African American Vernacular English

“Real language” or “street slang”? “Improvement” or “deterioration”?— Legitimization of African American Vernacular English remains a controversial and divisive issue.

Language information: African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is also known as “Black English,” “Black Vernacular” and “Black English Vernacular” (BEV), colloquially also as “Ebonics” (from “ebony” and “phonics”), “Ebo” and “Jive.”
     While it shares much of its phonology with American English dialects of the southern states (e.g., being non-rhotic, i.e., “deleting” syllable-final /r/), many of its characteristics are typical of English-based creoles, which have led many to consider it a type of creole rather than merely an American English dialect group. AAVE has also exerted considerable influence on the speech of Southerners of various backgrounds. Sons of well-to-do White families were often sent away to schools in the north in attempts to hinder their use of “Black English.” Girls, on the other hand, remained under the influence of the house slaves who often spent more time with the children than the actual parents.
     It is difficult to estimate the number of speakers of AAVE. What is known is that it is the native language or frequently used secondary language of a high percentage of U.S. Americans of African descent (currently 37.1 million or 12.9% of the U.S. population), as well many White Americans (especially in areas of the South) and many African Americans living abroad. It is also the dialect most used by immigrant communities in U.S. cities, especially those from Latin America. This is mostly due to the fact that they both settle in and are treated with more welcome within the Black ghettos or community areas. Most adult-age AAVE speakers are also highly or fully proficient in varieties that are within the Standard American English range.

For many African Americans there have long been numerous educational obstacles, among them social, cultural and linguistic differences.

          Especially in larger AAVE-speaking communities, many children have initial problems adapting to Standard English requirements at school, problems that are very similar to those of children with native languages other than English. A major difference is that, while most of these other children grow up with pride in and general acceptance of the cultures and languages of their ethnic home countries or Native American communities, African American children tend to grow up exposed to particularly prejudicial attitudes toward them, their communities, their culture and their ways of speaking. Many African American community leaders and well-meaning educators of various backgrounds have long been trying to counteract the negative psychological effects this has especially on young African Americans, mostly by means of pride campaigns and by legitimizing AAVE, even by integrating AAVE components into lower-grade school curricula. This has led to the highly controversial case of the school board of Oakland, California, moving to officially recognize Ebonics as a language in its own right and integrating it into the city’s public school curricula in December 1996. This was passed by the outgoing school board, was then amended and eventually dropped altogether by the following board. The more extreme or misunderstood arguments in the debate (for instance the claim of some that Ebonics was not a Germanic language but belonged to the “West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems”) were exploited in the popular media to discredit the entire effort of promoting AAVE as a legitimate language variety. This negative publicity ran counter to campaigns designed to remove the stigma and to afford African American children the sort of support children with languages other than English receive. Most attacks were in the form of implicit or explicit ridicule. In 2005, a similar proposal by sociology professor Mary Texeira was rejected by the Unified School District of San Bernardino, California. Ridicule of proposals to afford AAVE respect and official standing continues especially in Web presentations, for instance in the form of bogus “Ebonics” texts and purported electronic Ebonics dictionaries and translators generating absurd results—all of it portraying AAVE as laughable “slang,” even as “ghetto slang” or “gangsta slang,” all with the implicit message that it is merely inferior English.
     There ought to be no doubt about AAVE not being an ordinary English dialect group in that it shares characteristics with English-based Creoles. There is, for instance, the creation of a regularized tense morphology that uses English elements but seems to be at least partly rooted in West African systems; e.g., He aksin (~ askin) ‘He is asking’, He be aksin ‘He’s in the habit of asking’, He bin aksin ‘He has been asking’, He dun aks(t) (~ ast) ‘He has asked’, ‘He finished asking’, He bin aks(t) ‘He asked (some time ago)’, He (fixin to > fixin ta > fixin-a) fìnna aks ‘He’s going/about to ask’, He din’ŧ aks nuthin ‘He didn’t ask anything’, He ain’ŧ aksin me ‘He isn’t asking me’, Don’ nobody aks him nuthin ‘Nobody asks him anything’, Ain’ nobody aksin him ‘Nobody is asking him’, and omission of ‘to be’ before predicates; e.g., He koow ‘He’s cool (all right, calm)’, He ma homey ‘He’s my buddy’, He aksin me? ‘Is he asking me?’
     Besides the of AAVE-specific semantic shifts, usage of words and coinage of idiomatic expressions that tend to be perceived as “slang” by most Americans, a special lexical feature of AAVE is the survival of many words with West African roots, many of which entered general American “slang” or even mainstream American English; e.g., bogus ‘false’, ‘fake’ (cf. Hausa book ‘deceit’, ‘fraud’), hip ~ hep ‘aware’ (cf. Wolof hipi ‘to open one’s eyes’), dig (cf. Wolof dëgg) ‘to understand’, ‘to appreciate’, cat ‘man’, ‘guy’, ‘person’ (cf. Wolof –kat ‘person who ...’), jive ‘to deceive playfully’, ‘empty, misleading talk’, ‘talk’, ‘to make sense’ (cf. Wolof jev ~ jeu ‘to talk about an absent person’, ‘to gossip’), juke ‘honky-tonk’, ‘roadside dive’, ‘brothel’ (cf. Gullah juke ~ jook ‘disorderly’, ‘wicked’, Wolof dzug ‘to live wickedly’), gumbo (cf. Umbundu kingombo ‘okra’), okra (cf. Igbo ́ọk̀ụr̀ụ, Twi ŋkrakra), goober (cf. Kikongo nguba) ‘peanut’, jam ‘lively party’ (cf. Fula jam ‘splendid’), jambalaya (cf. Chiluba tshimboebole ‘cooked grain’) and jitterbug (cf. Mandinka jito-bag ‘dance-crazed person’), and let us not forget “jazz” from Creole jass ‘strenuous activity’, ‘sexual intercourse’ (cf. Mandinka jasi, Temne yas). It has been claimed that some words that are commonly assumed to be corrupted English words are in fact African-derived, such as swank (not from ‘swagger’ but from Mende suwangc ‘to be proud’) and lil (not from ‘little’ but from Wolof lir ‘little’, ‘small’). There are also many West African calques (i.e., loan translations) in AAVE; e.g., bad eye (cf. Mandinka ñaajawoo “bad-eye” = ‘evil glance’), bad-mouth(cf. Mandinka daajawoo, Hausa mūg̀ūm b̀ākī “to evil-mouth” = ‘to slander’), big eye (cf. Igbo anya uku “big eye” = ‘greedy’). Most North American African slave communities were of diverse West African backgrounds and had no common native language until they fully adopted English, though there were some in which certain African languages predominated as linguae francae. Among these especially Wolof seems to have survived as a creole base even in some originally diverse communities as long as into the early 19th century.
     Many AAVE words and expressions and slang have entered other dialects of English, typically by way of youth slang, usually disseminated through the American entertainment media. This leads to the endless cycle of reinvention of slang within the AAVE speaking community. That is to say as AAVE slang words become increasingly “cool” to use within the mainstream speakers seek out words that are more “hot,” “dope,” “hype” or “tight.”
      In recent years, its use in high-quality literature and in the performing arts has been improving the image of AAVE in some quarters. A notable example of highly skilled literary use of AAVE is Alice Walker’s 1982 award-winning novel The Color Purple on which a stage play and a motion picture have been based, both of them highly acclaimed.
      There is no standard spelling for AAVE. Most writers use Standard-English-based spelling. In order to represent the sound system more accurately, the author of this translation chose a compromise between the former and phonetic spelling with additional ideas for features from Middle English, Polish, French, Romanian and phonetically spelled Cherokee.

Genealogy: Indo-European > Germanic > Western > Anglo-Scots > English > Afro-English

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Authors: Reinhard F. Hahn & Tyson Taylor