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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.”

  • News sources thought policy was claiming “nonsense idea that black slang should be recognized as a new language.”

  • Word “Ebonics” was attacked for being imprecise (combination of Ebony and Phonics)

  • “The Oakland school board insisted Ebonics was a different language” (created pointless side issue: dialect vs. language argument unrelated to actual policy)

“..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."

  • To train teachers to look objectively at students’ “home language” using AAVE to teacher Standard English
  • Prompted by linguists who wanted to use contrastive method
  • The Linguistic Society of America’s vote on a January 1997 resolution in support of the Oakland school board was actually unanimous.
  • Contrastive method tested at a school in Chicago
  • After three months, “the experimental group" showed a 59% reduction in the use of AAVE in SE writing
  • Control group showed a slight INCREASE (8.5%)

  • teachers should not condemn students for using AAVE
  • teachers should use contrastive analysis to draw an awareness between AAVE and SE
  • teachers should enourage code switching

• 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

African

American Vernacular English

Background

What is AAVE?

Where does AAVE come from?

Creole vs. Pidgin Languages

Background

AAVE Grammatical Features

  • One theory: Arose from slave creoles from trans-Atlantic slave trade
  • Needed for captives to communicate with captors as well as other captors
  • Captives developed pidgins (simplified mixtures of two or more languages)

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?

African

• spoken in mostly cities

• similar characteristics of dialects spoken in the south

• The Great Migration

Solutions

Codeswitching

Unofficial Solution

Language Policy

Americans

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

  • Teachers continued teaching AAVE with discretion
  • Many teachers in Oakland speak AAVE
  • It is impossible to police classrooms tightly enough to prevent them from using it
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