African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a dialect of English distinct from standard American English yet 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. Stigma against AAVE, and discrimination against its users, is and has long been common—namely a result of racism against African Americans.
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 popularly seen and heard in advertising.
Popular misconceptions One myth is that AAVE is grammatically "simple" or "sloppy". However, like all dialects, AAVE shows consistent internal logic and grammatical complexity, and has evolved naturally among a community of speakers., citing Prescriptively, attitudes about AAVE are often less positive; since AAVE deviates from the standard, its use is commonly misinterpreted as a sign of ignorance, laziness, or both. argues that it is no coincidence that a population that has historically been "ridiculed and despised" would have its characteristic speech variety treated the same way. Perhaps because of this attitude (as well as similar attitudes among other Americans), speakers of AAVE are often bidialectal, being able to speak with more standard English features, as well as AAVE. Such linguistic adaptation in different environments is called code-switching—though argues that the situation is actually one of diglossia:Cited in each dialect, or code, is applied in different settings. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with increasing socioeconomic status (although AAVE is still used by even well-educated African Americans).
Another misconception is that AAVE is the native dialect (or even more inaccurately, a linguistic fad) employed by all African Americans. Wheeler (1999) warns that "AAVE should not be thought of as the language of Black people in America. Many African Americans neither speak it nor know much about it". Conversely, not all native AAVE speakers are African American, and nonnative speakers also incorporate elements into their speech.
argues that the use of AAVE carries racially affirmative political undertones as its use allows African Americans to assert their cultural upbringing. Nevertheless, use of AAVE also carries strong social connotations; presents a White female speaker of AAVE who is accepted as a member into African-American social groups despite her race.
Before substantial research of the 1960s and 1970s—including William Labov's groundbreakingly thorough grammatical study, Language in the Inner City—there was doubt that the speech of African Americans had any exclusive features not found in varieties spoken by other groups; noted that distinctive features of African-American speech were present in the speech of Southerners, while mistakenly argued that there were no substantial vocabulary or grammatical differences between the speech of Black people and other English dialects.Cited in
In the legal system The United States courts are divided over how to admit statements of ambiguous tense made in AAVE under evidence. In United States v. Arnold, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that "he finna shoot me" was a statement made in the present tense, so it was admissible hearsay under the excited utterance exception; however, the dissent held that past or present tense could not be determined by the statement, so the statement should not have been admitted into evidence.U.S. v. Arnold, 486 F.3d 177 (2007) http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/07a0181p-06.pdf Retrieved on Sept 23, 2013. Similarly, in State of Louisiana v. Demesme, the Louisiana courts ruled that the defendant's statement "if y'all think I did it, I know that I didn't do it, so why don't you just give me a lawyer dog 'cause this is not what's up" was too ambiguous to be considered a Miranda request for a lawyer.
In US courts, an interpreter is only routinely available for speakers of "a language other than English". argue that a lack of familiarity with AAVE (and other minority dialects of English) on the part of jurors, stenographers, and others can lead to misunderstandings in court. They especially focus on the Trayvon Martin case and how the testimony of Rachel Jeantel was perceived as incomprehensible and not credible by the jury due to her dialect.
A 2019 experimental study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, and Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, found that court stenographers in Philadelphia regularly fail to transcribe AAVE accurately, with about 40 percent of sentences being inaccurate, and only 83% accuracy at the word level, despite court stenographers being certified at or above 95% accuracy. Their study suggests that there is evidence that court reporters may potentially introduce incorrect transcriptions into the official court record, with ramifications in cross-examination, jury deliberations, and appeals. A 2016 qualitative study by researchers at Stanford University also suggests that testimony in AAVE—and other nonstandard varieties—is not necessarily always understood in a judicial setting. Some legal scholars have argued that these findings show a due process violation.
In music Spirituals, blues, jazz, R&B, and most recently, hip-hop are all genres falling under African-American music; as such, AAVE usually appears, through singing, speaking, or rapping, in these musical forms. Examples of morphosyntactic features of AAVE in genres other than hip-hop are given below: Artist Song Lyric AAVE feature Nina Simone "It Be's That Way Sometime" "It Be's That Way Sometime" habitual aspect with be Vera Hall "Trouble So Hard" "Don't nobody know my trouble but God" negative concord Texas Alexander "The Rising Sun" "She got something round, and it look just like a bat" lack of inflection on present-tense verb WC Handy "The St. Louis Blues" Cause my baby, he done left this town" use of "done" to indicate the recent past
More recently, AAVE has been used heavily in hip-hop to show "street cred". Examples of morphosyntactic AAVE features used by Black hip-hop artists are given below:
Artist Song Lyric AAVE feature LL Cool J "Control Myself" "She said her name Shayeeda" absence of copula LL Cool J "Control Myself" "I could tell her mama feed her" lack of inflection on present-tense verb Jay-Z and Kanye West "Gotta Have It" "You can bank I ain't got no ceilin negative concord
In addition to grammatical features, lexical items specific to AAVE are often used in hip-hop:
Artist Song Lyric AAVE lexical item Standard English definition Jay-Z and Kanye West "Otis" "Or the big-face rollie, I got two of those" rollie Rolex (watch) Tupac Shakur "Straight Ballin" "And getting ghost on the 5-0" 5-0 ("five-oh") police Lil Wayne "Blinded" "I can put bangles around yo' ashy ankles" ashy dry skin
Lexical items taken from
Because hip-hop is so intimately related to the African-American oral tradition, non-Black hip-hop artists also use certain features of AAVE; for example, in an MC battle, Eyedea said, "What that mean, yo?" dropping the "auxiliary do". However, they tend to avoid the term nigga, even as a marker of solidarity. White hip-hop artists such as Eyedea can choose to accentuate their whiteness by hyper-articulating postvocalic r sounds (i.e. the retroflex approximant).
AAVE is also used by non-Black artists in genres other than hip-hop, if less frequently. For instance, in "Tonight, Tonight", Hot Chelle Rae uses the term dime to mean "an attractive woman". Jewel's "Sometimes It Be That Way" employs habitual be in the title to indicate habitual aspect. If they do not employ similar features of AAVE in their speech, then it can be argued that they are modeling their musical performance to evoke aspects of particular musical genres such as R&B or the blues (as British pop musicians of the 1960s and beyond did to evoke rock, pop, and the blues). Some research suggests that non-African-American young adults learn AAVE vocabulary by listening to hip-hop music. And may have found that exposure to hip hop music greatly inspires its listeners to learn more about the genre.
In social media On Twitter, AAVE is used as a framework from which sentences and words are constructed, in order to accurately express oneself. Grammatical features and word pronunciations stemming from AAVE are preserved. Spellings based on AAVE have become increasingly common, to the point where it has become a normalized practice. Some examples include, "you" (you're), "they" (their/they're), "gon/gone" (going to), and "yo" (your).
In public education
With AAVE long facing discrimination and stigma in public education, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), a division of National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), issued a position statement on students' rights to their own language in April 1974. The position appeared in a special issue of College Composition and Communication in Fall of 1974. The resolution was as follows:
We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.
Around this time, pedagogical techniques similar to those used to teach English to speakers of foreign languages were shown to hold promise for speakers of AAVE. William Stewart experimented with the use of dialect readers—sets of text in both AAVE and standard English. The idea was that children could learn to read in their own dialect and then shift to "Standard English" with subsequent textbooks. developed a comprehensive set of dialect readers, called bridge readers, which included the same content in three different dialects: AAVE, a "bridge" version that was closer to "Standard American English" without being prohibitively formal, and a Standard English version. Despite studies that showed promise for such "Standard English as a Second Dialect" (SESD) programs, reaction to them was largely hostile and both Stewart's research and the Bridge Program were rejected for various political and social reasons, including strong resistance from parents.
A more formal shift in the recognition of AAVE came in the "Ann Arbor Decision" of 1979 (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al., v. Ann Arbor School District). In it, a federal judge of the Eastern District of Michigan ruled that in teaching Black children to read, a school board must adjust to the children's dialect, not the children to the school, and that, by not taking students' language into consideration, teachers were contributing to the failure of such students to read and use mainstream English proficiently.