African-American Vernacular English
African-American Vernacular English[a] (AAVE)[b] is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians.[4] Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary, and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the non-standard accent.[5][6] AAVE is widespread throughout the United States, but is not the native dialect of all African Americans, nor are all of its speakers African American.[7][8][9]
Not to be confused with African-American English.African-American Vernacular English
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Germanic
- West Germanic
- North Sea Germanic
- Anglo-Frisian
- Anglic
- English
- American English
- Older Southern American English
- African-American Vernacular English
- Older Southern American English
- American English
- English
- Anglic
- Anglo-Frisian
- North Sea Germanic
- West Germanic
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As with most English varieties spoken by African Americans, African-American Vernacular English shares a large portion of its grammar and phonology with the rural dialects of the Southern United States,[10] and especially older Southern American English,[11] due to the historical enslavement of African Americans primarily in that region.
Mainstream linguists maintain that the parallels between AAVE, West African languages, and English-based creole languages are existent but minor,[12][13][14][15] with African-American Vernacular English genealogically tracing back to diverse non-standard dialects of English[16][17] as spoken by the English-speaking settlers in the Southern Colonies and, later, Southern United States.[18] 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.[19][20][21]
Origins
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) may be considered a dialect, ethnolect or sociolect.[22] 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[13][14] (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.[23]
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."[24]
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.[25] According to this theory, these captives first developed what are called pidgins: simplified mixtures of languages.[26] Since pidgins form from close contact between speakers of different languages, the slave trade would have been exactly such a situation.[26] Creolist John Dillard quotes, for example, slave ship captain William Smith describing the sheer diversity of mutually unintelligible languages just in The Gambia.[27] 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.[28] 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:[27] "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.
Grammar
Tense and aspect
Although AAVE does not necessarily have the simple past-tense marker of other English varieties (that is, the -ed of "worked"), it does have an optional tense system with at least four aspects of the past tense and two aspects of the future tense.[66] The term TMA marker is used for forms that are an integral part of the predicate phrase.[67] The markers gon, done, be, and been were defined as markers of future tense, completive aspect, habitual aspect, and durative aspect, respectively. The habitual "be" helps to create emphasis and a state of being. However, these can function together but function separately as well.[67]
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. As statistically shown by Algeo (1991: 3-14),[96] the main sources for new words are combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating.[97] 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.[98] Early AAVE and Gullah contributed a number of words of African origin to the American English mainstream, including gumbo,[99] goober,[100] yam, and banjo.[101]
Compounding in AAVE is a very common method in creating new vocabulary. The most common type of compounding is the noun–noun combination.[102] There is also the adjective–noun combination, which is the second most commonly occurring type of combination found in AAE slang.[103] AAE also combines adjectives with other adjectives, less frequently, but more so than in standard American English.[104]
AAVE has also contributed slang expressions such as cool and hip.[105] In many cases, the postulated etymologies are not recognized by linguists or the Oxford English Dictionary, such as to dig,[106] jazz,[107] tote,[107] and bad-mouth, a calque from Mandinka.[108] African American slang is formed by words and phrases that are regarded as informal. It involves combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating new words. African American slang possess all of the same lexical qualities and linguistic mechanisms as any other language. AAVE slang is more common in speech than it is in writing.[104]
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),[109] possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms; and paddy, an extension of the slang use for "Irish".[110] "Red bone" is another example of this, usually referring to light skinned African Americans.[111]
"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.[112]
Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or seddity means "snobbish" or "bourgeois".[113]
AAVE has also contributed many words and phrases to other varieties of English, including chill out, main squeeze, soul, funky, and threads.[114]
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.[115] 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.[116] In the United States, urban youth participating in hip-hop culture or marginalized as ethnic minorities are also well-studied in adopting African-American Vernacular English, or prominent elements of it: for example, Southeast-Asian Americans embracing hip-hop identities.[117][118]
Variation
Urban versus rural variations
The first studies on the African American English (AAE) took place in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, to name a few.[119] These studies concluded that the African American Language (AAL) was homogeneous, which means that AAE was spoken the same way everywhere around the country.[119] Later, sociolinguists would realize that these cities lacked the influence of the rural south; the early studies had not considered the representation of the south of America, which caused the AAE studies to change.[119] To make those changes, the newer studies used the diversity of the country and took into consideration the rural south.[119]
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.[120] 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).[121] 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.[122]
Local variations
There are at least 10 distinct regional accents in AAVE,[123] and regional patterns of pronunciation and word choice appear on social media.[124][125][126]
Regional variation in AAVE does not pattern with other regional variation in North American English,[127] which broadly follows East-to-West migration patterns,[128] but instead patterns with the population movements during the Great Migration,[129] 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.[130][131]
There is no vowel for which the geographic variation in AAVE patterns with that of White American English.[132]
New York City AAVE incorporates some local features of the New York accent, including its high THOUGHT vowel; meanwhile, conversely, Pittsburgh AAVE may merge this same vowel with the LOT 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 DRESS vowel raising and FACE 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 SQUARE and NURSE, making there sound like thurr.[133][134][135]
Californian AAVE often lacks a cot-caught merger, especially before nasals.[127]