African-American Vernacular English


African-American Vernacular English, referred to also as Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular, Black Vernacular English, colloquially as Ebonics, or simply as Black English , is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians.
Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary and accent features, African-American Vernacular English is employed by working and middle-class African Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum; on the formal end of this continuum, middle-class African-Americans switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the nonstandard accent.
As with most African-American English, African-American Vernacular English shares a large portion of its grammar and phonology with the rural dialects of the Southern United States, and especially older Southern American English, due to historical connections of African Americans to the region.
Mainstream linguists maintain that the parallels between African-American Vernacular English and West African and English-based creole languages are real but minor, with African-American Vernacular English genealogically still falling under the English language, demonstrably tracing back to the diverse nonstandard dialects of early English settlers in the Southern United States. However, a minority of linguists argue that the vernacular shares so many characteristics with African creole languages spoken around the world that it could have originated as its own English-based creole or semi-creole language, distinct from the English language, before undergoing a process of decreolization.

Origins

African-American Vernacular English may be considered a dialect, ethnolect or sociolect. While it is clear that there is a strong historical relationship between AAVE and earlier Southern U.S. dialects, the origins of AAVE are still a matter of debate.
The presiding theory among linguists is that AAVE has always been a dialect of English, meaning that it originated from earlier English dialects rather than from English-based creole languages that "decreolized" back into English. In the early 2000s, Shana Poplack provided corpus-based evidence—evidence from a body of writing—from isolated enclaves in Samaná and Nova Scotia peopled by descendants of migrations of early AAVE-speaking groups that suggests that the grammar of early AAVE was closer to that of contemporary British dialects than modern urban AAVE is to other 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 McWhorter maintains that the contribution of West African languages to AAVE is minimal. In an interview on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, 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 McWhorter, virtually all linguists who have carefully studied the origins of AAVE "agree that the West African connection is quite minor."
However, a creole theory, less accepted among linguists, posits that AAVE arose from one or more creole languages used by African captives of the Atlantic slave trade, due to the captives speaking many different native languages and therefore needing a new way to communicate among themselves and with their captors. According to this theory, these captives first developed what are called pidgins: simplified mixtures of languages. Since pidgins form from close contact between speakers of different languages, the slave trade would have been exactly such a situation. Creolist John Dillard quotes, for example, slave ship captain William Smith describing the sheer diversity of mutually unintelligible languages just in The Gambia. By 1715, an African pidgin was reproduced in novels by Daniel Defoe, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. In 1721, Cotton Mather conducted the first attempt at recording the speech of slaves in his interviews regarding the practice of smallpox inoculation. By the time of the American Revolution, 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 War did the language of the slaves become familiar to a large number of educated whites. The abolitionist papers before the war form a rich corpus of examples of plantation creole. In Army Life in a Black Regiment, Thomas Wentworth Higginson detailed many features of his black soldiers' language. Opponents of the creole theory suggest that such pidgins or creoles existed but simply died out without directly contributing to modern AAVE.

Phonology

Many pronunciation features distinctly set AAVE apart from other forms of American English. McWhorter argues that what truly unites all AAVE accents is a uniquely wide-ranging intonation pattern or "melody", which characterizes even the most "neutral" or light African-American accent. A handful of multisyllabic words in AAVE differ from General American in their stress placement so that, for example, police, guitar, and Detroit are pronounced with initial stress instead of ultimate stress. The following are phonological differences in AAVE vowel and consonant sounds.

Vowels

McWhorter discusses an accent continuum from "a 'deep' Black English through a 'light' Black English to standard English," saying the sounds on this continuum may vary from one African American speaker to the next or even in a single speaker from one situational context to the next. McWhorter regards the following as rarer features, characteristic only of a deep Black English but which speakers of light Black English may occasionally "dip into for humorous or emotive effect":

Tense and aspect

Although AAVE does not necessarily have the simple past-tense marker of other English varieties, it does have an optional tense system with at least four aspects of the past tense and two aspects of the future tense.
Syntactically, I bought it is grammatical, but done 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 aspects:
The latter example shows one of the most distinctive features of AAVE: the use of be to indicate that performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In most other American English dialects, 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 and She been running. This aspect has been given several names, including perfect phase, remote past, and remote phase. As shown above, been places action in the distant past. However, when been is used with stative verbs or gerund 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:
AspectExampleStandard English meaning
Habitual/continuative aspectHe be working Tuesdays.He frequently works on Tuesdays.
Intensified continuative He stay working.He is always working.
Intensified continuative He steady working.He keeps on working.
Perfect progressiveHe been working.He has been working.
IrrealisHe finna go to work.He is about to go to work.

In addition to these, come 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.

Negation

Negatives are formed differently from most other varieties of English:
While AAVE shares these with Creole languages, 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

AAVE shares most of its lexicon with other varieties of English, particularly that of informal and Southern dialects; for example, the relatively recent use of y'all. However, it has also 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. Early AAVE and Gullah contributed a number of African-originated words to the American English mainstream, including gumbo, goober, yam, and banjo.
AAVE has also contributed slang expressions such as cool and hip. In many cases, the postulated etymologies are not recognized by linguists or the Oxford English Dictionary, such as to dig, jazz, tote, and bad-mouth, a calque from Mandinka.
AAVE also has words that either are not part of most other American English dialects or have strikingly different meanings. For example, there are several words in AAVE referring to white people that are not part of mainstream American English; these include gray as an adjective for whites, possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms; and paddy, an extension of the slang use for "Irish".
"," which is pejorative, is another general term for a white person; it might derive from the Ibibio word afia, which means "light-colored", from the Yoruba word ofe, spoken in hopes of disappearing from danger, or via Pig Latin from "foe". However, most dictionaries simply say its etymology is unknown.
Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or seddity 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.

Influence on other dialects

African-American Vernacular English has influenced the development of other dialects of English. The AAVE accent, New York accent, and Spanish-language accents have together yielded the sound of New York Latino English, some of whose speakers use an accent indistinguishable from an AAVE one. AAVE has also influenced certain Chicano accents and Liberian Settler English, directly derived from the AAVE of the original 16,000 African Americans who migrated to Liberia in the 1800s. In the United States, urban youth participating in hip-hop culture or marginalized as ethnic minorities, aside from Latinos, are also well-studied in adopting African-American Vernacular English, or prominent elements of it: for example, Southeast-Asian Americans embracing hip-hop identities.

Variation

Urban versus rural variations

African-American Vernacular English began as mostly rural and Southern, yet today is mostly urban and nationally widespread, and its more recent urban features are now even diffusing into rural areas. Urban AAVE alone is intensifying with the grammatical features exemplified in these sentences: "He be the best", "She be done had her baby", and "They come hollerin". On the other hand, rural AAVE alone shows certain features too, such as: "I was a-huntin" ; "It riz above us" ; and "I want for to eat it". Using the word bees even in place of be to mean is or are in standard English, as in the sentence "That's the way it bees" is also one of the rarest of all deep AAVE features today, and most middle-class AAVE speakers would recognize the verb bees as part of only a deep "Southern" or "country" speaker's vocabulary.

Local variations

New York City AAVE incorporates some local features of the New York accent, including its high vowel; meanwhile, conversely, Pittsburgh AAVE may merge this same vowel with the vowel, matching the cot-caught merger of white Pittsburgh accents. AAVE accents traditionally do not have the cot-caught merger. Memphis, Atlanta, and Research Triangle AAVE incorporates the vowel raising and vowel lowering associated with white Southern accents. Memphis and St. Louis AAVE are developing, since the mid-twentieth century, an iconic merger of the vowels in and, making there sound like thurr.

Social context

Although the distinction between AAVE and General American accents is clear to most English speakers, some characteristics, notably double negatives and the omission of certain auxiliaries such as the has in has been are also characteristic of many colloquial dialects of American English. There is near-uniformity of AAVE grammar, despite its vast geographic spread across the whole country. This may be due in part to relatively recent migrations of African Americans out of the American South as well as to long-term racial segregation that kept black people living together in largely homogeneous communities.
Misconceptions about AAVE are, and have long been, common, and have stigmatized its use. One myth is that AAVE is grammatically "simple" or "sloppy". However, like all dialects, AAVE shows consistent internal logic and grammatical complexity, and is used naturally by a group of people to express thoughts and ideas. Prescriptively, attitudes about AAVE are often less positive; since AAVE deviates from the standard, its use is commonly misinterpreted as a sign of ignorance, laziness, or both. Perhaps because of this attitude, most speakers of AAVE are bidialectal, being able to speak with more standard English features, and perhaps even a General American accent, as well as AAVE. Such linguistic adaptation in different environments is called code-switching—though argues that the situation is actually one of diglossia: each dialect, or code, is applied in different settings. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with increasing socioeconomic status.
Another myth is that AAVE is the native dialect employed by all African Americans. Wheeler warns that "AAVE should not be thought of as the language of Black people in America. Many African Americans neither speak it nor know much about it".
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.
Before the substantial research of the 1960s and 1970s—including William Labov's groundbreakingly thorough grammatical study, Language in the Inner City—there was doubt that the speech of African Americans had any exclusive features not found in varieties spoken by other groups; 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 the legal system

The United States courts are divided over how to admit statements of ambiguous tense made in AAVE under evidence. In United States v. Arnold, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that "he :wikt:finna#English|finna shoot me" was a statement made in the present tense, so it was admissible hearsay under the excited utterance exception; however, the dissent held that past or present tense could not be determined by the statement, so the statement should not have been admitted into evidence.
In US courts, an interpreter is only routinely available for speakers of "a language other than English". Rickford and King argue that a lack of familiarity with AAVE on the part of jurors, stenographers, and others can lead to misunderstandings in court. They especially focus on the Trayvon Martin case and how the testimony of Rachel Jeantel was perceived as incomprehensible and not credible by the jury due to her dialect.

In music

, blues, jazz, R&B, and most recently, hip-hop are all genres associated with African American music; as such, AAVE usually appears, through singing, speaking, or rapping, in these musical forms. Examples of morphosyntactic features of AAVE in genres other than hip-hop are given below:
ArtistSongLyricAAVE feature
Nina Simone"It Be's That Way Sometime""It Be's That Way Sometime"habitual aspect with be
Vera Hall"Trouble So Hard""Don't nobody know my trouble but God"negative concord
Texas Alexander"The Rising Sun""She got something round and it look just like a bat"lack of inflection on present-tense verb
WC Handy"Saint Louis Blues""Cause my baby, he done left this town."Use of "done" to indicate the recent past

More recently, AAVE has been used heavily in hip-hop to show "street cred". Examples of morphosyntactic AAVE features used by black hip-hop artists are given below:
ArtistSongLyricAAVE feature
LL Cool J"Control Myself""She said her name Shayeeda"absence of copula
LL Cool J"Control Myself""I could tell her mama feed her"lack of inflection on present-tense verb
Kanye West ft. Jay-Z"Gotta Have It""You can bank I ain't got no ceilin'"negative concord
Nick Cannon"Can I Live""It's a lot of angels waiting on their wings"expletive it

In addition to grammatical features, lexical items specific to AAVE are often used in hip-hop:
ArtistSongLyricAAVE lexical itemStandard English definition
Kanye West ft. Jay-Z"Otis""Or the big-face rollie, I got two of those"rollieRolex
Tupac Shakur"Straight Ballin'""And getting ghost on the 5-0"5-0 police
Lil Wayne"Blinded""I can put bangles around yo ashy ankles"ashydry skin

Lexical items taken from
Because hip-hop is so intimately related to the African American oral tradition, non-black hip-hop artists also use certain features of AAVE; for example, in an MC battle, Eyedea said, "What that mean, yo?" displaying a lack of subject-verb inversion and also the "auxiliary do". However, they tend to avoid the term nigga, even as a marker of solidarity. White hip-hop artists such as Eyedea can choose to accentuate their whiteness by hyper-articulating postvocalic r sounds.
AAVE is also used by non-black artists in genres other than hip-hop, if less frequently. For instance, in "Tonight, Tonight", Hot Chelle Rae uses the term dime to mean "an attractive woman". Jewel's "Sometimes It Be That Way" employs habitual be in the title to indicate habitual aspect. If they do not employ similar features of AAVE in their speech, then it can be argued that they are modeling their musical performance to evoke aspects of particular musical genres such as R&B or the blues. Some research suggests that non-African American young adults learn AAVE vocabulary by listening to hip-hop music.

In social media

On Twitter, AAVE is used as a framework from which sentences and words are constructed, in order to accurately express oneself. Grammatical features and word pronunciations stemming from AAVE are preserved. Spellings based on AAVE have become increasingly common, to the point where it has become a normalized practice. Some examples include, "you", "they", "gon/gone", and "yo".

In education

Educators traditionally have attempted to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system, perceiving the dialect as grammatically defective. In 1974, the teacher-led Conference on College Composition and Communication issued a position statement affirming students' rights to their own dialects and the validity of all dialects. Mainstream linguistics has long agreed with this view about dialects. In 1979, a judge ordered the Ann Arbor School District to find a way to identify AAVE speakers in the schools and to "use that knowledge in teaching such students how to read standard English." In 1996, Oakland Unified School District made a controversial resolution for AAVE, which was later called "Ebonics." The Oakland School board approved that Ebonics be recognized as a language independent from English, that teachers would participate in recognizing this language, and that it would be used in theory to support the transition from Ebonics to Standard American English in schools. This program lasted three years and then died off.