African-American Vernacular English

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African-American Vernacular English
Black Vernacular English
Region United States
Ethnicity African Americans
Early forms
Latin (English alphabet)
American Braille
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –
Glottolog afri1276
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

African-American Vernacular English [a] (AAVE) [b] is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. [4] Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the non-standard accent. [5] [6] AAVE is widespread throughout the United States, but is not the native dialect of all African Americans, nor are all of its speakers African American. [7] [8] [9]

Contents

As with most English varieties spoken by African Americans, African-American Vernacular English shares a large portion of its grammar and phonology with the regional dialects of the Southern United States, [10] and especially older Southern American English, [11] due to the historical enslavement of African Americans primarily in that region.

Mainstream linguists see only minor parallels between AAVE, West African languages, and English-based creole languages, [12] [13] [14] [15] instead most directly tracing back AAVE to diverse non-standard dialects of English [16] [17] as spoken by the English-speaking settlers in the Southern Colonies and later the Southern United States. [18] However, a minority of linguists argue that the vernacular shares so many characteristics with African creole languages spoken around the world that it could have originated as a creole or semi-creole language, distinct from the English language, before undergoing decreolization. [19] [20] [21]

Origins

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) may be considered a dialect, ethnolect or sociolect. [22] While it is clear that there is a strong historical relationship between AAVE and earlier Southern U.S. dialects, the origins of AAVE are still a matter of debate.

The presiding theory among linguists is that AAVE has always been a dialect of English, meaning that it originated from earlier English dialects rather than from English-based creole languages that "decreolized" back into English. In the early 2000s, Shana Poplack provided corpus-based evidence [13] [14] (evidence from a body of writing) from isolated enclaves in Samaná and Nova Scotia peopled by descendants of migrations of early AAVE-speaking groups (see Samaná English) that suggests that the grammar of early AAVE was closer to that of contemporary British dialects than modern urban AAVE is to other current American dialects, suggesting that the modern language is a result of divergence from mainstream varieties, rather than the result of decreolization from a widespread American creole. [23]

Linguist John McWhorter maintains that the contribution of West African languages to AAVE is minimal. In an interview on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, McWhorter characterized AAVE as a "hybrid of regional dialects of Great Britain that slaves in America were exposed to because they often worked alongside the indentured servants who spoke those dialects..." According to McWhorter, virtually all linguists who have carefully studied the origins of AAVE "agree that the West African connection is quite minor." [24]

However, a creole theory, less accepted among linguists, posits that AAVE arose from one or more creole languages used by African captives of the Atlantic slave trade, due to the captives speaking many different native languages and therefore needing a new way to communicate among themselves and with their captors. [25] According to this theory, these captives first developed what are called pidgins: simplified mixtures of languages. [26] Since pidgins form from close contact between speakers of different languages, the slave trade would have been exactly such a situation. [26] Creolist John Dillard quotes, for example, slave ship captain William Smith describing the sheer diversity of mutually unintelligible languages just in The Gambia. [27] By 1715, an African pidgin was reproduced in novels by Daniel Defoe, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque . In 1721, Cotton Mather conducted the first attempt at recording the speech of slaves in his interviews regarding the practice of smallpox inoculation. [28] By the time of the American Revolution, varieties among slave creoles were not quite mutually intelligible. Dillard quotes a recollection of "slave language" toward the latter part of the 18th century: [27] "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...." Not until the time of the American Civil War did the language of the slaves become familiar to a large number of educated Whites. The abolitionist papers before the war form a rich corpus of examples of plantation creole. In Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), Thomas Wentworth Higginson detailed many features of his Black soldiers' language. Opponents of the creole theory suggest that such pidgins or creoles existed but simply died out without directly contributing to modern AAVE.

Phonology

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Speech example
An example of a man from northern Ohio with an AAVE accent (Bobby Womack).
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Speech example
An example of a man from New York City with an AAVE accent (Eric Adams).
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Speech example
An example of two men with AAVE accents, the interviewer from Georgia (D. J. Shockley) and the interviewee from Louisiana (Russell Gage).
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Many pronunciation features distinctly set AAVE apart from other forms of American English (particularly, General American). McWhorter argues that what truly unites all AAVE accents is a uniquely wide-ranging intonation pattern or "melody", which characterizes even the most "neutral" or light African-American accent. [29] A handful of multisyllabic words in AAVE differ from General American in their stress placement so that, for example, police, guitar, and Detroit are pronounced with initial stress instead of ultimate stress. [30] The following are phonological differences in AAVE vowel and consonant sounds.

Final consonant groups or clusters in AAVE have been examined as evidence of the systematic nature of this language variety, governed by specific rules. Additionally, such analyses have been utilized to bolster arguments concerning the historical origins of AAVE.[ citation needed ] Consonant cluster reduction is a phonological process where a final consonant group or cluster, consisting of two consonant sounds, is simplified or reduced to a single consonant sound. The analysis of consonant cluster reduction in AAVE assumes that, initially, final clusters are present and intact in the language. For example, the word "tes" in AAVE originates from "test", with the final "t" of the "st" consonant cluster being deleted in word-final position.

Vowels

All AAVE vowels
Pure vowels (monophthongs)
English diaphoneme AAVE phoneme [31] Example words
/æ/ [æ~ɛː~ɛə]act, pal, trap
[ɛː~ɛə~eə] (/æ/ raising)ham, land, yeah
/ɑː/ [a~ɑ̈~ɑ]blah, bother, father,
lot, top, wasp
/ɒ/
[ɒ(ɔ)~ɔ(ʊ)]all, dog, bought,
loss, saw, taught
/ɔː/
/ɛ/ [ɛ~eə]dress, met, bread
/ə/ [ə]about, syrup, arena
/ɪ/ [ɪ~iə]hit, skim, tip
/iː/ [i]beam, chic, fleet
/ʌ/ [ʌ~ɜ]bus, flood, what
/ʊ/ [ʊ~ɵ~ø̞]book, put, should
/uː/ [ʊu~u]food, glue, new
Diphthongs
/aɪ/ [äe~äː~aː]prize, slide, tie
[äɪ] (Canadian raising [ dubious – discuss ])price, slice, tyke
/aʊ/ [æɔ~æə]now, ouch, scout
/eɪ/ [eɪ~ɛɪ]lake, paid, rein
/ɔɪ/ [oɪ]boy, choice, moist
/oʊ/ [ʌʊ~ɔʊ]goat, oh, show
R-colored vowels
/ɑːr/ non-rhotic: [ɑ~ɒ]
rhotic: [ɑɹ~ɒɹ]		barn, car, heart
/ɛər/ non-rhotic: [ɛə]
rhotic: [ɛɹ]		bare, bear, there
/ɜːr/ [ɚ]burn, first, herd
/ər/ non-rhotic: [ə]
rhotic: [ɚ]		better, martyr, doctor
/ɪər/ non-rhotic: [iə~iɤ]
rhotic: [iɹ]		fear, peer, tier
/ɔːr/ non-rhotic: [oə~ɔə~ɔo]
rhotic: [oɹ]		hoarse, horse, poor
score, tour, war
/ʊər/
/jʊər/ non-rhotic: [juə~jʊə]
rhotic: [juɹ~jʊɹ]		cure, Europe, pure

Consonants

"Deep" phonology

McWhorter discusses an accent continuum from "a 'deep' Black English through a 'light' Black English to standard English," saying the sounds on this continuum may vary from one African American speaker to the next or even in a single speaker from one situational context to the next. [64] McWhorter regards the following as rarer features, characteristic only of a deep Black English but which speakers of light Black English may occasionally "dip into for humorous or emotive effect": [29]

Grammar

Tense and aspect

Although AAVE does not necessarily have the simple past-tense marker of other English varieties (that is, the -ed of "worked"), it does have an optional tense system with at least four aspects of the past tense and two aspects of the future tense. [66] The dialect uses several Tense-Aspect-Mood markers integrated into the predicate phrase, [67] including gon or gonna (future tense), done (completive aspect), be (habitual aspect, state of being), and been (durative aspect). These can function separately or in conjunction. [67]

Phases/tenses of AAVE [68]
PhaseExample
PastPre-recentI been bought it
RecentI done bought it a
Pre-presentI did buy it
Past inceptiveI do buy it
PresentI be buying it
FutureImmediateI'ma buy it b
Post-immediateI'ma gonna buy it b
Indefinite futureI gonna buy it

^a Syntactically, I bought it is grammatical, but done (always unstressed, pronounced as /dən/ ) is used to emphasize the completed nature of the action. [69]

^b I'ma, also commonly spelled Imma, is pronounced as /ˈaɪmə/ . [70] Harvard professor Sunn m'Cheaux claims I'ma originated in the Gullah language (an English creole), which uses "a-" instead of "-ing" for this type of verb inflection. [71] Other sources suggest it is a further shortening of I'm gonna. [72]

As phase auxiliary verbs, been and done must occur as the first auxiliary; when they occur as the second, they carry additional aspects: [68]

He been done working means "he finished work a long time ago".
He done been working means "until recently, he worked over a long period of time".

The latter example shows one of the most distinctive features of AAVE: the use of be to indicate that performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In most other American English dialects, this can only be expressed unambiguously by using adverbs such as usually. [73]

This aspect-marking form of been or BIN [74] is stressed and semantically distinct from the unstressed form: She BIN running ('She has been running for a long time') and She been running ('She has been running'). [75] [76] This aspect has been given several names, including perfect phase, remote past, and remote phase (this article uses the third). [77] As shown above, been places action in the distant past. [78] However, when been is used with stative verbs or gerund forms, been shows that the action began in the distant past and that it is continuing now. Rickford (1999) suggests that a better translation when used with stative verbs is "for a long time". For instance, in response to "I like your new dress", one might hear Oh, I been had this dress, meaning that the speaker has had the dress for a long time and that it isn't new. [77]

To see the difference between the simple past and the gerund when used with been, consider the following expressions:

I been bought her clothes means "I bought her clothes a long time ago".
I been buying her clothes means "I've been buying her clothes for a long time".

Auxiliaries in African American Vernacular English are related in a typical pattern. They can be grouped into negative forms and affirmative forms for each of the words. For example, "had" is an affirmative form, while "hatn" is the corresponding negative form. These same auxiliaries can be used to mark sentences for the anterior aspect. As another example, was marks type 1 sentences, which by default are present tense, and transforms them to a time before the present. Take, for instance, "She at home": the word was can be inserted to mark this sentence, making the marked equivalent "She was at home". Auxiliaries such as these also have opposing negative and affirmative forms. In its negative form the auxiliary verb "wadn" is used to convey the opposing affirmative form. [67]

AAVE grammatical aspects
AspectExample Standard English meaning
Habitual/continuative aspect [79] He be working Tuesdays.He frequently (or habitually) works on Tuesdays.
Intensified continuative (habitual)He stay working.He is always working.
Intensified continuative (not habitual) [80] He steady working.He keeps on working.
Perfect progressiveHe been working.He has been working.
Irrealis (Mood)[ clarification needed ]He finna go to work.He is about to go to work. a

In addition to these, come (which may or may not be an auxiliary [83] ) may be used to indicate speaker indignation, such as in Don't come acting like you don't know what happened and you started the whole thing ("Don't try to act as if you don't know what happened, because you started the whole thing"). [84]

The irrealis [85] mood marker be, having no intrinsic tense refers to a current or future event that may be less than real.

Modals

The dialect uses double modals, such as might could, which can function in various ways, including as adverbs. [86]

Negation

Negatives are formed differently from most other varieties of English: [87]

While AAVE shares these with Creole languages, [90] Howe & Walker (2000) use data from early recordings of African Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and the recordings of former slaves to demonstrate that negation was inherited from nonstandard colonial English. [87]

Other grammatical characteristics

Vocabulary

AAVE shares most of its lexicon with other varieties of English, particularly that of informal and Southern dialects; for example, the relatively recent use of y'all . As statistically shown by Algeo (1991: 3–14), [98] the main sources for new words are combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating. [99] However, it has also been suggested that some of the vocabulary unique to AAVE has its origin in West African languages, but etymology is often difficult to trace, and without a trail of recorded usage, the suggestions below cannot be considered proven. [100]

Early AAVE and Gullah contributed a number of words of African origin to the American English mainstream, including gumbo, [101] goober, [102] yam, and banjo. [103]

Compounding in AAVE is a very common method in creating new vocabulary. The most common type of compounding is the noun–noun combination. [104] There is also the adjective–noun combination, which is the second most commonly occurring type of combination found in AAE slang. [105] AAE also combines adjectives with other adjectives, less frequently, but more so than in standard American English. [106]

AAVE has also contributed slang expressions such as cool and hip. [107] In many cases, the postulated etymologies are not recognized by linguists or the Oxford English Dictionary, such as to dig, [108] jazz, [109] tote, [109] and bad-mouth, a calque from Mandinka. [110] African American slang is formed by words and phrases that are regarded as informal. It involves combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating new words. African American slang possess all of the same lexical qualities and linguistic mechanisms as any other language. AAVE slang is more common in speech than it is in writing. [106]

AAVE also has words that either are not part of most other American English dialects or have strikingly different meanings. For example, there are several words in AAVE referring to White people that are not part of mainstream American English; these include gray as an adjective for Whites (as in gray dude), [105] possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms; and paddy, an extension of the slang use for "Irish". [111] "Red bone" is another example of this, usually referring to light skinned African Americans. [112]

"Ofay", which is pejorative, is another general term for a White person; it might derive from the Ibibio word afia, which means "light-colored", from the Yoruba word ofe, spoken in hopes of disappearing from danger. However, most dictionaries simply say its etymology is unknown. [113]

Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or seddity means "snobbish" or "bourgeois". [114]

AAVE has also contributed many words and phrases to other varieties of English, including chill out, main squeeze, soul, funky, and threads. [115]

Influence on other dialects

African-American Vernacular English has influenced the development of other dialects of English. The AAVE accent, New York accent, and Spanish-language accents have together yielded the sound of New York Latino English, some of whose speakers use an accent indistinguishable from an AAVE one. [116] AAVE has also influenced certain Chicano accents and Liberian Settler English, directly derived from the AAVE of the original 16,000 African Americans who migrated to Liberia in the 1800s. [117] In the United States, urban youth participating in hip-hop culture or marginalized as ethnic minorities are also well-studied in adopting African-American Vernacular English, or prominent elements of it: for example, Southeast-Asian Americans embracing hip-hop identities. [118] [119]

Variation

Urban versus rural variations

The first studies on the African American English (AAE) took place in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, to name a few. [120] These studies concluded that the African American Language (AAL) was homogeneous, which means that AAE was spoken the same way everywhere around the country. [120] Later, sociolinguists would realize that these cities lacked the influence of the rural south; the early studies had not considered the representation of the south of America, which caused the AAE studies to change. [120] To make those changes, the newer studies used the diversity of the country and took into consideration the rural south. [120]

African-American Vernacular English began as mostly rural and Southern, yet today is mostly urban and nationally widespread, and its more recent urban features are now even diffusing into rural areas. [121] Urban AAVE alone is intensifying with the grammatical features exemplified in these sentences: "He be the best" (intensified equative be), "She be done had her baby" (resultative be done), and "They come hollerin" (indignant come). On the other hand, rural AAVE alone shows certain features too, such as: "I was a-huntin" (a-prefixing); "It riz above us" (different irregular forms); and "I want for to eat it" (for to complement). [122] Using the word bees even in place of be to mean is or are in standard English, as in the sentence "That's the way it bees" is also one of the rarest of all deep AAVE features today, and most middle-class AAVE speakers would recognize the verb bees as part of only a deep "Southern" or "country" speaker's vocabulary. [123]

Local variations

There are at least 10 distinct regional accents in AAVE, [124] and regional patterns of pronunciation and word choice appear on social media. [125] [126] [127]

Regional variation in AAVE does not pattern with other regional variation in North American English, [128] which broadly follows East-to-West migration patterns, [129] but instead patterns with the population movements during the Great Migration, [130] resulting in a broadly South-to-North pattern, albeit with founder effects in cities that already had existing African American populations at the beginning of the Great Migration. [131] [132] There is no vowel for which the geographic variation in AAVE patterns with that of White American English. [133]

New York City AAVE incorporates some local features of the New York accent, including its high THOUGHT vowel; meanwhile, conversely, Pittsburgh AAVE may merge this same vowel with the LOT vowel, matching the cot-caught merger of White Pittsburgh accents, though AAVE accents traditionally do not have the cot-caught merger. Memphis, Atlanta, and Research Triangle AAVE incorporates the DRESS vowel raising and FACE vowel lowering associated with White Southern accents. Memphis and St. Louis AAVE are developing, since the mid-twentieth century, an iconic merger of the vowels in SQUARE and NURSE, making there sound like thurr. [134] [135] [136] Californian AAVE often lacks a cot-caught merger, especially before nasals. [128]

Social perception and context

African-American Vernacular suffers from persistent stigma and negative social evaluation in American culture. By definition, as a vernacular dialect of English, AAVE has not received the social prestige of a standard dialect, leading to widespread and long-standing misconceptions that it is a grammatically inferior form of English, which linguistics research of the twentieth century has debunked. However, educators and social commentators traditionally have advocated for eliminating AAVE usage through the public-education system for a variety of reasons, ranging from a continued belief that AAVE is intrinsically deficient to arguments that its use, by being stigmatized in certain social contexts, is socially limiting. [137] Some of the harshest criticism of AAVE or its use has come from African Americans themselves. [138] [139] [140] A conspicuous example was the "Pound Cake speech", in which Bill Cosby criticized some African Americans for various social behaviors, including the way they talked.

Educators traditionally have attempted to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system, perceiving the dialect as grammatically defective. [137] In 1974, the teacher-led Conference on College Composition and Communication issued a position statement affirming students' rights to their own dialects and the validity of all dialects. [141] Mainstream linguistics has long agreed with this view about dialects. [142] In 1979, a judge ordered the Ann Arbor School District to find a way to identify AAVE speakers in the schools and to "use that knowledge in teaching such students how to read standard English." [143] In 1996, Oakland Unified School District made a controversial resolution for AAVE, which was later called "Ebonics". The Oakland School board approved that Ebonics be recognized as a language independent from English (though this particular view is not endorsed by linguists), that teachers would participate in recognizing this language, and that it would be used in theory to support the transition from Ebonics to Standard American English in schools. This program lasted three years and then died off. [144]

Although the distinction between AAVE and General American dialects is clear to most English speakers, some characteristics, notably double negatives and the omission of certain auxiliaries (see below) such as the has in has been are also characteristic of many colloquial dialects of American English. There is general uniformity of AAVE grammar, despite its vast geographic spread across the whole country. [145] This may be due in part to relatively recent migrations of some African Americans out of the American South (see Great Migration and Second Great Migration) as well as to long-term racial segregation that kept these speakers living together in largely homogeneous communities. [146]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Also known as Black English, Black Vernacular English, Black English Vernacular, African-American English, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term). [1]
  2. ↑ AAVE is pronounced as an initialism, /ˈɑːveɪ/ , or /æv/ . [2] [3]

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African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a nonstandard dialect of English deeply embedded in the culture of the United States, including popular culture. It has been the center of controversy about the education of African-American youths, the role AAVE should play in public schools and education, and its place in broader society. The linguistic and cultural history of African Americans has been fostered and maintained in part through the Black church, including some lexicon and the call and response style of linguistic engagement. Artistic and cultural movements originating with African Americans, such as jazz and hip-hop, have also significantly showcased, influenced, or sometimes mainstreamed elements of AAVE in the broader American culture and even on the global stage. The dialect is also seen and heard in advertising.

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The sound system of New York City English is popularly known as a New York accent. The accent of the New York metropolitan area is one of the most recognizable in the United States, largely due to its popular stereotypes and portrayal in radio, film, and television. Several other common names exist based on more specific locations, such as Bronx accent, Brooklyn accent, Queens accent, Long Island accent, North Jersey accent. Research supports the continued classification of all these under a single label, despite some common assumptions among locals that they meaningfully differ.

The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant,, is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the in that position since it is followed by a vowel in this case.

In sociolinguistics, covert prestige is the high social prestige with which certain nonstandard languages or dialects are regarded within a speech community, though usually only by their own speakers. This is in contrast to the typical case of standard varieties holding widespread and often consciously acknowledged high prestige—that is, overt prestige—within a speech community.

Sonja L. Lanehart is an American linguist and professor of linguistics in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona who has advanced the study of language use in the African American community. Her work as a researcher, author, and editor includes African American English, education, literacy, identity, language variation, women's languages, intersectionality, and inclusivity within the African American community. Lanehart's sociolinguistic orientation prioritizes language as a phenomenon influenced by sociocultural and historical factors. She also utilizes the perspectives of Critical Race Theory and Black feminism in her work. Lanehart was the Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Literature and Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio from 2006 to 2019, and was selected by the Linguistic Society of America as a 2021 Fellow.

References

  1. ↑ For the reasons that linguists avoid using the term Ebonics, see for example Green (2002:7–8).
  2. ↑ Tamasi, Susan; Antieau, Lamont (2015). Language and Linguistic Diversity in the US: An Introduction. Routledge. p. 146. ISBN   978-0-415-80667-1.
  3. ↑ Gordon, Matthew J. (2013). Labov: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury. p. 215. ISBN   978-1-4411-5852-9.
  4. ↑ Edwards (2004), p. 383.
  5. ↑ Rickford (2015), pp. 302, 310.
  6. ↑ Spears (2015).
  7. ↑ Wheeler (1999), p. 55.
  8. ↑ "Do you speak American?: African American English". PBS .
  9. ↑ Benor, Sarah Bunin (April 19, 2010). "Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity". Journal of Sociolinguistics. 14 (2): 159–183. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9841.2010.00440.x.
  10. ↑ McWhorter (2001), p. 179.
  11. ↑ Thomas (2006), pp. 16, 19–20.
  12. ↑ Wardhaugh (2002), p. 341.
  13. 1 2 Poplack (2000), p. ?.
  14. 1 2 Poplack & Tagliamonte (2001), p. ?.
  15. ↑ See Howe & Walker (2000) for more information
  16. ↑ The Oakland school board's resolution "was about a perfectly ordinary variety of English spoken by a large and diverse population of Americans of African descent. . . . [E]ssentially all linguists agree that what the Oakland board was dealing with is a dialect of English."Pullum (1997)
  17. ↑ McWhorter (2001), pp. 162, 185.
  18. ↑ McWhorter (2001), pp. 162, 182.
  19. ↑ Mufwene (2001 :29) and Bailey (2001 :55), both citing Stewart (1964), Stewart (1969), Dillard (1972), and Rickford (1997a).
  20. ↑ Smith & Crozier (1998), pp. 113–114.
  21. ↑ Those in favor of the "creole hypothesis" of African-American Vernacular English include creolists William Stewart, John Dillard and John Rickford.
  22. ↑ Green (2002), pp. 1–11, 'Introduction'.
  23. ↑ William Labov, in the Foreword to Poplack & Tagliamonte (2001), says "I would like to think that this clear demonstration of the similarities among the three diaspora dialects and the White benchmark dialects, combined with their differences from creole grammars, would close at least one chapter in the history of the creole controversies."
  24. ↑ Ludden, Jennifer (September 6, 2010). "Op-Ed: DEA Call For Ebonics Experts Smart Move" Archived 2018-01-08 at the Wayback Machine . NPR.
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  44. ↑ Green (2002), pp. 117–119.
  45. ↑ Green (2002 :121–122) although her examples are different.
  46. ↑ Green, Lisa J. (2012). African American English: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN   978-0-521-81449-2. OCLC   900606048.
  47. 1 2 Green (2002), p. 107.
  48. 1 2 Bloomquist, Jennifer; Green, Lisa J.; Lanehart, Sonja L.; Thomas, Erik R.; Bailey, Guy (July 1, 2015), "Segmental Phonology of African American English", The Oxford Handbook of African American Language, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199795390.013.13, ISBN   978-0-19-979539-0
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  56. ↑ Labov (1972), pp. 18–19.
  57. ↑ See Baugh (2000 :92–94) on "aks" and metathesis, on the frequency with which "aks" is brought up by those who ridicule AAVE (e.g. Cosby (1997)), and on the linguistic or cognitive abilities of a speaker of another variety of English who would take "aks" to mean "axe" in a context that in another variety would probably call for "ask".
  58. ↑ Green (2002), pp. 119–121.
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  66. ↑ Fickett (1972), pp. 17–18.
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  74. ↑ In order to distinguish the stressed and unstressed forms, which carry different meaning, linguists often write the stressed version as BIN
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  81. ↑ Green (2002), p. 71.
  82. ↑ Green (2002 :70–71), citing DeBose & Faraclas (1993).
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  101. ↑ Shorter OED, 5th edition, cf Bantu kingumbo
  102. ↑ Shorter OED, 5th edition, Kikongo nguba
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  105. 1 2 Widawski, Maciej (March 5, 2015). African American Slang: A Linguistic Description. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-1-316-24061-8.
  106. 1 2 Widawski, Maciej (2015), "Introduction", African American Slang, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. ix–xii, doi:10.1017/cbo9781139696562.001 (inactive November 2, 2024), ISBN   978-1-139-69656-2 {{citation}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  107. ↑ Guralnik (1984), p. ?.
  108. ↑ This is from Wolof dëgg or dëgga, meaning "to understand/appreciate" according to Smitherman 2000 s.v. "Dig"; or, it may instead come from Irish tuig , according to Random House Unabridged, 2001
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  113. ↑ Smitherman (2000) suggests either a general West African or the Pig Latin origin. Black Talk, s.v. "Ofay".
  114. ↑ Smitherman (2000), s.v. "Kitchen". Kitchen, siditty: Dictionary of American Regional English, s.vv. "Kitchen", "Siditty".
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  138. ↑ Lippi-Green (1997), p. 200.
  139. ↑ Lanehart (2001), p. 6.
  140. ↑ "Black critics [of Black English] use all the different arguments of the White critics, and spare us the more or less open embarrassment that all White Americans feel when publicly criticizing anything or anyone Black. So, of course, they can be even more wrong-headed and self-righteously wrong-headed than anyone else ..." Quinn (1982 :150–51).
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  142. ↑ McWhorter (2001).
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