Universität Hannover, Fachbereich Anglistik
Englishes of the World, So Se 2004

African American English
 

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Terminology 1

3. The Oakland Schoolboard Proposal 2

4. History 3

5. Features 4

5.1 Phonological features 4
5.2 Grammatical features 6

5.2.1 Time reference 7
5.2.2 Negation 8
5.2.3 Complex sentence formation 9
5.2.4 Other grammatical features 9

5.3 Semantic features 9
5.4 Pragmatic features 10

6. Conclusion  11

7. Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

Being about to write a term paper about African American English, I first want to explain the order of contents I have chosen for it. Since there are different terms for the English of African  Americans and in order to not confuse the reader chapter 2 lists and defines the most common terms used by linguists concerned with this topic. In chapter 3 the Oakland School Board proposal is mentioned and its contents are summarised. Before investigating the features of the African American dialect of English, I am going to take a look at its history as well as different theories of how it actually arose. Chapter 5 is concerned with various phonological, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic features which are characteristic for the English of African Americans and make it an interesting and unique dialect.

2. Terminology

The term African American English (AAE) is used to refer to “a continuum of varieties ranging from the most mainstream or standard speech, to the most vernacular or non-mainstream variety” (Rickford 1999: xxi). AAE is therefore a relatively general term, also including language varieties like Gullah or dialects of the Carribbean, which this paper will not be concerned with. Instead, the focus will be on the informal speech of African Americans, “as the variety most widespread among working-class African Americans in inner-city areas, […] and to avoid the impression that every African American would use the features associated with that variety” (Rickford 1999: xxi).
The term most widely used among linguists which refers to the informal speech of many African Americans is African American Vernacular English (AAVE). AAVE is said to be “used by 80 to 90 percent of continental African Americans as a primary means of communication for their day-to-day intragroup communication” (Mufwene 2001: 291).
Another term which has become very popular since 1996, is Ebonics, a blending of ebony (black) and phonics (sound). In December 1996, the Oakland controversy took place and got a lot of public attention across the country, which I will investigate in the following chapter. The terms AAVE and Ebonics are regarded to be very similar, “if not identical” by the majority of linguists (Rickford 1999: xxi). Ebonics puts a little more emphasis on the fact that it derived from the Niger Congo African languages, though (Rickford 1999: xxii). Within this term paper, however, all of the terms listed above will occur. They are used according to the sources I worked with and what I thought was most likely to fit into the context.

3. The Oakland School Board proposal

Although the term Ebonics apparently originated in the 1970s, only a few people had heard of it before December 18, 1996, when “the Oakland School Board approved a resolution recognizing it as the primary language of African American students” (Rickford 1999: 320). Supporters of the proposal believed themselves to be “wildly misunderstood” by the general public, whose reaction was “overwhelmingly negative” (nationmaster.com). “The belief underlying Ebonics-education was that African-American students would perform better in school and more easily learn Standard American English, if textbooks and teachers acknowledged AAVE was not a substandard version of SAE but rather a speech variety with as much although different structure than SAE” (nationmaster.com). The idea was not actually to teach AAVE like Standard American English would usually be taught at school, but to show students how to translate expressions from AAVE to SAE. “Teachers were encouraged to accept that the errors in SAE that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or lack of effort, but rather because the language that they normally use is grammatically different from that of SAE” (nationmaster.com).
Since all languages and dialects are systematic and rule-governed, we can tell for sure that Ebonics is not slang or bad English or whatever the opponents of the Oakland School Board proposal said it to be. “Although Ebonics certainly has slang words […] its linguistic identity is described by distinctive patterns of pronunciation and grammar” (Rickford 1999: 321 f.). As  Rickford states, “Ebonics is more of a dialect of English than a separate language, because it shares many words and other features with other informal varieties of American English” (1999: 322). “Yet Ebonics is one of the most distinctive varieties of American English, differing from Standard English – the educated standard – in several ways” (Rickford 1999: 322).

4. History

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