African-American Vernacular English
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), 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 Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum; on the formal end of this continuum, speakers 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, West African languages, 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 (AAVE) 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 (see Samaná English) 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" (1870), 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 (particularly, General American). 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. Section::::"Deep" phonology. 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": Grammar. Tense and aspect. Although AAVE does not necessarily have the simple past-tense marker of other English varieties (that is, the "-ed" of "work"ed""), 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" (always unstressed, pronounced as /dən/) 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" ('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 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: In addition to these, "come" (which may or may not be an auxiliary) may be used to indicate speaker indignation, such as in "Do n'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 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. Vocabulary. 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 (as in "gray dude"), possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms; and "paddy", an extension of the slang use for "Irish". "Ofay," 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. 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 many 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" (intensified equative "be"), "She be done had her baby" (resultative "be done"), and "They come hollerin" (indignant "come"). On the other hand, rural AAVE alone shows certain features too, such as: "I was a-huntin" ("a"-prefixing); "It riz above us" (different irregular forms); and "I want for to eat it" ("for to" complement ). 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. There are at least 10 distinct regional accents in AAVE, and regional patterns of pronunciation and word choice appear on Twitter and other social media. Regional variation in AAVE does not pattern with other regional variation  in North American English, which broadly follows East-to-West migration patterns, but instead patterns with the population movements during the Great Migration, resulting in a broadly South-to-North pattern, albeit with founder effects in cities that already had existing African American populations at the beginning of the Great Migration. There is no vowel for which the geographic variation in AAVE patterns with that of White American English. 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, though 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". Californian AAVE often lacks a cot-caught merger, especially before nasals. Social context. Although the distinction between AAVE and General American dialects is clear to most English speakers, some characteristics, notably double negatives and the omission of certain auxiliaries  (see below) 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 (see Great Migration and Second Great Migration) 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 (as well as similar attitudes among other Americans), 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 (although AAVE is still used by even well-educated African Americans). Another misconception is that AAVE is the native dialect (or even more inaccurately, a linguistic fad) employed by all African Americans. Wheeler (1999) 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". 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 Black people and 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 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. Similarly, in "Louisiana v. Demesme", the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the defendant's request "give me a lawyer, dog" was too ambiguous to be considered a "Miranda" request for a lawyer. In US courts , an interpreter is only routinely available for speakers of "a language other than English". argue that a lack of familiarity with AAVE (and other minority dialects of English) 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. A 2019 experimental study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, and Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, found that court stenographers in Philadelphia regularly fail to transcribe AAVE  accurately, with about 40 percent of sentences being inaccurate, and only 83% accuracy at the word level, despite court stenographers being certified at or above 95% accuracy. Their study suggests that there is evidence that court reporters may potentially introduce incorrect transcriptions into the official court record, with ramifications in cross-examination, jury deliberations, and appeals. A 2016 qualitative study by researchers at Stanford University also suggests that testimony in AAE — and other nonstandard varieties — is not necessarily always understood in a judicial setting. In music. Spirituals, 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: 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: In addition to grammatical features, lexical items specific to AAVE are often used in hip-hop: 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 (i.e. the retroflex approximant). 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 (as British pop musicians of the 1960s and beyond did to evoke rock, pop, and 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" (you're), "they" (their/they're), "gon/gone" (going to), and "yo" (your). 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 (though this particular view is not endorsed by linguists), 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.