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Results for African American Vernacular English
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Any of the nonstandard varieties of English spoken by African Americans. Also called Black English, Black English Vernacular; Also called Black Vernacular English, Ebonics. See Usage Note at Black English.
The noun has one meaning:
Meaning #1:
a nonstandard form of American English spoken by some American Black people
Synonyms: Black English, Ebonics
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) – also called African
American English, Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Black
Vernacular English (BVE) – is a
AAVE shares several characteristics with Creole English dialects spoken by people throughout much of the world. AAVE has pronunciation, grammatical structures, and vocabulary in common with various West African languages.[3]
Many features of AAVE are shared with dialects spoken in the Southern United States. While these are mostly regionalisms (i.e. originating from white speech), 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.[4] The traits of AAVE that separate it from Standard American English (SAE) include:
Early AAVE contributed a number of words of African origin to Standard American English, including "gumbo",[5] "goober",[6] "yam", and "banjo". AAVE has contributed slang expressions such as cool, hip, hep cat and bling.
The near uniformity of AAVE pronunciation, despite vast geographic area, may be due in part to relatively recent migrations of African Americans out of the south as well as to long-term racial segregation.[citation needed] Phonological features that set AAVE apart from forms of "Standard English" (such as General American) include:
The most distinguishing feature of AAVE is the use of forms of be to mark aspect in verb phrases. The use or lack of a form of be can indicate whether the performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In SAE, this can be expressed only using adverbs such as usually.[22] It is disputed whether the use of the verb "to be" to indicate a habitual status or action in AAVE has its roots in various West African languages.
| Example | Name | SE Meaning / Notes |
|---|---|---|
| He workin'. | Simple progressive | He is working [right now]. |
| He be workin'. | Habitual/continuative aspect | He works frequently or habitually. Better illustrated with "He be workin' Tuesdays." |
| He stay workin'. | Intensified continuative | He is always working. |
| He been workin'. | Perfect progressive | He has been working. |
| He been had that job. | Remote phase (see below) | He has had that job for a long time and still has it. |
| He done worked. | Emphasized perfective | He has worked. Syntactically, "He worked" is valid, but "done" is used to emphasize the completed nature of the action.[23] |
| He finna go to work. | Immediate future | He's about to go to work. Finna is a contraction of "fixing to"; though is also believed to show residual influence of late 16th century archaism "would fain (to)", that persisted until later in some rural dialects spoken in the Carolinas (near the Gullah region). "Fittin' to" is commonly thought to be another form of the original "fixin' (fixing) to", and it is also heard as fitna, fidna, fixna, and finsta.[24] |
| I was walkin' home, and I had worked all day. | Preterite narration. | "Had" is used to begin a preterite narration. Usually it occurs in the first clause of the narration, and nowhere else. |
The aspect marked by stressed 'been' has been given many names, including Perfect Phase, Remote Past, Remote Phase[25] This article uses the third. Been here is stressed; in order to distinguish it from unstressed been (used as in standard English), linguists often write it as BIN. Thus the distinction between She BIN running ("She has been running for a long time") and She been running ("She has been running").[26]
With non-stative verbs, the role of been is simple: it places the action in the distant past, or represents total completion of the action. A Standard English equivalent is to add "a long time ago". For example, She been told me that translates as, "She told me that a long time ago".
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. Linguist John R. Rickford (1999) 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.[27]
To see the difference between the simple past and the gerund when used with been, consider the utterances:
In addition, negatives are formed differently from standard American English:[28]
While these are features that AAVE has in common with Creole languages,[30] Howe and Walker use data from early recordings of African Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and Ex-Slave recordings to demonstrate that negation was inherited from nonstandard colonial English.[31]
Some of these characteristics, notably double negatives and the use of been for "has been", are also characteristic of general colloquial American English.
The linguist William Labov carried out and published the first thorough grammatical study of African American Vernacular English in 1965.
The general rules are
For the most part, AAVE uses the lexicon of SAE, particularly informal and southern dialects. There are some notable differences, however. It has been suggested that some of this vocabulary 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, and in many cases are not recognised by linguists or the OED.[37]
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 Confederate uniforms, possibly an extension of the slang use for "Irish",[42] "Ofay," which is pejorative, is another general term for a white; it might derive from the Ibibio word afia, which means "light-colored," and may have referred to European traders[citation needed]; or from the Yoruba 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.[43] Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or seddity means snobbish or bourgeois.[44] "The Man" and "Miss Ann" are words used generally to refer to the white authority and white women, respectively.[citation needed]
AAVE has also contributed various words and phrases to other varieties of English; these include chill out, main squeeze, soulmate and threads[45]
AAVE's resistance to assimilation into Standard American English or other more standard dialects is a consequence of cultural and historical differences between blacks and whites (Romaine 109). Any language used by isolated groups of people is likely to split into various dialects. Thus, language becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and pride. It is "intricately bound up with his or her sense of identity and group consciousness".[46]
AAVE has survived through the centuries also as a result of varying degrees of isolation from Southern American English and Standard American English — through both "self-segregation from and marginalization by mainstream society" (Trudgill 108). Still, most speakers of AAVE are bidialectal, since they use Standard American English to varying degrees as well as AAVE. This method of linguistic adaptation in different environments is called code switching. Each dialect, or code, is applied in different settings. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with the rise in socioeconomic status (although it is still used by even well educated African Americans).[47] As with the case of many nonstandard varieties, almost all speakers of AAVE (at any socioeconomic level) fully understand Standard American English.[citation needed] Thus use of AAVE, as with the use of SAE, can be a conscious choice. The level of usage of any dialect is subject to the speaker's volition.[citation needed] In certain situations, speakers of AAVE may deem it more appropriate to use SAE, and in other instances (most likely among other African Americans) use AAVE.
The preponderance of code switching indicates that AAVE and SAE are met with different reactions or discernments. AAVE is often perceived by members of mainstream American society as indicative of low intelligence or limited education. Furthermore, as with many other non-standard dialects and especially creoles, AAVE sometimes has been called "lazy" or "bad" English, although among linguists there is no such controversy, since AAVE, like all dialects, shows consistent internal logic and structure.[48]
While it is clear that there is a strong relationship between AAVE and Southern American English, the unique characteristics of AAVE are not fully explained and it is unclear exactly how they arose.
One theory is that AAVE arose from one or more slave creoles that arose from the
trans-Atlantic African slave trade and the need for African captives to communicate among themselves and with their captors.
During the Middle Passage, these captives (many already multi-lingual speakers of
dialects of Wolof, Twi, Hausa, Yoruba, Dogon,
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 Babel.
Some slave owners preferred slaves from a particular tribe. For consigned cargoes, language mixing aboard ship was sometimes
minimal. There is evidence that many enslaved Africans continued to use fairly intact native languages until almost 1700, when
the Wolof language became one of the bases of a sort of intermediary pidgin among Africans. It is Wolof that comes to the fore in
tracing the African roots of AAVE.[citation needed] By 1715, this African pidgin had made its way into novels by
Daniel Defoe, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. Cotton Mather claimed to have been very familiar with his slaves' speech, knowing enough to affirm that
one of his slaves was a Coromantee, a general term applied during slavery to the
By the time of the American Revolution, slave creoles had not quite established themselves to the point of mutual intelligibility among varieties. Dillard quotes a recollection of "slave language" toward the latter part of the 18th century[50]:
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…
It was not until the time of the Civil War that the language of the slaves became 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 (1870), Thomas Wentworth Higginson detailed many features of his soldiers' language. In particular, this book contains the first reference to the distinction within AAVE "been" between stressed BÍN and unstressed bin.[citation needed]
After Emancipation, some freed slaves traveled to West Africa, taking their creole with them. In certain African tribal groups, such as those in west Cameroon, there are varieties of Black English that show strong resemblances to the creole dialects in the U.S. documented during this period.[citation needed] The languages have remained similar due to the homogeneity within tribal groups, and so can act as windows into a past state of Creole English.[citation needed]
AAVE has been the center of controversy on issues regarding the education of African American youths and the role it should play in public schools and education, as well as its place in broader society. Educators have held that attempts should be made to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system. Criticisms from social commentators and educators have ranged from asserting that AAVE is an intrinsically deficient form of speech [citation needed] to arguments that its use, by being considered unacceptable in most cultural contexts, is socially limiting. It is often argued that incorporating AAVE in schools would only impede the academic progress of young African American children.[citation needed] The harshest criticisms of AAVE have come from other African Americans.[51] Most notably, Bill Cosby, in his Pound Cake speech, criticized members of the African American community for various social behaviors including exclusive use of AAVE
Changes in formal attitudes regarding the acceptance of AAVE as a distinct dialect correlated with advancements in civil rights. One notable shift in the recognition of AAVE came in the "Ann Arbor Decision" of 1979 (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al., v. Ann Arbor School District). In it, a federal judge ruled that a school board, in teaching black children to read, must adjust to the children's dialect, not the children to the school.[52]
Prior to this, the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication), a sub-division of NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) issued a position statement on students' right to their own language.[citation needed] This was adopted by members of the CCCC in April 1974 and appeared in a special issue of CCC in the fall of 1974. The resolution is 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."[citation needed]
The formal recognition of AAVE was revisited when a controversial resolution from the Oakland, California school board on December 18, 1997, called on "Ebonics" to be officially recognized as a language of African Americans.[53] At its last meeting, the outgoing Oakland school board unanimously passed the resolution before stepping down from their positions to the newly elected board consisting of members who held different political views. The new board modified the resolution and then effectively dropped it. Had the measure remained in force, it would have affected funding and education-related issues.[citation needed]
The Oakland resolution declared that AAVE was not English, and was not an Indo-European language at all, asserting that the speech of black children belonged to "West and Niger-Congo languages and are not merely dialects of English."[54] This claim is inconsistent with the current linguistic theory that AAVE is a dialect of English and thus of Indo-European origin. Furthermore, the differences between modern AAVE and Standard English are nowhere near as great as those between French and Haitian Creole, which are considered to be separate languages. The resolution was widely misunderstood as an intention to teach Ebonics and "elevate it to the status of a written language."[55] The resolution gained national attention and was the subject of derision and criticism. Most notably, from Jesse Jackson and Kweisi Mfume, who regarded it as an attempt to teach slang to children.[56] The statement that "African Language Systems are genetically based" also contributed to widespread hostility because it was popularly misunderstood to mean that African Americans have a biological predisposition to a particular language.[citation needed] In an amended resolution, this phrase was removed and replaced with wording that states African American language systems "have origins in West and Niger-Congo languages and are not merely dialects of English."[57]
Proponents of AAVE instruction in public education believe that their proposals have been distorted by political debate and misunderstood by the general public.[citation needed] The underlying belief is 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 dismiss it as substandard.[58]
For students whose primary dialect was AAVE, the Oakland resolution mandated some instruction in that dialect, both for "maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language... and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills." This also included the proposed increase of salaries of those proficient in both AAVE and Standard English to the level of those teaching LEP (limited English proficiency) students and the use of public funding to help teachers learn AAVE themselves. [59] Teachers were to recognize that the "errors" in Standard American English that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or effort, and indeed were not errors at all but instead were features of a grammatically distinct form of English.[citation needed] Rather than teaching Standard English by proscribing non-standard usage, the idea was to teach Standard American English to Ebonics-speaking students by showing them how to translate expressions from AAVE to Standard American English.[citation needed]
Pedagogical techniques similar to those used to teach English to speakers of foreign languages appear to hold promise for speakers of AAVE. William Stewart experimented with the use of dialect readers—sets of text in both AAVE and SAE.[60] The idea was that children could learn to read in their own dialect and then shift to Standard English with subsequent textbooks.[61] Simpkins, Holt, and Simpkins developed a comprehensive set of dialect readers, called bridge readers, which included the same content in three different dialects: AAVE, a bridge version, which was closer to SAE without being prohibitively formal, and a Standard English version.[62] Despite studies that showed promise for such dialect reader programs, reaction to them was largely hostile[63] and both Stewart's research and the Bridge Program were rejected for various political and social reasons, including strong resistance from parents[64] . Opinions on Ebonics still range from advocacy of official language status in the United States to denigration as "poor English."[citation needed]
In 2002, Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy edited and contributed to the book The Skin that We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. This book takes a look at how classrooms are dealing with the English debate in practice and what that can mean for students because while policymakers are still debating exactly where they stand on the issue of Standard American English in the classroom and what else is or is not allowed, teachers are having to make their own policies on how to deal with such issues. [65]
Teaching children whose primary dialect is AAVE poses problems beyond simply those commonly addressed by pedagogical techniques, and the Oakland approach has support among some educational theorists. However, such pedagogical approaches have given rise to educational and political disputes. The American public and policymakers remain divided over whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate dialect of English. Though she had no standing in the school district, California State San Bernardino sociology professor Mary Texeira suggested, in July 2005, that Ebonics be included in the San Bernardino City Unified School District.[citation needed] The recommendation was met with a backlash similar to that in Oakland nine years before.
According to Smitherman, the overwhelming controversy and debates concerning AAVE in public schools insinuate the deeper, more implicit deterministic 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".[66] She also asserts that since African Americans, in order to succeed, are forced to conform to European American society this ultimately means the "eradication of black language…and the adoption of the linguistic norms of the white middle class." The necessity for a "bi-dialectialism" (AAVE and SAE) has "some blacks contend that being bi-dialectal not only causes a schism in the black personality, but it also like saying black talk is 'good enough' for blacks but not for whites."[67]
| Dialects of English | |
|---|---|
| Europe | British · England · Received Pronunciation · Estuary ·
Cockney (East London) · East Anglian · East Midlands · West Midlands · West Country · Northern · Mancunian
(Manchester · Scouse (Liverpool) · Mackem (Sunderland) · Geordie (Tyneside) · Scottish (Glaswegian · Highland) · Welsh · Manx · Mid Ulster · Hiberno-English (Ireland) · Guernsey English. Czenglish · Danglish · Denglisch · Dunglish · Finglish · Franglais · Greeklish · Llanito · Norwenglish · Poglish · Runglish · Serblish · Swenglish |
| North America | American · African American Vernacular · Appalachian · Baltimorese · Boston · Buffalonian |
