African American Vernacular English

The term Ebonics, which is a portmanteau of ebony and phonics, has been suggested as an alternative name for this dialect. However, that name is not widely used in linguistic literature, although it enjoys considerable common use as a result of the controversy surrounding it (see below). Robert L. Williams, a linguistics professor at Washington University, created the term Ebonics in 1973, then detailed it in his 1975 book, . AAVE became the subject of contentious debate following the decision in 1996 of the school board of Oakland, California, to recognize, for pedagogical purposes, Ebonics a unique language or dialect.

History and Social Context

AAVE has its roots in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. Distinctive patterns of language usage among African slaves and, later, African Americans arose out of the need for multicultural populations of African captives to communicate among themselves, and with their captors, in a hostile and alien environment. Crammed together in holding pens on the West African coast and chained together during the Middle Passage, these captives, many of them already multi-lingual speakers of Wolof, Twi, Hausa, Yoruba, Dogon, Akan, Kimbundu, Bambara and other languages, developed pidgins -- simplified mixtures of two or more languages. Over time in the Americas, some of these pidgins became fully developed creole languages. Significant numbers of African Americans still speak some of these creole languages, notably Gullah on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

As a language is used by isolated and diverging groups of people, the language itself becomes isolated and divergent. Pronunciational aspects of AAVE are based, in part, on the Southern American English variety, an influence that no doubt was reciprocal as the dialects diverged. The traits of AAVE that separate it from standard English include grammatical structures traceable to West African languages; changes in pronunciation along definable patterns, many of which are found in Creole and pidgin dialects of other populations of West African descent (but which also emerge in English pidgin dialects uninfluenced by West African languages, such as Newfoundland English); distinctive slang; and differences in the use of tenses. AAVE also has a substantial vocabulary little understood beyond the African-American community, and has contributed several words with African origins now in common use in SAE: "gumbo," "goober," "yam," "banjo," "bogus" -- and even some slang expressions, such as "hip" and "hip cat."

It is common for an oppressed people (such as African slaves in the Americas) to develop a radically different dialect from that of their oppressors. Such a departure from majority language usage is, of course, a natural consequence of cultural differences. However, sociologists, linguists and psychologists believe that such divergent language development is often a kind of passive resistance to subjugation, oppression or cultural aggression. Language becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and ethnic pride. In the case of African-Americans, AAVE has survived and thrived through the centuries also as a result of group societal marginalization -- through segregation, discrimination and often self-imposed social separation.

Most speakers of AAVE are bidialectical in that they command Standard American English (SAE) to varying degrees in addition to AAVE. African Americans who speak AAVE exclusively are most commonly southern and rural, or those with working-class roots. Generally speaking, the higher the socioeconomic status of one's custodial parents, the higher the level of formal education attained, and the greater the socialization with speakers of SAE or other dialects, the less likely one is to speak AAVE, or to speak it exclusively. Most African-Americans, however, regardless of socioeconomic status, educational background, or geographic region, use some form of AAVE at least occasionally in informal and intra-ethnic communication. This process of selective language usage, based on social context, is called code switching. Some phrases in AAVE have entered popular American culture, and these may be employed contextually by speakers belonging to diverse ethnic groups.

Because of white supremacist beliefs, racism and prevailing cultural biases, whites commonly believed the aberrant English of African slaves was due to inferior intellect. Such prejudices persist today. AAVE often is perceived by members of broader American society as an indicator of inferior intelligence or low educational attainment. Further, like many other creole dialects, AAVE sometimes has been called "lazy" or "bad" English. A similar perception exists with regard to SAE in Britain and other English-speaking nations. Such appraisals also may be due in part to AAVE's substitution of aspect for tense in some cases and certain grammatical and phonological reductions. Some challenge whether AAVE should be considered a dialect at all. However, among linguists there is no such controversy.

In the late 1990s, the formal recognition of AAVE as a distinct dialect and its proposed use as an educational tool to help African American students become more fluent in SAE became a controversial subject in the United States See: Ebonics.

AAVE as a Creole

When European slavers arrived in Africa to abduct slaves, they found that the African languages exhibited very little mixing. Dillard (1972) attributes to slave ship Captain William Smith:

As for the languages of Gambia, they are so many and so different, that the Natives, on either Side of the River, cannot understand each other.… [T]he safest Way is to trade with the different Nations, on either Side of the River, and having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel.

Some slaveowners often acquired a preference for slaves from a particular tribe. In cases of consigned cargoes, language mixing aboard ship was sometimes minimal. There is evidence that many enslaved Africans, in fact, continued to use fairly intact native languages until almost 1700, when Wolof became the basis of a sort of intermediary pidgin among Africans. It is Wolof that comes to the fore in tracing the African roots of AAVE.

By 1715, the African pidgin was widely enough known to make its way into Daniel Defoe's novels, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. Cotton Mather claimed to have been very familar with his slaves' speech. He knew enough to affirm that one of his slaves was from the Coromantee tribe. Mather's imitative writing showed features present in many creoles and even in modern day AAVE.

By the time of the American Revolution, African-American creoles had not quite established themselves to the point of mutual intelligibility among varieties. Dillard (1972) references a recollection of "slave language" toward the latter part of the eighteenth century:

Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe; but me fall asleep, massa, and no wake 'til you come…

It wasn't until the time of the Civil War that the language of the slaves became familiar to a large number of educated whites. The abolitionist papers before the war form a rich corpus of examples of plantation creole. Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a book titled Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870). In the book, he details many features of his soldiers' language. In particular, this book contains the first reference to the distinction between stressed BÍN and unstressed bin.

After Emancipation, some freed slaves traveled to West Africa, taking their creole with them. In certain African tribal groups, such as those in east Cameroon, there are varieties of Black English that show strong resemblances to the creole dialects in the U.S. documented during this time period. The languages have remained relatively the same due to the homogeneity within tribal groups. As a result, they can act as windows into a past state of creole English.

Educational Issues

Teaching children whose first language is AAVE poses problems beyond simply what techniques to add to the pedagogy. This topic foots a raft of controversial political issues. Foremost, despite linguistic evidence, the American public and policymakers are divided on whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate dialect of English (see Ebonics)— again, with cultural biases and race prejudice coloring public debate.

When teaching anyone a language or dialect with which they are unfamiliar, it is important to differentiate between understanding and pronunciation. For instance, if a child reads "He passed by both of them" as "he pass by bowf uh dem", a teacher must determine whether the child is saying "passed" or "pass," since they are homonyms in AAVE phonology. Appropriate remedial strategies in such a case would be different from effective strategies in the case of an SE speaker who read "passed" as "pass".

Pedagogical techniques similar to those used to teach English to speakers of foreign languages appear to hold promise for speakers of AAVE. Baratz and Stewart (1969) developed a strategy that introduced AAVE speakers to reading using "dialect readers"—sets of text nearer to the child's dialect than SE text. This helps the child focus on translating symbols on paper into words without worrying about learning a new language at the same time. Simpkins, Holt, and Simpkins (1977) developed a comprehensive set of dialect readers, called bridge readers, which included the same content in three different dialects: AAVE, a bridge version, which was closer to SE without being prohibitively formal, and a Standard English version. The bridge program showed very promising results, but didn't become widely adopted for various political reasons mostly related to the failure of school systems to recognize AAVE as a dialect of English.

Grammatical features

Phonological features