University of Duisburg-Essen (Campus Essen)

Term: Summer 2008

African American Vernacular

English

Author: Durgut, Ismail

1

Table of Content

1. Introduction 3

2. History 3

3. Features 6

3.1 Phonology 6

3.1.1 Vowel system 6

3.1.2 Consonant system 7

3.1.3 Stress 9

3.2 Grammar 9

3.2.1 Time reference 9

3.2.2 Negation 11

3.2.3 Other grammatical features 11

3.3 Vocabulary 12

4. Summary 13

5. Sources 14

Literature: 14

Internet: 15

6. Abbreviations 15

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1. Introduction

The majority of the UScitizens of African ancestry speak a

characteristic variety of English that has been referred to by several names.

It has variously been called NonStandard Negro English, Negro Dialect1,

Black English Vernacular, Black English, African American English, African

American Vernacular English, Ebonics, etc. In this paper, I will use the term

African American Vernacular English, abbreviated AAVE, because it is the

term most current among linguists today. The term "vernacular"

refers to

the everyday language spoken by a speech community, often a non

standard variety. 2

No other variety inside the United States has been studied as much

as AAVE. During the last fourty years, many works have been released

concerning this topic. This paper is an overview of AAVE. It starts with the

historical backgrounds of the variety by discussing the major theories

concerning its origin. The main part of this paper deals with AAVE′s

linguistic features in comparison to Standard American English. The

features are subdivided into the subchapters phonology, grammar and

vocabulary. A summary forms the final chapter of this paper.

2. History

There are three major theories about the origin of African American

Vernacular English and the reasons why it differs from Standard American

English as well as other varieties of English. The first theory is that AAVE is

1 Ralph W. Fasold / Walt Wolfram: "Some Linguistic Features of Negro Dialect", in:

Paul Stoller [editor], Black American English. Its Background and Its Usage in the

Schools and in Literature, Dell, New York 1975, pp. 4988.

2 Tottie (2002), p. 218.

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descended from a creole, which derived from an Englishbased pidgin

itself. 3

Those who support the creolist hypothesis maintain that the creole upon

which AAVE is based was fairly widespread in the antebellum South. They

observe that this creole was not unique to the mainland South but rather

shows a number of similarities to wellknown Englishbased creoles of the

African diaspora such as Krio, spoken today in Sierra Leone along the

coast of West Africa, as well as Englishbased creoles of the Caribbean

such as the creoles of Barbados and Jamaica. Its vestiges in the United

States are still found today in GULLAH, more popularly called "Geechee,"

the creole still spoken by a small number of African Americans in the Sea

Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. It is maintained that

this creole was fairly widespread among the descendants of Africans on

Southern plantations but was not spoken to any extent by whites.4

Judith Rodby (1992) outlines the possible development of AAVE as follows:

The roots of contemporary BEV5 are found in the seventeenthcentury

slave trade. Historically, slave owners had organized the slaves′ social

universe so that it was difficult for them to communicate. The Ibo, Hausa,

Yoruba, Mandingo, and Wolof tribes, for example, lived together even

though they spoke languages that were only minimally mutually

intelligible. These slaves who did not speak the same language and did not

have the opportunity to learn English developed a pidgin language to

communicate with each other and with whites. Gradually, the pidgin

became creolized; it was regularized, expanded, and passed from one

generation to another as a mother tongue. Slave creole was based largely

3 Tottie (2002), p. 227.

4 Wolfram & SchillingEstes (1998), p.175.

5 BEV, i.e. Black English Vernacular, meaning AAVE.

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