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THE UNITED STATES OF ACCENTS: AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH

What is AAVE? Where did it come from? How is it used today? All this and more
are answered in this installment of the United States of Accents.
By Justine Stephens

February 3, 2020
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Play

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, African American Vernacular English, often
shortened to AAVE, is “a nonstandard variety of English spoken by some African
Americans.” Nonstandard is pretty vague, though, in the all-encompassing terms
of language. What exactly is so “nonstandard” about this particular dialect of
English? Where is it spoken, and by whom? When and how did it become popular?
Let’s take a closer look.

FROM THE SOUTH TO THE MOUTH

AAVE’s origins stem from how Black Americans first came to this country over 400
years ago — on slave ships coming primarily from West Africa. Its actual roots
are somewhat muddled, however. Like a lot of unknown Black history, it’s still
argued whether AAVE is simply a variant adapted from the Germanic American
English overheard on plantations, or if it’s an entirely separate Creole
language that evolved from contact between English and several West African
languages.

The fact that AAVE shares many structural and pronunciation characteristics with
other African-based Creoles around the world makes the Creole Theory intriguing
for linguists. That said, AAVE also shares much of its grammar and phonology
with rural dialects across the American South.

Out of the beauty of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ‘30s came Harlem
jive — or simply, jive. It was an amalgamation of AAVE, Harlem slang, lingo from
criminals and Broadway gossip, and it evolved into a fast-talking, exciting
lingo that spread with New York’s influence. On top of this, linguist William
Labov studied how racial segregation further pushed the development of AAVE. He
found that living in segregated communities (unsurprisingly) made for further
divergence from Standard American English over time.

SO, WHAT EXACTLY IS AAVE?

African American Vernacular English is also known as Black English or Black
Vernacular English (and historically as “Ebonics,” although we’ll get to that
term later). This dialect has unique phonology, grammar and vocabulary, and
these characteristics are conventionalized, meaning that they’re used and
understood by the wider speech community. That said, you’ll also find that
accents and some vocabulary in AAVE will vary from New York to New Orleans to
Chicago, just as they would for any other geographically based dialects.

VERB CONJUGATION

The addition, subtraction and replacement of key words, vowels and consonants
separate AAVE from Standard American English. Deleting the verbal copula in the
present tense — leaving out “is” or “are” — is one of the most distinct
characteristics of AAVE. “Sasha going to the store” or “Tyrone working Saturday
night” are prime examples of this, and still means the same thing if the “is”
were present.

AAVE speakers can take this one step further, and adding a habitual “be” to
signify something that is often or usually done. “Tyrone be working Saturday
nights” means that Tyrone regularly works on Saturday nights. To show that
Tyrone has always worked Saturday nights, you’d say “Tyrone been working
Saturday nights.”

Verbs are also often uninflected (not changed) for number or person, which means
there is no –s suffix in the present-tense third-person singular. So if you want
to describe where Tyrone works, you’d drop the final s, saying, “He work at the
bar.”

SOUND CHANGES

There are some regular sound changes often observed in AAVE, in particular,
something called metathesis. Metathesis involves switching around sounds within
words. For example, “ask” could be pronounced “aks,” or “library” pronounced
“libary.” TH-fronting is also a prominent feature of African American Vernacular
English. For example, “those” and “doze” can sound nearly identical. Another
common sound change involves dropping the R when it’s not followed by a vowel,
which makes AAVE one of many non-rhotic dialects spoken in the USA.

WORD ORDER

Word order in questions is also a distinctive characteristic of AAVE grammar.
For example, instead of moving the verb to immediately follow the question word
(“Why aren’t they coming?”), AAVE speakers often maintain the typical word order
of a statement (“Why they ain’t coming?”).

Sometimes, we AAVE speakers like to add more words than would be considered
strictly necessary to get our point across. (Why? Because we be extra, of
course.) We’ll often use double negatives (“Sasha ain’t never at the store”) and
preterite “had” (“Tyrone had went to work”) to get our point across. The
expletive “it” is one of my favorite aspects of AAVE: it’s simply replacing
“there” with “it.” “It’s a bodega just two blocks away” is how I’d direct
someone coming off the NYC subway in my former neighborhood of Crown Heights,
Brooklyn.

LEXICON

One of the most notable and familiar parts of AAVE is our lexicon of colorful,
descriptive words. Hopefully it’s common knowledge that jazz was invented by
Black Americans, but did you know that the modern way we use “cool” and “hip”
was coined by us as well? Here are a few recent highlights:

Finna

* Meaning: About to. Replaced “fixing to” from Southern English.
* Example: I’m finna go to the store, you want anything

Wildin / whilin

* Meaning: To say or do something crazy. Synonymous with buggin or trippin.
* Example: That professor was whilin assigning us all that reading.

GOAT

* Meaning: Acronym that stands for Greatest Of All Time. Typically used to
describe an icon.
* Example: Solange is the GOAT.

A NOTE ON “EBONICS” AND “CORRECTNESS”

African American Vernacular English used to be called “Ebonics” (a portmanteau
of “ebony” and “phonics”) when the term was coined in 1970s. It was created by
the Black psychologist Robert Williams in the hope of changing the conversation
around the dialect, which was often referred to as lazy or broken English by the
white establishment. The term garnered national attention when the Oakland
School Board declared it to be the primary language of its 28,000 primarily
Black students. Because of the media storm that followed, Ebonics now has a
negative connotation.

It should go without saying that there are a multitude of ways to speak the
English language. As the late Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison
emphasized, “It’s terrible to think that a child with five different
present-tenses comes to school to be faced with books that are less than his own
language. And then to be told things about his language, which is him, that are
sometimes permanently damaging.”

Play

AAVE IN TODAY’S WORLD

In music, pop artists like Italian-American singer Ariana Grande have shifted
from the flowery lyrics and dance beats that defined the 2000s and early 2010s
to rap interludes over trap rhythms in the past few years. Grande chirps in her
Grammy-nominated song 7 rings, “My receipts be lookin like phone numbas / If it
ain’t money then wrong numba / Black card is my business [pronounced as
“bidniss”] card.” She adds various habitual “be”s and “ain’t”s, as well as omits
the verbal copula and final consonants. Since the internet has been at our
fingertips over the last 30 years — particularly in the past 5-10 years with the
rise of social media — the proximity to AAVE for those who aren’t Black has
risen considerably.

There are, however, other situations where AAVE still isn’t accepted — and where
this creates tangible consequences. Take, for example, the United States’ legal
system. When “He don’t be in that neighborhood” was heard in a courtroom in
Philadelphia, a court reporter erroneously transcribed it to “We going to be in
this neighborhood” — exactly the opposite of what was said.

When Warren Demesme was up for trial in 2017 and asked the police “Why don’t you
just give me a lawyer, dog?” his rights were ignored because someone presumed
he’d requested a “lawyer dog,” not an actual attorney. “The larger implication
is that people are not being afforded a sense of fairness and justice because
the system is not responding to their language,” said Anthony L. Ricco, a New
York-based criminal defense lawyer, when told about this study’s findings.

To some, the Black dialect is equated with being uneducated. But then there are
non-Black individuals, like Grande, who seem to be fine hopping between the two
without the the consequences of what Black speakers can experience. This is why
AAVE usage often neatly falls along the lines of cultural appropriation.

Play

Black Americans also experience situations where we might switch from AAVE to
Standard American English — also known as code-switching. This can happen in the
workplace or in academia, or at any other point when speaking with a person who
doesn’t understand our dialect. We do it so that they can understand us or feel
comfortable, as described in the video above.

To me, AAVE is comprised of friendly, comforting and familial Black
colloquialisms. AAVE feels like your mother’s bosom pressing up against the back
of your head as she’s braiding On the basketball court or sharing in community
with friends, AAVE is an ever-evolving, intimate and unifying aspect of
communication in Black American life.

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Justine Stephens
A New Yorker by birth and at heart, Justine Stephens is a musician, community
organizer and occasional visual artist. After her jazz debut feature in the
award-winning 2011 short film Kuvuka Daraja, she has given more than 70 world
premieres of contemporary classical and jazz music. Justine is proud to have
contributed to the growth and development of American Ballet Theatre, Carnegie
Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, and more arts institutions and companies. She
enjoys yoga, cooking and daydreaming of being back in Mexico City, where she
succeeded in only speaking Spanish for a week last summer. Justine is currently
based in Boston.
A New Yorker by birth and at heart, Justine Stephens is a musician, community
organizer and occasional visual artist. After her jazz debut feature in the
award-winning 2011 short film Kuvuka Daraja, she has given more than 70 world
premieres of contemporary classical and jazz music. Justine is proud to have
contributed to the growth and development of American Ballet Theatre, Carnegie
Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, and more arts institutions and companies. She
enjoys yoga, cooking and daydreaming of being back in Mexico City, where she
succeeded in only speaking Spanish for a week last summer. Justine is currently
based in Boston.

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