African-American Vernacular English

Variety of American English

African-American Vernacular English

Black Vernacular English
Region| United States
Ethnicity| African Americans

Language family

Indo-European

* Germanic
* West Germanic
* North Sea Germanic
* Anglo-Frisian
* Anglic
* English
* American English
* Older Southern American English
* African-American Vernacular English

Early forms

Proto-Indo-European

* Proto-Germanic
* Old English
* Middle English
* Early Modern English

Dialects|

* Samaná English
* Jive

Writing system

| Latin (English alphabet)
American Braille
Language codes
ISO 639-3| –
Glottolog| `afri1276`
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.
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African Americans

History

|  Periods

* Timeline
* Atlantic slave trade
* Abolitionism in the United States
* Slavery in the colonial history of the US
* Revolutionary War
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* Reconstruction era
* Politicians
* Juneteenth
* Civil rights movement (1865–1896)
* Jim Crow era (1896–1954)
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* Black power movement
* Post–civil rights era

Aspects

* Agriculture history
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* Business history
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* Treatment of the enslaved

Migrations

* Great Migration
* Second Great Migration
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Culture

|  Lifeways

* Dance
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* Film
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* Musical theater
* Names
* Neighborhoods
* Newspapers
* Soul food

Schools

* Education during the slave period in the US
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* Historically black colleges and universities
* Fraternities

Academic study

* Studies
* Art
* Literature

Celebrations

* Martin Luther King Jr. Day
* Black History Month
* Juneteenth
* Kwanzaa

Economic class

* African-American businesses
* Middle class
* Upper class
* Billionaires

Symbols and ideas

* African-American beauty
* Black is beautiful
* Black pride
* African-American hair
* Good hair
* Stepping
* "Lift Every Voice and Sing"
* Self-determination

Religion

|  Institutions

* Black church

Theologies

* Black theology
* Womanist theology

Non-Christian groups

* Hoodoo
* Black Hebrew Israelites
* African-American Jews
* African-American Muslims
* Nation of Islam
* Louisiana Voodoo
* African Diaspora Religions

Politics

|  Organizations

* Congressional Black Caucus
* Joint Center
* National Black Caucus of State Legislators
* National Conference of Black Mayors

Ideologies

* Afrocentrism
* Anarchism
* Back-to-Africa movement
* Black power
* Capitalism
* Conservatism
* Garveyism
* Leftism
* Liberalism
* Nationalism
* Pan-Africanism
* Patriotism
* Populism
* Radicalism
* Socialism

Civic/economic groups

|  Organizations

* Association for the Study of African
American Life and History
* Black conductors
* NAACP
* National Black Chamber of Commerce
* National Council of Negro Women
* National Pan-Hellenic Council
* National Urban League
* TransAfrica
* UNCF

Sports

* Negro league baseball

Athletic associations and conferences

* Central (CIAA)
* HBCU (HBCUAC)
* Mid-Eastern (MEAC)
* Southern (SIAC)
* Southwestern (SWAC)

Sub-communities

|  Multiethnic

* African-American Jews
* Afro-Puerto Ricans
* Alabama Creole people
* Black Indians
* Black Seminoles
* Mascogos
* Blaxicans
* Brass Ankles
* Creoles of color
* Dominickers
* Freedmen
* Great Dismal Swamp maroons
* Louisiana Creoles
* Melungeon
* Carmel
* Redbone

Specific ancestries

* Americo-Liberians
* Creek Freedmen
* Gullah
* Merikins
* Nova Scotians
* Samaná Americans
* Sierra Leone Creole

Sexual orientation

* LGBT community

Dialects and languages

|  English dialects

* African-American English
* African-American Vernacular English
* Liberian English
* Samaná English
* Tutnese

Languages and other dialects

* Gullah
* Afro-Seminole Creole
* Negro Dutch
* Black American Sign Language

Population

|  US states

* Alabama
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* New York
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US cities

* Black mecca
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Historic places

* District of Columbia
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Population count

* US states and territories
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* Places by plurality of population

Diaspora

* Africa
* Canada
* France
* Ghana
* Israel
* Liberia
* Nova Scotia
* Sierra Leone

Prejudice

|  Racism

* Black genocide
* Race and ethnicity in the US census
* Racism against Black Americans
* Reparations for slavery
* School segregation in the US
* Unarmed African Americans killed by police officers

Stereotypes and media depictions

* Blackface
* Criminal stereotypes
* Hollywood
* Magical Negro
* Minstrel show

* United States portal
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* Index

* v
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* e

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 vernacular (non-standard) accent.[5][6] AAVE is widespread throughout the United States, but it is not the native dialect of all African Americans, nor are all of its speakers African American.[7][8][9]

Like most varieties of African-American English, African-American Vernacular English shares a large portion of its grammar and phonology with the regional 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 see only minor parallels between AAVE, West African languages, and English-based creole languages,[12][13][14][15] instead most directly tracing back AAVE to diverse non-standard dialects of English[16][17] as spoken by the English-speaking settlers in the Southern Colonies and later the 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 a creole or semi-creole language, distinct from the English language, before undergoing decreolization.[19][20][c]

## Origins

[edit]

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) may be considered a dialect, ethnolect, and sociolect.[21] 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 populated 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.[22]

Linguist John McWhorter maintains that the contribution of West African languages to AAVE is minimal. McWhorter has 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."[23]

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.[24] According to this theory, these captives first developed pidgins or simplified mixtures of languages.[25] Because pidgins form from close contact between speakers of different languages, the slave trade would have been exactly such a situation.[25] Creolist John Dillard quotes, for example, slave ship captain William Smith describing the sheer diversity of mutually unintelligible languages just in The Gambia.[26] 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.[27] 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:[26] "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.[citation needed]

## Phonology

[edit]

Speech example

An example of a man from northern Ohio with an AAVE accent (Bobby Womack).

* * *

Problems playing this file? See media help.

Speech example

An example of a man from New York City with an AAVE accent (Eric Adams).

* * *

Problems playing this file? See media help.

Speech example

An example of two men with AAVE accents, the interviewer from Georgia (D. J. Shockley) and the interviewee from Louisiana (Russell Gage).

* * *

Problems playing this file? See media help.

Many pronunciation features 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.[28] 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.[29] The following are phonological differences in AAVE vowel and consonant sounds.

Final consonant groups or clusters in AAVE have been examined as evidence of the systematic nature of this language variety, governed by specific rules. These analyses have been utilized to bolster arguments concerning the historical origins of AAVE.[30] Consonant cluster reduction is a phonological process where a final consonant group or cluster, consisting of two adjacent consonant sounds, is simplified or reduced to a single consonant sound. The analysis of consonant cluster reduction in AAVE assumes that, initially, final clusters are present and intact in the language. For example, the word "tes" in AAVE originates from "test", with the final "t" of the "st" consonant cluster being deleted in word-final position.

### Vowels

[edit]

All AAVE vowels  Pure vowels (monophthongs)

English diaphoneme | AAVE phoneme[31] | Example words
/æ/ | [æ~ɛː~ɛə] | act, pal, trap
[ɛː~ɛə~eə] (/æ/ raising)  | ham, land, yeah
/ɑː/ | [a~ɑ̈~ɑ] | blah, bother, father,
lot, top, wasp
/ɒ/
[ɒ(ɔ)~ɔ(ʊ)] | all, dog, bought,
loss, saw, taught
/ɔː/
/ɛ/ | [ɛ~eə] | dress, met, bread
/ə/ | [ə] | about, syrup, arena
/ɪ/ | [ɪ~iə] | hit, skim, tip
/iː/ | [i] | beam, chic, fleet
/ʌ/ | [ʌ~ɜ] | bus, flood, what
/ʊ/ | [ʊ~ɵ~ø̞] | book, put, should
/uː/ | [ʊu~u] | food, glue, new
Diphthongs
/aɪ/ | [äe~äː~aː] | prize, slide, tie
[äɪ] (Canadian raising[dubious - discuss])  | price, slice, tyke
/aʊ/ | [æɔ~æə] | now, ouch, scout
/eɪ/ | [eɪ~ɛɪ] | lake, paid, rein
/ɔɪ/ | [oɪ] | boy, choice, moist
/oʊ/ | [ʌʊ~ɔʊ] | goat, oh, show
R-colored vowels
/ɑːr/ | non-rhotic: [ɑ~ɒ]
rhotic: [ɑɹ~ɒɹ] | barn, car, heart
/ɛər/ | non-rhotic: [ɛə]
rhotic: [ɛɹ] | bare, bear, there
/ɜːr/ | [ɚ] | burn, first, herd
/ər/ | non-rhotic: [ə]
rhotic: [ɚ] | better, martyr, doctor
/ɪər/ | non-rhotic: [iə~iɤ]
rhotic: [iɹ] | fear, peer, tier
/ɔːr/ | non-rhotic: [oə~ɔə~ɔo]
rhotic: [oɹ] | hoarse, horse, poor
score, tour, war
/ʊər/
/jʊər/ | non-rhotic: [juə~jʊə]
rhotic: [juɹ~jʊɹ] | cure, Europe, pure

* Cot-caught merger: AAVE accents have traditionally resisted the cot-caught merger spreading nationwide, with LOT pronounced [ɑ̈] and THOUGHT traditionally pronounced [ɒɔ], though now often [ɒ] or [ɔə], with the latter pronunciation most prominent in the Northeastern U.S.[32] However, there is evidence of AAVE speakers exhibiting the cot-caught merger in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania;[33] Charleston, South Carolina;[34] Florida and Georgia;[35] and in parts of California.[35]
* African American Vowel Shift: Early 2000s research has shown that the resistance to the cot-caught merger may continue to be reinforced by the fronting of LOT, linked through a chain shift of vowels to the raising of the TRAP, DRESS, and perhaps KIT vowels. This chain shift of vowels is called the "African American Shift".[36] However, this shift is not universal to all AAVE speakers; it is mostly exhibited by speakers who live in all the states along the Mississippi River and in North Carolina.[32]
* Reduction of certain diphthong[37] forms to monophthongs, in particular, the PRICE vowel /aɪ/ is monophthongized to [aː] except before voiceless consonants (this is also found in most White Southern dialects). The vowel sound in CHOICE (/ɔɪ/ in General American) is also monophthongized, especially before /l/, making boil indistinguishable from ball.[38]
* Pin–pen merger: Before nasal consonants (/m/, /n/, and /ŋ/), DRESS /ɛ/ and KIT /ɪ/ are both pronounced like [ɪ~ɪə], making pen and pin homophones.[38] This is also present in other dialects, particularly of the South. The pin-pen merger is not universal in AAVE, and there is evidence for unmerged speakers in California, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.[39][40][41]
* The distinction between the KIT /ɪ/ and FLEECE /i/ vowels before liquid consonants is frequently reduced or absent, making feel and fill homophones (fill–feel merger). /ʊər/ and /ɔːr/ also merge, making poor and pour homophones (cure–force merger).[38]

### Consonants

[edit]

* Word-final devoicing of /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/, whereby, for example, cub sounds similar to cup,[42] though these words may retain the longer vowel pronunciations that typically precede voiced consonants, and devoicing may be realized with debuccalization (where /d/ is realized as [.], for instance).[43][44]
* AAVE speakers may not use the fricatives [θ] (the th in "thin") and [ð] (the th of "then") that are present in other varieties of English. The phoneme's position in a word determines its exact sound.[45]
* Word-initially, /θ/ is normally the same as in other English dialects (so thin is [θɪn]); in other situations, it may move forward in the mouth to /f/ (Th-fronting).
* Word-initially, /ð/ is [ð~d] (so this may be [dɪs]). In other situations, /ð/ may move forward to /v/.
* Realization of final ng /ŋ/, the velar nasal, as the alveolar nasal [n] (assibilation, alveolarization) in function morphemes and content morphemes with two or more syllables like -ing, e.g. tripping /ˈtrɪpɪŋ/ is pronounced as [ˈtɹɪpɨn] (trippin) instead of the standard [ˈtɹɪpɪŋ]. This change does not occur in one-syllable content morphemes such as sing, which is [sɪŋ] and not *[sɪn]. However, singing is [ˈsɪŋɨn]. Other examples include wedding → [ˈwɛɾɨn], morning → [ˈmo(ɹ)nɨn], nothing → [ˈnʌfɨn]. Realization of /ŋ/ as [n] in these contexts is commonly found in many other English dialects.[46]
* A marked feature of AAVE is final consonant cluster reduction.[30] This is a process by which the pronunciations of consonant clusters at the end of certain words are reduced to pronouncing only the first consonant of that cluster.[47] There are several phenomena that are similar but 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.[48][47]
* Final consonant clusters that are homorganic (have the same place of articulation) and share the same voicing are reduced.[48][49] For instance, test is pronounced [tɛs] since /t/ and /s/ are both voiceless; hand is pronounced [hæn] (alternatively [hæ̃] or [hɛən]), since /n/ and /d/ are both voiced; but pant is unchanged, as it contains both a voiced and a voiceless consonant in the cluster.[30][50] It is the plosive (/t/ and /d/) in these examples that is lost rather than the fricative; the nasal is also either preserved completely or lost with preservation of nasality on the preceding consonant.[51] Speakers may carry this declustered pronunciation when pluralizing so that the plural of test is [ˈtɛsɨs] rather than [tɛsts].[52] The clusters /ft/, /md/ are also affected.[53]
* More often, word-final /sp/, /st/, and /sk/ are reduced, again with the final element being deleted rather than the former.[54]
* For younger speakers, /skr/ also occurs in words where other varieties of English would have /str/ instead. As a result, for example, street is pronounced [skɹit].[37]
* Clusters ending in /s/ or /z/ exhibit variation in whether the first or second element is deleted.[55]
* 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. 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.[56]
* Use of metathesized forms like aks for "ask"[57] or graps for "grasp".
* General non-rhotic behavior, in which the rhotic consonant /r/ is typically dropped when not followed by a vowel; it may also manifest as an unstressed [ə] or the lengthening of the preceding vowel.[58] Intervocalic /r/ may also be dropped, e.g., General American story ([ˈstɔɹi]) can be pronounced [ˈstɔ.i], though this doesn't occur across morpheme boundaries.[59] /r/ may also be deleted between a consonant and a back rounded vowel, especially in words like throw, throat, and through.[60]
* The level of AAVE rhoticity is likely somewhat correlated with the rhoticity of White speakers in a given region; in 1960s research, AAVE accents tended to be mostly non-rhotic in Detroit, whose White speakers are rhotic, but completely non-rhotic in New York City, whose White speakers are also often non-rhotic.[61]
* /l/ is often vocalized in patterns similar to that of /r/ (though never between vowels)[62] 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].[63]

### "Deep" phonology

[edit]

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.[64] McWhorter regards the following features as rarer and characteristic of only deep Black English, though speakers of light Black English may occasionally "dip into for humorous or emotive effect":[28]

* Lowering of /ɪ/ before /ŋ/, causing pronunciations such as [θɛŋ~θæŋ] for thing (sounding something like thang).[37]
* Word-medially and word-finally, pronouncing /θ/ as [f] (so [mʌmf] for month and [mæɔf] for mouth), and /ð/ as [v] (so [smuv] for smooth and [ˈɹævə(ɹ)] for rather.[65] This is called th-fronting. Word-initially, /ð/ is [d] (so those and doze sound nearly identical). This is called th-stopping. In other words, the tongue fully touches the top teeth.
* Glide deletion (monophthongization) of all instances of /aɪ/, universally, resulting in [aː~äː] (so that, for example, even rice may sound like rahss).
* Full gliding (diphthongization) of /ɪ/, resulting in [iə] (so that win may sound like wee-un).
* Raising and fronting of the vowel /ʌ/ of words like strut, mud, tough, etc. to something like [ɜ~ə].

## Grammar

[edit]

### Tense and aspect

[edit]

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 dialect uses several tense–aspect–mood markers integrated into the predicate phrase,[67] including gon or gonna (future tense), done (completive aspect), be (habitual aspect, state of being), and been (durative aspect). These can function separately or in conjunction.[67]

Linguist Charles E. DeBose notes that these markers form part of a broader and systematic tense, modality, and aspect (TMA) grammar in AAVE, in which native speakers distinguish between nuanced temporal categories—such as remote versus recent past—through constructions like BIN (e.g., "He BIN left") to indicate a long-completed action that remains relevant.[68]

Phases/tenses of AAVE[69] Phase  | Example

|

Past  | Pre-recent  | I been bought it
Recent  | I done bought it a
Pre-present  | I did buy it
Past inceptive  | I do buy it
Present  | I be buying it
Future  | Immediate  | I'ma buy it b
Post-immediate  | I'ma gonna buy it b
Indefinite future  | I gonna buy it

^a Syntactically, I bought it is grammatical, but done (always unstressed, pronounced as /dən/) is used to emphasize the completed nature of the action.[70]

^b I'ma, also commonly spelled Imma, is pronounced as /ˈaɪmə/.[71] Harvard professor Sunn m'Cheaux claims I'ma originated in the Gullah language (an English creole), which uses "a-" instead of "-ing" for this type of verb inflection.[72] Alternatively, other sources suggest it is a further shortening of I'm gonna.[73]

As phase auxiliary verbs, been and done must occur as the first auxiliary; when they occur as the second, they carry additional aspects:[69]

He been done working means "he finished work a long time ago".
He done been working means "until recently, he worked over a long period of time".

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.[74]

This aspect-marking form of been or BIN[75] 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').[76][77] This aspect has been given several names, including perfect phase, remote past, and remote phase (this article uses the third).[78] As shown above, been places action in the distant past.[79] 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. 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.[78]

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 buying her clothes means "I've been buying her clothes for a long time".

Auxiliaries in African American Vernacular English are related in a typical pattern. They can be grouped into negative forms and affirmative forms for each of the words. For example, "had" is an affirmative form, while "hatn" is the corresponding negative form. These same auxiliaries can be used to mark sentences for the anterior aspect. As another example, was marks type 1 sentences, which by default are present tense, and transforms them to a time before the present. Take, for instance, "She at home": the word was can be inserted to mark this sentence, making the marked equivalent "She was at home". Auxiliaries such as these also have opposing negative and affirmative forms. In its negative form the auxiliary verb "wadn" is used to convey the opposing affirmative form.[67]

AAVE grammatical aspects  Aspect  | Example  | Standard English meaning

|
|

Habitual/continuative aspect[80] | He be working Tuesdays.  | He frequently (or habitually) works on Tuesdays.
Intensified continuative (habitual)  | He stay working.  | He is always working.
Intensified continuative (not habitual)[81] | He steady working.  | He keeps on working.
Perfect progressive  | He been working.  | He has been working.
Irrealis (Mood)  | He finna go to work.  | He is about to go to work.a

* ^a Finna corresponds to "fixing to" in other varieties.[82] It is also written fixina, fixna, fitna, and finta.[83]

In addition to these, come (which may or may not be an auxiliary[84]) 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").[85]

The irrealis[86] mood marker be, having no intrinsic tense refers to a current or future event that may be less than real.

Modals

The dialect uses double modals, such as might could, which can function in various ways, including as adverbs.[87][88]

### Negation

[edit]

Negatives are formed differently from most other varieties of English:[89]

* Use of ain't as a general negative marker. As in other English dialects, it can be used instead of am not, isn't, aren't, haven't, and hasn't. However, some speakers of AAVE distinctively use ain't instead of don't, doesn't, or didn't (e.g., I ain't know that).[90] Ain't had its origins in common English but became increasingly stigmatized since the 19th century (see also: English auxiliary verbs § Amn't).
* Double negation, as in I didn't go nowhere. If the sentence is negative, all negatable forms are negated. This contrasts with standard written English convention, which interprets a double negative to mean a positive (although this was not always so; see double negative).[91] There is no limit to how many negators can be used.[30]
* 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 nothing going on.)

While AAVE shares these with Creole languages,[92] early recordings of African Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and recordings of former slaves indicate that negation was likely inherited from nonstandard colonial English.[89]

### Other grammatical characteristics

[edit]

* The copula be in the present tense is often dropped, as in Russian, Hungarian, Arabic, and other languages. For example: You crazy ("You're crazy") or She my sister ("She's my sister"). This extends to questions: Who you? ("Who're you?") and Where you at? ("Where are you (at)?"). This has been sometimes considered a Southern U.S. regionalism, though it is most frequent in Black speech.[93] On the other hand, is can be included for emphasis: Yes, she is my sister. The general rules are:
* Only the forms is and are (often replaced by is) can be omitted; am, was, and were are not deleted.
* These forms cannot be omitted when they would be pronounced with stress in Standard American (whether or not the stress serves specifically to impart an emphatic sense to the verb's meaning).
* These forms can be omitted only when the corresponding form in standard English can be contracted. For example, I don't know where he is cannot be reduced to *I don't know where he, and correspondingly Standard English forbids the contraction *I don't know where he's. Compare the acceptable forms I don't know where he at in AAVE, paralleling I don't know where he's at in Standard English.[94]
* Verbs are uninflected for number and person: there is no -s ending in the present-tense third-person singular. Example: She write poetry ("She writes poetry"). AAVE don't for standard English doesn't comes from this, unlike in some other dialects which use don't for standard English doesn't but does when not in the negative. Similarly, AAVE was is used for standard English was and were.[95]
* The genitive -'s ending indicating possession may or may not be used.[96] Instead, genitive case is inferrable from adjacency. This feature is similar to many Caribbean creoles. 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 existence of something, equivalent to standard English's there is or there are.[97]
* Word order in questions: Why they ain't growing? ("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 most other forms of English. Because of this, there is also no need for the auxiliary do.[98]
* Relative clauses do not require a relative pronoun when they modify a noun in the object or in the predicate nominative position.[99]

## Vocabulary

[edit]

AAVE shares most of its lexicon with other varieties of English, particularly that of informal and Southern dialects, such as, the relatively recent use of y'all. The main sources for new words are combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating.[100][101] It has also been suggested that some of the vocabulary unique to AAVE has its origin in West African languages. However, etymology is often difficult to trace and, without a trail of recorded usage, these proposed origins cannot be considered proven.[102]

Early AAVE and Gullah contributed a number of words of African origin to the American English mainstream, including gumbo,[103] goober,[104] yam, and banjo.[105]

Compounding in AAVE is a very common method in creating new vocabulary. The most common type of compounding is the noun–noun combination[106], followed by adjective–noun combination.[107] AAVE also combines adjectives with other adjectives less frequently, but more often than in standard American English.[108]

AAVE has also contributed slang expressions such as cool and hip.[109] In many cases, the proposed etymologies are not recognized by linguists or the Oxford English Dictionary, such as to dig,[110] jazz,[111] tote,[111] and bad-mouth, a calque from Mandinka.[112] African American slang is formed by combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing words and phrases that are regarded as informal.[108]

AAVE also has words that either are not found in other American English dialects or that 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),[107] possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms; and paddy, an extension of the slang use for "Irish".[113] "Red bone" is another example of this, usually referring to light-skinned African Americans.[114]

"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.[115]

Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or seddity means "snobbish" or "bourgeois".[116]

AAVE has also contributed many words and phrases to other varieties of English, including chill out, main squeeze, soul, funky, and threads.[117]

## Influence on other dialects

[edit]

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.[118] 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.[119] In the United States, urban youth participating in hip-hop culture or marginalized as ethnic minorities may also adopt AAVE, or prominent elements of it: for example, Southeast-Asian Americans embracing hip-hop identities.[120][121]

Internet slang has borrowed heavily from AAVE, which has often been characterized as cultural appropriation.[122][123][124] The term blaccent broadly refers to the accent associated with AAVE, but more often refers to the use of AAVE by non-black speakers.[125]

## Variation

[edit]

### Urban versus rural variations

[edit]

Early research on African-American Vernacular English took place in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.[126] These studies concluded that AAVE was linguistically homogenous, or spoken roughly the same way everywhere around the country.[126] Later sociolinguists found that these cities lacked the influence of the rural South and that earlier studies had not considered the representation of the Southern United States.[126]

While AAVE began as mostly rural and Southern, today it is mostly urban and nationally widespread. Its more recent urban features are now diffusing back into rural areas.[87] 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).[127] Use of the word bees in place of be to mean is or are in standard English, as in the sentence "That's the way it bees", is one of the rarest of all deep AAVE features today. Most middle-class AAVE speakers would recognize the verb bees as part of only a deep "Southern" or "country" speaker's vocabulary.[128]

### Local variations

[edit]

There are at least 10 distinct regional accents in AAVE.[129]. Regional variation in AAVE does not pattern with other regional variation in North American English,[130] which broadly follows East-to-West migration patterns,[131] but instead patterns with the population movements during the Great Migration,[132] 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.[133][134]

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.[135][136][137] Californian AAVE often lacks a cot-caught merger, especially before nasals.[130] Regional patterns of pronunciation and word choice are also apparent on social media.[138][139][140]

There is general uniformity of AAVE grammar, despite its vast geographic spread across the whole country.[141] This may be due in part to relatively recent migrations of some African Americans out of the American South (see Great Migration and Second Great Migration) as well as to long-term racial segregation that kept these speakers living together in largely homogeneous communities.[142]

## Social perception and context

[edit]

Main article: African-American Vernacular English and social context

African-American Vernacular suffers from persistent stigma and negative social evaluation in American culture. By definition, as a vernacular dialect of English, AAVE has not received the social prestige of a standard dialect, leading to widespread and long-standing misconceptions that it is a grammatically inferior form of English, which linguistics research of the twentieth century has debunked. However, educators and social commentators traditionally have advocated for eliminating AAVE usage through the public education system for a variety of reasons, ranging from a continued belief that AAVE is intrinsically deficient to arguments that its use, by being stigmatized in certain social contexts, is socially limiting.[143] Some of the harshest criticism of AAVE or its use has come from African Americans themselves.[144][145][146] A conspicuous example was the "Pound Cake speech", in which Bill Cosby criticized some African Americans for various social behaviors, including the way they talked.

Educators traditionally have attempted to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system, perceiving the dialect as grammatically defective.[143] 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.[147] Mainstream linguistics has long agreed with this view about dialects.[148] 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."[149] 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.[150]

## See also

[edit]

* United States portal
* Languages portal
* English language portal
* Africa portal

* Africanisms
* African American English
* Glossary of jive talk
* Gullah language
* Is-leveling
* Languages of the United States
* North American English regional phonology
* Northern Subject Rule
* Brittonicisms in English

## Notes

[edit]

1. ^ Also known as Black English, Black Vernacular English, Black English Vernacular, African-American English, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term).[1]
2. ^ AAVE is pronounced as an initialism ("A-A-V-E"), /ˈɑːveɪ/, or /æv/.[2][3]
3. ^ Linguists in favor of the "creole hypothesis" of African-American Vernacular English include creolists William Stewart, John Dillard, and John Rickford.

## References

[edit]

1. ^ For the reasons that linguists avoid using the term Ebonics, see for example Green (2002:7–8).
2. ^ Tamasi, Susan; Antieau, Lamont (2015). Language and Linguistic Diversity in the US: An Introduction. Routledge. p. 146\. ISBN 978-0-415-80667-1.
3. ^ Gordon, Matthew J. (2013). Labov: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury. p. 215\. ISBN 978-1-4411-5852-9.
4. ^ Edwards (2004), p. 383.
5. ^ Rickford (2015), pp. 302, 310.
6. ^ Spears (2015).
7. ^ Wheeler (1999), p. 55.
8. ^ "Do you speak American?: African American English". PBS.
9. ^ Benor, Sarah Bunin (April 19, 2010). "Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity". Journal of Sociolinguistics. 14 (2): 159–183\. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9841.2010.00440.x.
10. ^ McWhorter (2001), p. 179.
11. ^ Thomas (2006), pp. 16, 19–20.
12. ^ Wardhaugh (2002), p. 341.
13. ^ a b Poplack (2000), p. ?.
14. ^ a b Poplack & Tagliamonte (2001), p. ?.
15. ^ See Howe & Walker (2000) for more information
16. ^ The Oakland school board's resolution "was about a perfectly ordinary variety of English spoken by a large and diverse population of Americans of African descent. . . . [E]ssentially all linguists agree that what the Oakland board was dealing with is a dialect of English."Pullum (1997)
17. ^ McWhorter (2001), pp. 162, 185.
18. ^ McWhorter (2001), pp. 162, 182.
19. ^ Mufwene (2001:29) and Bailey (2001:55), both citing Stewart (1964), Stewart (1969), Dillard (1972), and Rickford (1997a).
20. ^ Smith & Crozier (1998), pp. 113–114.
21. ^ Green (2002), pp. 1–11, 'Introduction'.
22. ^ William Labov, in the Foreword to Poplack & Tagliamonte (2001), says "I would like to think that this clear demonstration of the similarities among the three diaspora dialects and the White benchmark dialects, combined with their differences from creole grammars, would close at least one chapter in the history of the creole controversies."
23. ^ Ludden, Jennifer (September 6, 2010). "Op-Ed: DEA Call For Ebonics Experts Smart Move" Archived 2018-01-08 at the Wayback Machine. NPR.
24. ^ Wolfram (1998), p. 112.
25. ^ a b Bloomquist, Green & Lanehart (2015).
26. ^ a b Dillard (1972), p. ??.
27. ^ Read (1939), p. 247.
28. ^ a b McWhorter (2001), pp. 146–7.
29. ^ Green (2002), p. 131.
30. ^ a b c d Green, Lisa J. (2012). African American English: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81449-2. OCLC 900606048.
31. ^ Heggarty, Paul; et al., eds. (2013). "Accents of English from Around the World". University of Edinburgh. Archived from the original on April 26, 2016. Retrieved January 7, 2018. See pronunciation for "Chicago AAVE" and "N.Carolina AAVE."
32. ^ a b Jones (2020), p. 255.
33. ^ Eberhardt (2008).
34. ^ Baranowski (2013).
35. ^ a b Jones (2020), p. 165.
36. ^ Thomas, Erik R. (September 2007). "Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English: Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of AAVE". Language and Linguistics Compass. 1 (5): 450–475\. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00029.x.
37. ^ a b c Green (2002), p. 123.
38. ^ a b c Labov (1972), p. 19.
39. ^ King, Sharese (December 1, 2016). "On Negotiating Racial and Regional Identities: Vocalic Variation Among African Americans in Bakersfield, California". University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. 22 (2).
40. ^ Jones, Taylor; Kalbfeld, Jessica Rose; Hancock, Ryan; Clark, Robin (2019). "Testifying while black: An experimental study of court reporter accuracy in transcription of African American English". Language. 95 (2): e216 – e252. doi:10.1353/lan.2019.0042. S2CID 198787228. Project MUSE 727848.
41. ^ Jones (2020).
42. ^ Green (2002), p. 116.
43. ^ Bailey & Thomas (1998:89), citing Wolfram (1994)
44. ^ Farrington, Charlie (October 2018). "Incomplete neutralization in African American English: The case of final consonant voicing". Language Variation and Change. 30 (3): 361–383\. doi:10.1017/S0954394518000145. S2CID 149592143.
45. ^ Green (2002), pp. 117–119.
46. ^ Green (2002:121–122) although her examples are different.
47. ^ a b Green (2002), p. 107.
48. ^ a b Bloomquist, Jennifer; Green, Lisa J.; Lanehart, Sonja L.; Thomas, Erik R.; Bailey, Guy (July 1, 2015), "Segmental Phonology of African American English", The Oxford Handbook of African American Language, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199795390.013.13, ISBN 978-0-19-979539-0
49. ^ Green, Lisa (September 23, 2021), "Aspect and predicate phrases in African-American vernacular English", African-American English, London: Routledge, p. 109, doi:10.4324/9781003165330-3, ISBN 978-1-003-16533-0, S2CID 244227668
50. ^ Rickford (1997b), p. ??.
51. ^ "Phonological Features of African American Vernacular English". www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca. Retrieved August 30, 2020.
52. ^ Green (2002), pp. 107–116.
53. ^ Labov (1972), p. 15.
54. ^ Labov (1972), pp. 15–16.
55. ^ Labov (1972), pp. 17–18.
56. ^ Labov (1972), pp. 18–19.
57. ^ See Baugh (2000:92–94) on "aks" and metathesis, on the frequency with which "aks" is brought up by those who ridicule AAVE (e.g. Cosby (1997)), and on the linguistic or cognitive abilities of a speaker of another variety of English who would take "aks" to mean "axe" in a context that in another variety would probably call for "ask".
58. ^ Green (2002), pp. 119–121.
59. ^ Green (2002:121), citing Wolfram & Fasold (1974:140)
60. ^ Labov (1972), p. 14.
61. ^ Wolfram, Walt; Kohn, Mary E. (forthcoming). "The regional development of African American Language Archived 2018-11-06 at the Wayback Machine". In Sonja Lanehart, Lisa Green, and Jennifer Bloomquist (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on African American Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 147.
62. ^ Green (2002), p. 121.
63. ^ Labov (1972), pp. 14–15.
64. ^ McWhorter (2001), pp. 146.
65. ^ McWhorter (2001), pp. 148.
66. ^ Fickett (1972), pp. 17–18.
67. ^ a b c DeBose, Charles E. (July 1, 2015). "The Systematic Marking of Tense, Modality, and Aspect in African American Language". The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199795390.013.18. ISBN 978-0-19-979539-0. Retrieved June 17, 2022.
68. ^ DeBose, Charles E. (2015). "The Systematic Marking of Tense, Modality, and Aspect in African American Language." In Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. Oxford University Press. pp. 371–373. ISBN 978-0199795390.
69. ^ a b Fickett (1972), p. 19.
70. ^ Green (2002), pp. 60–62.
71. ^ Scott, Candice L. (2016). "Tense & Aspect Markers in African American English". University of Michigan Dissertation Papers. p. 94.
72. ^ Ciku Theuri (February 17, 2023). "The evolution of Black American English". WBUR.
73. ^ Scott, 2016, pp. 86, 94.
74. ^ Aspectual be: Green (2002:47–54)
75. ^ In order to distinguish the stressed and unstressed forms, which carry different meaning, linguists often write the stressed version as BIN
76. ^ Green (2002), pp. 54–55.
77. ^ "Stressed BIN (been) | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America". ygdp.yale.edu. Retrieved June 14, 2022.
78. ^ a b Rickford (1999), p. ??.
79. ^ Debose, Charles (2015). Oxford Handbook of African American Language (1st ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 371–386\. ISBN 978-0-19-979539-0.
80. ^ Fickett (1972:17) refers to this as a combination of "punctuative" and "imperfect" aspects.
81. ^ Green (2002), pp. 71–72.
82. ^ Green (2002), p. 71.
83. ^ Green (2002:70–71), citing DeBose & Faraclas (1993).
84. ^ See Spears (1982:850)
85. ^ Green (2002), pp. 73–74.
86. ^ Labov, William (2013). "Co-existent Systems In African-American English". The Structure of African American English: 110–153 - via Research Gate.
87. ^ a b Wolfram, Walt (2004). "The Grammar of Urban African American Vernacular English". In Handbook of Varieties of English, edited by Bernd Kortmann and Edgar Schneider. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 334.
88. ^ Coats, S. (2024). Naturalistic double modals in North America. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 99(1), 47–77. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9766889
89. ^ a b Howe & Walker (2000), p. 110.
90. ^ Labov (1972), p. 284.
91. ^ Green 2002.
92. ^ Winford (1992), p. 350.
93. ^ Labov (1972), p. 8.
94. ^ Geoff Pullum (October 17, 1998). "Why Ebonics Is No Joke". Lingua Franca (transcript). Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on February 9, 2010. Retrieved May 1, 2014.
95. ^ Green (2002), p. 38.
96. ^ Green (2002), pp. 102–103.
97. ^ Green (2002), p. 80.
98. ^ Green (2002), pp. 84–89.
99. ^ Green (2002), pp. 89–91.
100. ^ Cassidy, Frederic G.; Algeo, John (June 1993). "Fifty Years among the New Words: A Dictionary of Neologisms, 1941-1991". Language. 69 (2): 397. doi:10.2307/416548. ISSN 0097-8507. JSTOR 416548.
101. ^ Widawski, Maciej (2019). African American slang: a linguistic description. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-42440-1. OCLC 1090422253.
102. ^ Widawski, Maciej (2016). African American Slang: A Linguistic Description (1st ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. pp. 19–64\. ISBN 978-1-107-07417-0.
103. ^ Shorter OED, 5th edition, cf Bantu kingumbo
104. ^ Shorter OED, 5th edition, Kikongo nguba
105. ^ Nagle, S., & Sanders, S. (Eds.). (2003). English in the Southern United States (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 12.
106. ^ Widawski, Maciej (2015). African American Slang - A Linguistic Description. Cambridge University Press. p. 20\. ISBN 978-1-316-24061-8.
107. ^ a b Widawski, Maciej (March 5, 2015). African American Slang: A Linguistic Description. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-316-24061-8.
108. ^ a b Widawski, Maciej (2015), "Introduction", African American Slang, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. ix–xii, doi:10.1017/cbo9781139696562.001, ISBN 978-1-139-69656-2
109. ^ Guralnik (1984), p. ?.
110. ^ This is from Wolof dëgg or dëgga, meaning "to understand/appreciate" according to Smitherman 2000 s.v. "Dig"; or, it may instead come from Irish tuig, according to Random House Unabridged, 2001
111. ^ a b Rickford & Rickford (2000), p. 146.
112. ^ Smitherman (1977) cited in Rickford & Rickford (2000:240).
113. ^ Gray: Smitherman, Black Talk, s.v. "Gray". Paddy: Dictionary of American Regional English, s.v. "Paddy".
114. ^ Widawski, Maciej (2015). African American slang: a linguistic description. Cambridge, United Kingdom. ISBN 978-1-107-07417-0. OCLC 885547585.`{{cite book}}`: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
115. ^ Smitherman (2000) suggests either a general West African or the Pig Latin origin. Black Talk, s.v. "Ofay".
116. ^ Smitherman (2000), s.v. "Kitchen". Kitchen, siditty: Dictionary of American Regional English, s.vv. "Kitchen", "Siditty".
117. ^ Lee (1999), pp. 381–386.
118. ^ Blake, Shousterman & Newlin-Łukowicz (2015), pp. 284–285.
119. ^ Singler, John Victor (2004). Liberian Settler English: phonology. In Edgar W. Schneider, Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie & Clive Upton (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English: Phonology. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 875-876.
120. ^ Reyes, Angela (2007). Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
121. ^ Reyes, Angela (November 2005). "Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth". Journal of Sociolinguistics. 9 (4): 509–532\. doi:10.1111/j.1360-6441.2005.00304.x.
122. ^ Thompson, Sydnee (September 7, 2021). "So Much Modern Slang Is AAVE. Here's How Language Appropriation Erases The Influence Of Black Culture". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved June 25, 2025.
123. ^ "Is It Gen Z Slang Or AAVE?". Axis. May 17, 2021. Retrieved June 25, 2025.
124. ^ Shammet, Tagwa (February 18, 2021). "AAVE is not your internet slang. It is Black culture". The Commonwealth Times. Retrieved June 25, 2025.
125. ^ Bainbridge, Danielle (April 11, 2022). "What Is Blaccent And Why Do People Keep Using It?". Historian's Take. Episode 1. PBS. Retrieved August 5, 2025.
126. ^ a b c Bloomquist, Green & Lanehart (2015), pp. 140–159.
127. ^ Wolfram, Walt (2004). "Urban African American Vernacular English: morphology and syntax". In Handbook of Varieties of English, edited by Bernd Kortmann and Edgar Schneider. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 335-336.
128. ^ McWhorter (2001), pp. 146–147.
129. ^ Jones (2020), p. 263.
130. ^ a b Jones (2020), p. 225.
131. ^ Jones (2020), p. 35.
132. ^ Jones (2020), p. 253.
133. ^ Jones (2020), p. 264.
134. ^ Farrington, Charles (September 18, 2019). Language Variation and the Great Migration: Regionality and African American Language (Thesis). hdl:1794/24866.
135. ^ Wolfram, Walt; Kohn, Mary E. (forthcoming). "The regional development of African American Language Archived 2018-11-06 at the Wayback Machine". In Sonja Lanehart, Lisa Green, and Jennifer Bloomquist (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on African American Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 149-151.
136. ^ Hinton, Linette N.; Pollock, Karen E. (2003). "Regional Variations in the Phonological Characteristics of African American Vernacular English". World Englishes. 19 (1): 59–71\. doi:10.1111/1467-971X.00155. ISSN 0883-2919.
137. ^ Thomas, Erik R. (2007). "Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English: Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of AAVE". Language and Linguistics Compass. 1 (5): 450–475\. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00029.x.
138. ^ Jones, Taylor (November 2015). "Toward a Description of African American Vernacular English Dialect Regions Using 'Black Twitter'". American Speech. 90 (4): 403–440\. doi:10.1215/00031283-3442117.
139. ^ Jones, Taylor (2016). "Tweets as graffiti: What the reconstruction of Vulgar Latin can tell us about Black Twitter". In Squires, Lauren (ed.). English in Computer-Mediated Communication. pp. 43–68\. doi:10.1515/9783110490817-004. ISBN 978-3-11-049081-7.
140. ^ Austen, Martha (August 1, 2017). "Put the Groceries Up". American Speech. 92 (3): 298–320\. doi:10.1215/00031283-4312064.
141. ^ Labov (2001), pp. 506–508.
142. ^ Wardhaugh (2002), p. 339.
143. ^ a b Wardhaugh (2002), pp. 343–348.
144. ^ Lippi-Green (1997), p. 200.
145. ^ Lanehart (2001), p. 6.
146. ^ "Black critics [of Black English] use all the different arguments of the White critics, and spare us the more or less open embarrassment that all White Americans feel when publicly criticizing anything or anyone Black. So, of course, they can be even more wrong-headed and self-righteously wrong-headed than anyone else ..." Quinn (1982:150–51).
147. ^ Smitherman (1999), p. 357.
148. ^ McWhorter (2001).
149. ^ Flood, J., Jensen, J., Lapp, D., Squire, J. (1991). Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company.
150. ^ Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent (Second ed.). Routledge. pp. 304–321.

### Bibliography

[edit]

* Artiles, Alfredo J.; Trent, Stanley C. (1994), "Overrepresentation of minority students in special education: a continuing debate", The Journal of Special Education, 24: 410–437, doi:10.1177/002246699402700404, S2CID 146535428
* Bailey, Guy (2001), "The relationship between African American Vernacular English and White Vernaculars in the American South: A sociocultural history and some phonological evidence", in Lanehart, Sonja (ed.), Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, Varieties of English Around the World, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 53–92, doi:10.1075/veaw.g27.08bai, ISBN 978-90-272-4885-5
* Bailey, Guy; Thomas, Erik (1998), "Some aspects of African-American Vernacular English phonology", in Mufwene, Salikoko; Rickford, John R.; Bailey, Guy; Baugh, John (eds.), African-American English: Structure, History, and Use, London: Routledge, pp. 85–109, doi:10.4324/9780203355596-13, ISBN 978-0-203-35559-6
* Baker, Houston A. Jr. (1984), Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: a Vernacular Theory, University of Chicago Press, doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226160849.001.0001, ISBN 978-0-226-03538-3
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* Baratz, Joan C.; Shuy, Roger, eds. (1969), Teaching Black Children to Read, Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics
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## Further reading

[edit]

* Bailey, Guy; Baugh, John; Mufwene, Salikoko S.; Rickford, John R. (2013), African-American English: Structure, History and Use, Routledge, ISBN 978-1-135-09756-1
* Delpit, Lisa; Dowdy, Joanne Kilgour (2002), The Skin that We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom., New York: New Press, ISBN 1-56584-544-7
* McDorman, Richard E. (2012). "Understanding African-American English: A Course in Language Comprehension and Cross-Cultural Understanding for Advanced English Language Learners in the United States" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2012.
* Nunberg, Geoffrey (1997), "Double Standards", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 15 (3): 667–675, doi:10.1023/A:1005815614064, S2CID 169316918, archived from the original on September 23, 2009, retrieved March 4, 2010
* Oubré, Alondra (1997). "Black English Vernacular (Ebonics) and Educability: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Language, Cognition, and Schooling". African American Web Connection. Archived from the original on June 14, 2007. Retrieved March 4, 2010.
* Patrick, Peter L. (2007). "A bibliography of works on African American English". University of Essex. Archived from the original on February 16, 2010. Retrieved March 4, 2010.
* Pollock, K.; Bailey, G.; Berni; Fletcher; Hinton, L.N.; Johnson; Roberts; Weaver (1998). "Phonological Features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE)". Child Phonology Laboratory. University of Alberta. Archived from the original on May 29, 2010. Retrieved March 4, 2010.
* Rickford, John R. (December 1996). "Ebonics Notes and Discussion". Archived from the original on March 1, 2009. Retrieved March 4, 2010.
* Rickford, John R.; Rickford, Angela E. (1995), "Dialect readers revisited", Linguistics and Education, 7 (2): 107–128, doi:10.1016/0898-5898(95)90003-9
* Sidnell, Jack. "African American Vernacular English (Ebonics)". Archived from the original on February 10, 2010. Retrieved March 4, 2010.

## External links

[edit]

African-American Vernacular English at Wikipedia's sister projects

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Dialects and accents of Modern English by continent

Europe|

| Great
Britain|

| England|

| North|

* Cheshire
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|

Midlands|

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South|

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Scotland|

* Glasgow
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Wales|

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Ireland|

* Dublin
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Americas|

| North
America|

| Canada|

* Aboriginal
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|

United
States|

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* Bermuda
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Oceania|

| Australia|

* variation
* accent
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|

* Fiji
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Africa|

* Cameroon
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Asia|

| East Asia|

* Hong Kong

|

South Asia|

* Bangladesh
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* Sri Lanka

Southeast Asia|

* Brunei
* Cambodia
* Malaysia
* Myanmar
* Philippines
* Singapore
* Thailand

Antarctica|

* Antarctica

Related|

* English language
* Basic
* Broad and general accents
* Commonwealth
* Comparison of American and British English
* E-Prime
* Engrish
* English as a lingua franca
* English-based creole languages
* Englishisation
* Globish
* Gogate
* Nerrière
* International
* Jewish English (Yeshiva English)
* Learning
* Linguistic purism in English
* List of English-based pidgins
* Non-native pronunciations of English
* Plain
* Standard

Authority control databases

National|

* Germany
* United States
* France
* BnF data
* Czech Republic
* Israel

Other|

* IdRef
* Yale LUX

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