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Facts about African American grammar have been known to linguists for some time. See: William Labov (University of Pennsylvania), John Rickford (Standford University), and others.
The characteristics of AAVE are the following:
-the copula can be omitted, but there are strict rules about how and where (to be later discussed)
Present simple tense:
-He be workin’ Tuesdays.
-*He workin’ Tuesdays.
Intentional use of the double negative
-I ain’t got no time.
Intentional use of negative inversion
-Ain’t nobody gonna tell him where to go?
• Dropping of voiceless consonants
"Turn lef’ at da corner."
• Interdental fricatives are replaced by stops
"They" is pronounced "dey."
• Intentional omission of the /g/ sound after a velar nasal except in the middle of a word
"He stay workin’."
Columnist William Raspberry constructed a dialogue between himself and a fiction taxi driver, speaking AAVE. His goal was to parody AAVE use. But linguist Geoffrey Pullum noted some errors Raspberry made in his depiction of an AAVE speaker.
Example 1: “What you be talkin’ bout, my man?”
Example 2: “I don’t be offering you my grub.”
Do all African Americans speak AAVE?
“In the United States, the standard language lacks multiple negation marking, but has syllable-final consonant clusters, and interdental fricative consonants. In Italy the facts are the reverse: the standard language of that country lacks syllable-final consonant clusters and interdental fricative consonants and does exhibit multiple negation marking, exactly the same combination (coincidentally) as AAVE happens to have.”
“..the commentators clarified little except the deep hostility and contempt whites feel for the way Blacks speak (the patois of America’s meanest streets, columnist George Will called it, as if AAVE could only be spoken in the slums) and the deep shame felt by Americans of African descent for speaking that what (former Black Panther party officials Eldridge Cleaver published an article in the Los Angeles Times in which he compared acknowledging AAVE with condoning cannibalism.”
“Fearing the linguistic ghettoization of their children, they pressed the school board to reconsider."
• the practice of moving back and forth between two languages or between two dialects or registers of the same language.
• Contrastive Analysis and code switching garner success for students speaking vernacular language
• builds repore and promotes self-efficacy
Where does AAVE come from?
Creole vs. Pidgin Languages
Background
AAVE Grammatical Features
Timeline:
Nonstandard Negro English (1960's)
Pidgin: When speakers of two languages have a need for limited communication
Ebonics (1973)
African-American English (1996)
African-American Vernacular English (1996)
In contrast, a Creole is a fully functional language of its own which includes elements of both languages.
AAVE Grammatical Features
Miconceptions vs. Reality
AAVE Grammatical Features
It has some systematic grammar
It has its own expressions
It has systematic pronunciation
"I ain't offerin' you my grub,"
It is not spoken by all
He clearly means “I am not offering you my food,” so this should be
because the present progressive is required. Not the habitual “be.”
*Consider the song “I Put A Spell on You,” has a line We don’t say “I don’t be lyin’, ” because the singer means “I am lying right now,” not the habitual “I don’t lie.”
The uninflected “be” of AAVE marks a habitual aspect (usual behavior).
But from the context, the taxi driver means “What are you talking about right now?” and not “What do you habitually talk about?”
So the correct AAVE for that would be
with the zero copula.
"I ain't lyin'."
-It is grammar mistakes
-It is just slang
-It is mispronunciation
-It is spoken by all African Americans
-It is spoken exclusively by African Americans
"What you talkin' bout?"
It is not only spoken by African Americans
Where is AAVE spoken?
IS AAVE just pronunciation mistakes?
• spoken in mostly cities
• similar characteristics of dialects spoken in the south
• The Great Migration
Codeswitching
Unofficial Solution
Controversy
Oakland School Board Resolution of '96
-half the population in Oakland is African-American
Cultural Significance
On January 15th, 1997, it was overturned. Why?
What Actually Was Proposed:
After Effects