ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 15: AAVE (African American Vernacular English) AAVE, also k
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 15: AAVE (African American Vernacular English) AAVE, also known as Black English, Blaccent, or, with some controversy, Ebonics, is a leaf of the American English twig of the Ingvaeonic stem of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. AAVE was first formally studied in the late 60’s and 70’s to prove a rather strange point: that AAVE was a language. I would love to be able to talk about how people ~used~ to think about the speech of black Americans, but the frank truth is people still very much maintain the idea that black speech is “ungrammatical”, “slang” and a result of poor education. What linguists demonstratively proved, what frankly any decent human being already knew, was that AAVE is a true language with consistent grammatical rules. There are many theories about AAVE being influenced by the West African languages of slaves or a child of the creole languages of the southeast and Caribbean. However this is likely untrue, or at most a minimal influence. AAVE is most similar to archaic forms of Southern English and is probably a sister dialect. The two share many phonological features, like “monopthongal ai” (pronouncing “nice white rice” like “nahs waht rahs”) and also unique lexical entries like “fixing to” also spelled “finna” meaning “going to, about to”. What little forms of conjugation persist in English, like the third person -s (ex. I run, he runs) are dropped in AAVE. It also exhibits zero-copula, where the copula i.e. word that equates two things (ex. the word “are” in “dogs are great”) can be dropped, hence white English “who is that?” vs. AAVE “who that?”. Hebrew is also a zero-copula language. AAVE has a pretty robust system of verb tense and aspect, consider “he workin”, “he been workin” “he be workin” “he done work” “he do work” “he done been workin” are all distinct placements of one mans action of working in time, and that these are consistent and identifiable verbal constructions. It should not come as a shock that I chose this language on MLK day. I feel like I’ve made it very clear that the speech of black Americans, and frankly the dialectical speech of all Americans, is as much a language as any other tongue. Now I’d like to make certain we understand the ramifications of this knowledge. AAVE is NOT a sign of poor education or poor socialization, and the fact that you cannot speak it in formal settings, that no newscasters speak it on tv, that no nature documentary is narrated in it, is a facet of racism and nothing else. While not all black Americans speak AAVE, most do, especially those from primarily black communities. All of them will be basically forced by our society to learn a second language, specifically the language of white Americans, in order to be taken seriously. 2018 is still young, and I ask everyone, especially white people, reading this to go into the rest of this year with an additional resolution: Stop acting like AAVE is lesser, or more comical. When you see a friend or celebrity typing in their native tongue don’t make jokes about how you “can’t understand” or can’t take them seriously like that. Admire how much subtle meaning can be implied with just a slight change in word choice or order. Marvel that “fuck with” has an entirely different meaning in AAVE not found in white dialects. Stop being a racist pedant. -- source link