African American Vernacular English

Contents

1.  ) Introduction  3

2.  ) Who speaks AAVE  4

2.1)  Brief historical outline  5

3.  ) Grammar  6

3.1)  Present Tense  7

3.2)  Past Tense and Perfective Constructions  8

3.3)  Future  9

3.4)  Progressive  9

3.5)  Negation  10

3.6)  s suffix  10

3.7)  Questions  11

3.8)  To be  11

4.  ) Phonology  12

5.  ) Frequency in AAVE  14

6.  ) Aspect in AAVE  15

7.  ) AAVE: Dialect or self contained system  16

8.  ) Examples  17

8.1)  Zora Neale Hurston: “Their eyes Were Watching God  17

8.2)  Dr. Dre: “What's the difference between me and you  18

9.  ) Conclusion  20

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1.) Introduction English is the most spoken language in the world. Wherever you go, you can express yourself via English. But English is not the same anyplace you go. British English and American English, for instance, differ a lot. Not only by means of pronunciation, but also concerning vocabulary, grammar etc. Moreover, the language within each country differs and there exist many dialects. One may say that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a dialect; others may say it is a separate language system. In this paper I will try to show how AAVE works, who speaks it and how it differs from Standard English. My focus lies on AAVE spoken in the United States. “Significant research on black English in the United states is almost entirely a product of the 1960s” (Dillard1972: 6) and thus not that old. Nevertheless there exist different opinions concerning as well? Its the origin and the status it has. So, in this essay I am going to deal with Black American English and its specific features and differences to Standard English. Standard means here the achieved official recognition of a language. The standard is spoken by the majority of speakers in the US.

The analysis includes an introduction to the grammar of AAVE and its specific vocabulary. At the beginning a short survey will be given on who actually speaks AAVE. At the end of the paper, I will give some examples how AAVE actually works and is used by blacks. Tense, mood, and aspect cannot always be strictly separated, and thus the explanations and examples of each category are sort of melted together. Moreover, I will talk about the question whether AAVE should be looked at as if being a self-governed language system or a dialect of Standard English spoken in the United States.

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2.) Who speaks AAVE? First of all, what is AAVE? It is said to be a dialect of English spoken by Blacks in the United States. Dialect means the collective linguistic pattern of a subgroup of the speakers of a language (Dillard, 1972:1). AAVE was mainly studied in the 60s. In general, we can say that all those speak AAVE (= African American Vernacular English) who consider themselves to be Black. Those are 80% of the Black American population (Dillard, 1972:1). However, also some Puerto Ricans and members of the southern plantation owning class do use this language. In former times AAVE was also used by some Indian tribes and Seminoles. The dialect patterns depend on social factors rather than racial or geographic. Many people are capable of speaking several dialects, and also some Whites do speak those dialects.

The history of the Afro–American languages correlates with a caste system. The use of AAVE indicates for some people a low level of education as well as a low social standard. Here the opinions differ in that some argue that AAVE is a dialect of Standard English and others say that it is a self-contained system. We will talk about this later on. It indicates that the speaker belongs to a social group that has remained unassimilated to the white culture. Rich black families tend to speak Standard English. In the use of Standard English among Blacks age grading plays a great role. First the children adopt the language they learn in their peer group; later on they learn Standard English in school. The agegrading towards Standard English is closely connected with status grading, i.e. children of families with a higher social level tend to the use of Standard English. The higher a Black climbs on the social ladder the more he tends to Standard English. In general, women find it easier to affiliate with the middleclass and to adopt the white culture standards.

But the use of AAVE is also an indicator of racial awareness and identity. And even highly educated Blacks want to express their roots linguistically to show their identification. They do so by the use of ethnic slang which they use, even if they detest the grammar and phonology of AAVE Thus, not all Blacks use AAVE for communication, but the majority is able to. Well-educated people make less use of AAVE and talk more like white speakers. There exist, as mentioned before, regional and age differences. Older speakers use less AAVE than younger ones, probably because of group solidarity. “Invariant be, copula deletion, absence of possessive ‘s and third

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person –s seem to be spreading among younger speakers of AAVE” (Tottie, 2002:227)

2.1) Brief historical outline Should rather be: origin of AAVE

“Black English has come to mean the speech of low socioeconomic blacks living in urban ghettos” in the United States (NY, Detroit, L.A.) (DeStefano, 1973:5) And the English spoken by blacks is called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The term vernacular refers to the everyday language spoken by a speech community (Tottie, 2002:218). There exist two options concerning the origin. Some argue that AAVE is descendent from a creole, itself derived from an English-based pidgin, i.e. a contact language. Others say that AAVE is a dialect of English based on the varieties that the slaves picked up from white speakers.

AAVE differs from Standard English not only in sound but also in grammar and vocabulary. Many of the most significant features of Black English are to be found in its tense system and in the treatment of the verb „to be“.•So, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety formerly known as Black English Vernacular or Vernacular Black English among sociolinguists, and commonly called Ebonics outside the academic community. AAVE has been at the heart of several public debates and the analysis of this variety has also sparked and sustained debates among sociolinguists. Copied text It is extremely difficult to say how many people speak AAVE because it is not clear what exactly this would mean. Some speakers may use some distinctive aspects of phonology (pronunciation) and lexis (vocabulary) but none of the grammatical features associated with the variety. Many sociolinguists would reserve the term AAVE for varieties which are marked by the occurrence of certain distinctive grammatical features some of which are discussed below. Even so it may still be difficult to say with any exactitude how many AAVE speakers there are since such grammatical features occur variably, that is, in alternation with standard features. Such variability in the speech both of groups and individuals reflects the complex social attitudes surrounding AAVE and other nonstandard varieties of English and it was this variability which initially attracted the attention of sociolinguists such as William Labov. As I said above, the origin is controversial: Some say that AAVE developed out of the contact between speakers of West African languages and speakers

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of vernacular English varieties. According to such a view, West Africans learnt English on plantations in the southern Coastal States (Georgia, South Carolina, etc.) from a very small number of native speakers. Some suggest that this led to the development of a rudimentary pidgin which was later expanded through a process of creolization( Dillard, 1972:7ff.).

Others who advocate a contact scenario for the development of AAVE suggest that the contact language (an early creole-like AAVE) developed through processes of second language acquisition. According to such a view West Africans newly arrived on plantations would have limited access to English grammatical models because the number of native speakers was so small (just a few indentured servants on each plantation). In such a situation a community of second language learners might unite English vocabulary that could be gained from temporary meet onto the few grammatical patterns which are common to the languages of West Africa. What linguists refer to as universal grammar (the law-like rules and tendencies which apply to all natural human language) would have played a significant role in such processes as well. This kind of thing seems to have taken place in the Caribbean and may also have happened in some places, at some times in the United States. For instance Gullah or Sea Islands Creole spoken in the Coastal Islands of South Carolina and Georgia seems to have formed in this way.

It seems reasonable to suggest that both views are partially correct and that AAVE developed to some extent through reorganization while it also inherited many of its today distinctive features from older varieties of English which were once widely spoken.

3.) Grammar

In general, we can say that AAVE does not contain words we do not find in Standard English (in this text the abbreviation StE will be used for it or: hence StE). Neither do we find word forms that white dialects do not have. But AAVE has a greatly different syntax. The probably most distinctive and striking difference between AAVE and StE is that of tense and aspect marking. Whereas the marking of tense is obligatory in StE, it is optional in AAVE. The verb in AAVE is often used without any ending. As is the case with the English

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