe and Walker use data from early recordings of African Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and the recordings of former slaves to demonstrate that negation was inherited from nonstandard colonial English.
Other grammatical characteristics
- The copula be is often dropped
Zero copula is a linguistic phenomenon whereby the subject is joined to the predicate without overt marking of this relationship...
, as in RussianRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
, ArabicArabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
and other languages. For example: You crazy ("You're crazy") or She my sister ("She's my sister"). The phenomenon is also observed in questions: Who you? ("Who're you?") and Where you at? ("Where are you (at)?"). On the other hand, a stressed is cannot be dropped: She is my sister. The general rules are:
- Only the forms is and are (of which the latter is anyway often replaced by is) can be omitted.
- These forms cannot be omitted when they would be pronounced with stress in Standard English (whether or not the stress serves specifically to impart an emphatic sense to the verb's meaning).
- These forms cannot be omitted when the corresponding form in Standard English cannot show contraction (and vice-versa). For example, I don't know where he is cannot be reduced to *I don't know where he just as in Standard English the corresponding reduction *I don't know where he's is likewise impossible. (I don't know where he at is possible, paralleling I don't know where he's at in Standard English.)
- Possibly some other minor conditions apply as well.
- Present-tense verbs are uninflected for number/person: there is no -s ending in the present-tense third-person singular. Example: She write poetry ("She writes poetry"). Similarly, was is used for what in standard English are contexts for both was and were.
- The genitive -'s ending may or may not be used. Genitive case is inferrable from adjacency. This is similar to many creoles throughout the Caribbean. Many language forms throughout the world use an unmarked possessive; it may here result from a simplification of grammatical structures. Example: my momma sister ('my mother's sister')
- The words it and they denote the existence of something, equivalent to Standard English there is, or there are.
- Altered syntax in questions: In Why they ain't growin'? ('Why aren't they growing?') and Who the hell she think she is? ('Who the hell does she think she is?') lack the inversion of standard English. Because of this, there is also no need for the auxiliary DO.
Lexical features
AAVE shares much of its lexicon with other varieties of English, particularly that of informal and
SouthernThe Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
dialects. There are some notable differences between the two, however. It has been suggested that some of the vocabulary unique to AAVE has its origin in West African languages, but etymology is often difficult to trace and, without a trail of recorded usage, the suggestions below cannot be considered proven; in many cases, the postulated etymologies are not recognized by linguists or the
Oxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
.
- dig from Wolof
Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, The Gambia, and Mauritania, and is the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Atlantic branch of the Niger–Congo language family...
dëgg or dëgga, meaning "to understand/appreciate" (It may instead come from Gaelic dtuig.)
- jazz
- tote
- bad-mouth, a calque
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...
from MandinkaThe Mandinka language is a Mandé language spoken by millions of Mandinka people in Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea-Bissau and Chad; it is the main language of The Gambia. It belongs to the Manding branch of Mandé, and is thus fairly...
AAVE also has words that either are not part of Standard American English or have strikingly different meanings from their common usage in SAE. For example, there are several words in AAVE referring to white people which are not part of mainstream SAE; these include the use of gray as an adjective for whites (as in gray dude), possibly from the color of
ConfederateThe Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
uniforms, possibly an extension of the slang use for "Irish", Ofay, which is pejorative, is another general term for a white; it might derive from the
YorubaYorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
word ofe, spoken in hopes of disappearing from danger such as that posed by European traders. However, most dictionaries simply refer to this word as having an unknown etymology. Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or
sedditySeddity – is defined as an African American who is bourgeois, snobbish or pretentious. According to Lisa J. Green’s study of the African American lexicon in African American English: a linguistic introduction, the usage of the word spanned from 1960 – 1980.As to the disparity in the spelling, this...
means snobbish or bourgeois.
AAVE has also contributed various words and phrases to other varieties of English; including chill out, main squeeze, soul, funky, and threads.
Social context
Linguists maintain that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with AAVE as a variety since, like all dialects, AAVE shows consistent internal logic and is used earnestly to express thoughts and ideas. However, non-specialist attitudes towards AAVE can be negative, especially among African Americans, as it both deviates from the standard and its use is interpreted, at best, as a sign of ignorance or laziness. Perhaps because of this attitude (as well as similar attitudes outside the African American community), most speakers of AAVE are bidialectal, being able to use Standard American English to varying degrees as well as AAVE. Such linguistic adaptation in different environments is called
code-switchingIn linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals—people who speak more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...
–though argues that the situation is actually one of
diglossiaIn linguistics, diglossia refers to a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety , a second, highly codified variety is used in certain situations such as literature, formal...
–Each dialect, or code, is applied in different settings. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with increasing
socioeconomic statusSocioeconomic status is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person's work experience and of an individual's or family’s economic and social position in relation to others, based on income, education, and occupation...
(although AAVE is still used by even well educated African Americans).
argues that the use of AAVE carries racially affirmative political undertones as its use allows African Americans to assert their cultural upbringing. Nevertheless, use of AAVE also carries strong social connotations; presents a white female speaker of AAVE who is accepted as a member into African American social groups despite her race.
Amid related research in the 1960s and 1970s–including
William LabovWilliam Labov born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics...
's groundbreaking thorough grammatical study, Language in the Inner City–there was doubt as to the existence of a distinct variety of English spoken by African Americans; noted that distinctive features of African American speech were present in the speech of Southerners and argued that there were really no substantial vocabulary or grammatical differences between the speech of blacks and that of other English dialects.
In literature and media
There has been a long-standing tradition of representing the speech of blacks in
American literatureAmerican literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
. A number of researchers have looked into the ways that American authors have depicted the speech of black characters, investigating the ways that black identity is established and how it connects to other characters. argues that early mass media portrayals of black speech are the strongest historical evidence that a separate variety of English existed for blacks. Early popular works are also used to determine the similarities that historical varieties of black speech have in common with modern AAVE.
The earliest depictions of black speech came from works written in the eighteenth-century, primarily from white authors. A notable exception includes
ClotelClotel; or, The President's Daughter is an 1853 novel by U.S. author and playwright William Wells Brown, an escaped slave from Kentucky who was active on the anti-slavery circuit...
, the first novel written by an African American (
William Wells BrownWilliam Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer...
). Depictions have largely been restricted to dialogue and the first novel written entirely in AAVE was
June JordanJune Millicent Jordan was a Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher and committed activist...
's His Own Where (1971), though
Alice WalkerAlice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender...
's
epistolary novelAn epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
The Color Purple is a much more widely known work written entirely in AAVE.
Lorraine HansberryLorraine Hansberry was an African American playwright and author of political speeches, letters, and essays...
's 1959 play
A Raisin in the SunA Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The title comes from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes...
also depicts near exclusive use of AAVE.
Some other notable works that have incorporated representations of black speech (with varying degrees of perceived authenticity) include the following:
- Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
: "The Gold Bug" (1843)
- Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
: Moby Dick (1851)
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...
: Uncle Tom's CabinUncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman....
(1851–1852)
- Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years...
: Uncle RemusUncle Remus is a fictional character, the title character and fictional narrator of a collection of African American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881...
(1880)
- Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
: Adventures of Huckleberry FinnAdventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by...
(1885)
- Thomas Nelson Page
Thomas Nelson Page was a lawyer and American writer. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, including the important period of World War I.-Biography:...
: In Ole Virginia (1887)
- Thomas Dixon
Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. was an American Baptist minister, playwright, lecturer, North Carolina state legislator, lawyer, and author, perhaps best known for writing The Clansman — which was to become the inspiration for D. W...
: The ClansmanThe Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is the title of a novel published in 1905. It was the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. that included The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor. It was influential in providing the ideology that helped support the...
(1905)
- Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American author and journalist. Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 for her epic American Civil War era novel, Gone with the Wind, which was the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.-Family:Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta,...
: Gone With the WindThe slaves depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork and Uncle Peter, and these slaves stay on with their masters even after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 sets them free...
(1936)
- Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance...
: Their Eyes Were Watching GodTheir Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel and the best-known work by African American writer Zora Neale Hurston. Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel garnered attention and controversy at the time of its publication, and has come to be regarded as a seminal...
(1937)
- William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
: Go Down, MosesGo Down, Moses is a collection of seven related pieces of short fiction by American author William Faulkner, sometimes considered a novel...
(1942)
- Mezz Mezzrow
Milton Mesirow, better known as Mezz Mezzrow was an American jazz clarinetist and saxophonist from Chicago, Illinois. Mezzrow is well known for organizing and financing historic recording sessions with Tommy Ladnier and Sidney Bechet. Mezzrow also recorded a number of times with Bechet and...
: Really The Blues (1946)
- John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best-known for his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected...
: A Confederacy of DuncesA Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published by LSU Press in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy and Toole's mother Thelma Toole, quickly becoming a cult classic, and later a...
(1980)
As there is no established spelling system for AAVE, depicting it in literature is instead often done through spelling changes to indicate its phonological features, or to contribute to the impression that AAVE is being used (
eye dialectEye dialect is the use of non-standard spelling for speech to draw attention to pronunciation. The term was originally coined by George P. Krapp to refer to the literary technique of using non-standard spelling that implies a pronunciation of the given word that is actually standard, such as...
). More recently, authors have begun focusing on grammatical cues, and even the use of certain rhetorical strategies.
Portrayals of black characters in movies and television are also done with varying degrees of authenticity. In
Imitation of LifeImitation of Life is a 1934 American drama film directed by John M. Stahl. The screenplay by William Hurlbut, based on Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel of the same name, was augmented by eight additional uncredited writers, including Preston Sturges and Finley Peter Dunne...
(1934), the speech and behavioral patterns of Delilah (an African American character) are reminiscent of minstrel performances that set out to exaggerate stereotypes, rather than depict black speech authentically. More authentic performances occur when certain speech events (such as rapping), specialized vocabulary, and certain syntactic features are used to indicate AAVE usage; some examples:
- Do the Right Thing
Do the Right Thing is a 1989 American dramedy produced, written, and directed by Spike Lee, who is also a featured actor in the film. Other members of the cast include Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, and John Turturro. It is also notably the...
(1989)
- Jungle Fever
Jungle Fever is a 1991 American drama film directed by Spike Lee, starring Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra. It was Lee's fifth feature-length film. The film mainly explores interracial relationships...
(1991)
- The Best Man
The Best Man is a 1999 romantic comedy-drama film, written and directed by Malcolm D. Lee. It was produced by Spike Lee's production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks. The film stars Taye Diggs, Nia Long, Morris Chestnut and Sanaa Lathan, and is considered to be a male-centered answer to...
(1999)
- Airplane!
Airplane! is a 1980 American satirical comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker and released by Paramount Pictures...
(1980)
Linguistic cues are also used to mark the speech of young urban African Americans, such as in
Laurel AvenueLaurel Avenue is an American three-hour television miniseries which aired on HBO on July 10 and 11, 1993. It is the story of an eventful weekend in the lives of an extended African American family living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Paul Aaron and actor Charles S. Dutton served as executive producers....
(1993), Fresh (1994), and the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
In education
AAVE has been the center of controversy about the education of
African AmericanAfrican Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
youths, the role AAVE should play in public schools and education, and its place in broader society. Educators have held that attempts should be made to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system. Criticism from social commentators and educators has ranged from asserting that AAVE is an intrinsically deficient form of speech to arguments that its use, by being considered unacceptable in most cultural contexts, is socially limiting. Some of the harshest criticism of AAVE or its use has come from other African Americans. A conspicuous example was the "
Pound Cake speechThe Pound Cake speech was given by Bill Cosby in May 2004 during an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. In it, Cosby was highly critical of members of subsets of the black community in the United...
", in which
Bill CosbyWilliam Henry "Bill" Cosby, Jr. is an American comedian, actor, author, television producer, educator, musician and activist. A veteran stand-up performer, he got his start at various clubs, then landed a starring role in the 1960s action show, I Spy. He later starred in his own series, the...
criticized many African Americans for various social behaviors, including exclusive use of AAVE.
Faced with such attitudes, the
Conference on College Composition and CommunicationThe Conference on College Composition and Communication is a national professional association of college and university writing instructors in the USA. Formed in 1949 as an organization within the National Council of Teachers of English, CCCC currently has about 7000 members...
(CCCC), a division of
National Council of Teachers of EnglishThe National Council of Teachers of English is an American professional organization dedicated to "improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education...
(NCTE), issued a position statement on students' rights to their own language. This was adopted by CCCC members in April 1974 and appeared in a special issue of College Composition and Communication in Fall of 1974. The resolution was as follows:
"We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language."
Around this time, pedagogical techniques similar to those used to teach English to speakers of foreign languages were shown to hold promise for speakers of AAVE. William Stewart experimented with the use of dialect readers—sets of text in both AAVE and SAE. The idea was that children could learn to read in their own dialect and then shift to Standard English with subsequent textbooks. developed a comprehensive set of dialect readers, called bridge readers, which included the same content in three different dialects: AAVE, a "bridge" version that was closer to SAE without being prohibitively formal, and a Standard English version. Despite studies that showed promise for such "Standard English as a Second Dialect" (SESD) programs, reaction to them was largely hostile and both Stewart's research and the Bridge Program were rejected for various political and social reasons, including strong resistance from parents.
A more formal shift in the recognition of AAVE came in the "
Ann Arbor DecisionThe Ann Arbor Decision refers to the case of Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District. This case was decided on July 12, 1979 by Judge Charles W. Joiner on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan...
" of 1979 (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al., v. Ann Arbor School District). In it, a federal judge ruled that in teaching black children to read, a school board must adjust to the children's dialect, not the children to the school, and that, by not taking students’ language into consideration, teachers were contributing to the failure of such students to read and use mainstream English proficiently.
National attitudes towards AAVE were revisited when a
controversial resolutionOn December 18, 1996, the Oakland, California school board passed a controversial resolution recognizing the legitimacy of "Ebonics"—what mainstream linguists more often term African American Vernacular English—as a language...
from the
OaklandOakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724...
(California) school board (
Oakland Unified School DistrictOakland Unified School District is a public education school district which operates elementary schools , middle schools , and high schools in Oakland, California.-History:...
) on December 18, 1996, called on "
EbonicsEbonics is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from enslaved Africans, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America...
" to be recognized as a language of African Americans. The proposal was to implement a program similar to the Language Development Program for African American Students (LPDAAS) in
Los AngelesLos Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, which began in 1988 and uses methods from the SESD programs mentioned above.
Like other similar programs, the Oakland resolution was widely misunderstood as intended to teach AAVE and "elevate it to the status of a written language." It gained national attention and was derided and criticized, most notably by
Jesse JacksonJesse Louis Jackson, Sr. is an African-American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to...
and
Kweisi MfumeKweisi Mfume is the former President/CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , as well as a five-term Democratic Congressman from Maryland's 7th congressional district, serving in the 100th through 104th Congress...
who regarded it as an attempt to teach
slangSlang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's language or dialect but are considered more acceptable when used socially. Slang is often to be found in areas of the lexicon that refer to things considered taboo...
to children. The statement that "African Language Systems are genetically based" also contributed to widespread hostility because "genetically" was popularly misunderstood to imply that African Americans had a biological predisposition to a particular language. In an amended resolution, this phrase was removed and replaced with wording that states African American language systems "have origins in West [sic] and Niger–Congo languages and are not merely dialects of English. . . ."
In reality, the belief underlying the Oakland proposal was that black students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English if textbooks and teachers incorporated AAVE in teaching black children to speak Standard English rather than mistakenly equating nonstandard with substandard and dismissing AAVE as the latter. point to these linguistic barriers, and common reactions by teachers, as a primary cause of reading difficulties and poor school performance.
More recently, research has been conducted on the overrepresentation of African Americans in special education. argue that this is because AAVE speech characteristics are often erroneously considered to be signs of speech development problems, prompting teachers to refer children to speech pathologists.
According to Smitherman, the controversy and debates concerning AAVE in public schools imply deeper
deterministicCultural determinism is the belief that the culture in which we are raised determines who we are at emotional and behavioral levels. This supports the theory that environmental influences dominate who we are instead of biologically inherited traits....
attitudes towards the African-American community as a whole. Smitherman describes this as a reflection of the "power elite's perceived insignificance and hence rejection of Afro-American language and culture". She also asserts that African Americans are forced to conform to European American society in order to succeed, and that conformity ultimately means the "eradication of black language . . . and the adoption of the linguistic norms of the white middle class." The necessity for "bi-dialectialism" (AAVE and SAE) means "some blacks contend that being bi-dialectal not only causes a schism in the black personality, but it also implies such dialects are 'good enough' for blacks but not for whites."
See also
- Black English
Black English is a term used for both dialects of English and English-based pidgins and creoles, and whose meaning depends considerably upon the context, and particularly the part of the world.-Africa:*Aku *Cameroon English...
- Dialects of North American English
- English-based creole languages
An English-based creole language is a creole language that was significantly influenced by the English language...
- Gullah language
Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people , an African American population living on the Sea Islands and the coastal region of the U.S...
- Ebonics
Ebonics is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from enslaved Africans, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America...
- Habitual be
Habitual be is the use of an invariant be in African American Vernacular English and Caribbean English to mark habitual or extended actions in the present tense, instead of using the Standard English inflected forms of be, such as is and are....
- Is-leveling
Is-leveling, in some nonstandard dialects of English, is the use of the word "is" in places where standard English has "are" occurring. For example: "We is brothers."...
- Jive filter
Jive, also known as the Jive Filter, is a novelty computer program that converts plain English to a comic dialect known as "jive", a parody of African American Vernacular English. Some versions of the filter were adapted to parody other forms of English speech, such as valspeak, cockney, geordie,...
- Languages of the United States
- Southern American English
Southern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast to most of Texas and Oklahoma.The Southern dialects make...
- Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
- Code-switching
In linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals—people who speak more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...
- Africanisms
Africanisms refers to characteristics of African culture and people that can be traced through societal practices and institutions of the African diaspora....
External links and further reading