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African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), also called Ebonics, Black English, or Black English Vernacular (BEV) is a dialect of American English. Similar to common southern U.S. English, the dialect is spoken by many African Americans in the United States. AAVE shares many characteristics with various pidgin and creole English dialects spoken by blacks worldwide. AAVE also has grammatical origins in, and pronunciational characteristics in common with, various West African languages. The term Ebonics, which is a portmanteau word of ebony and phonics, has been suggested as an alternative name for this dialect. However, that name is not widely used in linguistic literature, although it enjoys considerable common use as a result of the controversy surrounding it (see below). Robert L. Williams, a linguistics professor at Washington University, created the term Ebonics in 1973, then detailed it in his 1975 book, Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks. AAVE became the subject of contentious debate following the decision in 1996 of the school board of Oakland, California, to recognize, for pedagogical purposes, Ebonics a unique language or dialect.
History and Social ContextAAVE has its roots in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. Distinctive patterns of language usage among African slaves and, later, African Americans arose out of the need for multicultural populations of African captives to communicate among themselves, and with their captors, in a hostile and alien environment. Crammed together in holding pens on the West African coast and chained together during the Middle Passage, these captives, many of them already multi-lingual speakers of Wolof, Twi, Hausa, Yoruba, Dogon, Akan, Kimbundu, Bambara and other languages, developed pidgins -- simplified mixtures of two or more languages. Over time in the Americas, some of these pidgins became fully developed creole languages. Significant numbers of African Americans still speak some of these creole languages, notably Gullah on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. As a language is used by isolated and diverging groups of people, the language itself becomes isolated and divergent. Pronunciational aspects of AAVE are based, in part, on the Southern American English variety, an influence that no doubt was reciprocal as the dialects diverged. The traits of AAVE that separate it from standard English include grammatical structures traceable to West African languages; changes in pronunciation along definable patterns, many of which are found in Creole and pidgin dialects of other populations of West African descent (but also emerge in English pidgin dialects uninfluenced by West African languages, Newfoundland English, for example); distinctive slang; and differences in the use of tenses. AAVE also has a substantial vocabulary little understood beyond the African-American community, and has contributed several words with African origins now in common use in SAE: "gumbo," "goober," "yam," "banjo," "bogus" -- and even some slang expressions, such as "hip" and "hip cat." It is common for an oppressed people (as, for example, African slaves in the Americas) to develop a radically different dialect from that of their oppressors. Such a departure from majority language usage is, of course, a natural consequence of cultural differences. However, sociologists, linguists and psychologists believe that such divergent language development is often a kind of passive resistance to subjugation, oppression or cultural aggression. Language becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and ethnic pride. In the case of African-Americans, AAVE has survived and thrived through the centuries also as a result of group societal marginalization -- through segregation, discrimination and often self-imposed social separation. Most speakers of AAVE are bidialectical in that they command Standard American English (SAE) to varying degrees in addition to AAVE. African Americans who speak AAVE exclusively are most commonly southern and rural, or those with working-class roots. Generally speaking, the higher the socioeconomic status of one's custodial parents, the higher the level of formal education attained, and the greater the socialization with speakers of SAE or other dialects, the less likely one is to speak AAVE, or to speak it exclusively. Most African-Americans however, regardless of socioeconomic status, educational background, or geographic region, use some form of AAVE at least occasionally in informal and intra-ethnic communication. This process of selective language usage, based on social context, is called code-switching. Some phrases in AAVE have entered popular American culture, and these may be employed contextually by speakers belonging to diverse ethnic groups. Because of white supremacist beliefs and prevailing cultural biases, whites commonly believed the aberrant English of African slaves was due to inferior intellect. Such prejudices persist today. AAVE often is perceived by members of broader American society as an indicator of inferior intelligence or low educational attainment. Further, like many other creole dialects, AAVE sometimes has been called "lazy" or "bad" English. Such appraisals may be due to AAVE's substitution of aspect for tense in some cases and certain grammatical and phonological reductions. Some challenge whether AAVE should be considered a dialect at all. However, such opinions have no basis in fact, and among linguists there is no such controversy. In the late 1990s, the formal recognition of AAVE as a distinct dialect and its proposed use as an educational tool to help African American students become more fluent in SAE became a controversial subject in the U.S. See: Ebonics. AAVE as a CreoleWhen European slavers arrived in Africa to abduct slaves, they found that the African languages exhibited very little mixing. Dillard (1972) attributes to slave ship Captain William Smith:
However, some slaveowners often acquired a preference for slaves from a particular tribe. In cases of consigned cargoes, language mixing aboard ship was sometimes minimal. There is evidence that many enslaved Africans, in fact, continued to use fairly intact native languages until almost 1700, when Wolof became the basis of a sort of intermediary pidgin among Africans. It is Wolof that comes to the fore in tracing the African roots of AAVE. By 1715, the African pidgin was widely enough known to make its way into Daniel Defoe's novels, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. Cotton Mather claimed to have been very familar with his slaves' speech. He knew enough to affirm that one of his slaves was from the Coromantee tribe. Mather's imitative writing showed features present in many creoles and even in modern day AAVE. By the time of the American Revolution, African-American creoles had not quite established themselves to the point of mutual intelligibility among varieties. Dillard (1972) references a recollection of "slave language" toward the latter part of the eighteenth century:
It wasn't until the time of the Civil War that the language of the slaves became familiar to a large number of educated whites. The abolitionist papers before the war form a rich corpus of examples of plantation creole. Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a book titled Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870). In the book, he details many features of his soldiers' language. In particular, this book contains the first reference to the distinction between stressed BÍN and unstressed bin. After Emancipation, some freed slaves traveled to West Africa, taking their creole with them. In certain African tribal groups, such as those in East Cameroon, there are varieties of Black English that show strong resemblances to the creole dialects in the U.S. documented during this time period. The languages have remained relatively the same due to the homogeneity within tribal groups. As a result, they can act as windows into a past state of creole English. Educational IssuesTeaching children whose first language is AAVE poses problems wider than simply what techniques to add to the pedagogy. This topic foots a suite of controversial political issues. Foremost, America is divided on whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate dialect of English, as discussed in the Ebonics article. When teaching anyone a language or dialect with which they are unfamiliar, it is important to differentiate between understanding and pronunciation. For instance, if a child reads "He passed by both of them" as "he pass by bowf uh dem", a teacher must determine whether the child is saying "passed" or "pass," since they are homonyms in AAVE phonology. Appropriate remedial strategies in such a case would be different from effective strategies in the case of an SE speaker who read "passed" as "pass". A strategy was introduced by Baratz and Stewart (1969) that introduced AAVE speakers to reading using "dialect readers"—sets of reading nearer to the child's dialect than SE text. This helps the child focus on translating symbols on paper into words without worrying about learning a new language at the same time. Simpkins, Holt, and Simpkins (1977) introduced a comprehensive set of dialect readers, called bridge readers, which included the same content in three different dialects: AAVE, a bridge version, which was closer to SE without being prohibitively formal, and a Standard English version. The bridge program showed very promising results, but didn't become widely adopted for various political reasons mostly related to the failure to recognize AAVE as a dialect of English. Grammatical featuresNote: The following pronunciations are written in SAMPA. See the SAMPA chart for reference. Phonological features
Aspect markingThe most distinguishing feature of AAVE is the use of forms of be to mark aspect in verb phrases. The use or lack of a form of be can indicate whether or not the performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In SAE, this can be expressed only using adverbs such as usually. It is disputed whether the use of the verb "to be" to indicate a habitual status or action in AAVE has its roots in various West African languages.
Remote Phase MarkerThe aspect marked by stressed BÍN has been given many names, including Perfect Phase, Remote Past, Remote Phase (Fickett 1970, Fasold and Wolfram 1970, Rickford 1999, respectively). This article uses the latter of the three. With non-stative verbs, the role of BÍN is simple: it places the action in the distant past, or represents total completion of the action. A decent translation is adding "a long time ago" as an adverbial phrase onto the sentence. For example, She BÍN tell me that translates as, "She told me that a long time ago." However, when BÍN is used with stative verbs, or when it is used with gerund forms, BÍN represents 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 BÍN had this dress, meaning that the speaker has had the dress for a long time and that it isn't new. To illustrate the difference between the simple past and the gerund when used with BÍN, consider the utterances:
NegationIn addition, negatives are formed differently from standard American English:
Lexical featuresFor the most part, AAVE uses the lexicon of SE, particularly informal and southern dialects. There are some notable differences, however. In particular, certain English words share the sound of words from West African languages, and we can see the connection.
In addition to words with clearly African origins, however, AAVE has a separate vocabulary of English words that have strikingly different meanings from their common usage in SAE. Other grammatical characteristicsSome of these characteristics, notably double negatives and the use of been for "has been", are also characteristic of general colloquial American English. Linguist William Labov carried out and published the first thorough grammatical study of African American Vernacular English in 1965.
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