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African-American English

This article is about the variety of American English known as "Black English". For the fictional Middle Earth language, see Black Speech. For the minority group in Britain, see Black British. For the variety of British English, see Multicultural London English.
See also: List of creole languages

African-American English (AAE), also known as Black English in North American linguistics, is the set of English dialects primarily spoken by most black people in North America.[1] African-American English is not a homogeneous single dialect but, rather, a cluster of related dialects and dialect continuums,[2] with differences such as in vernacular versus standard forms, rural versus urban characteristics, features specific to singular cities or regions only, and other sociocultural criteria. Though African-American English mostly refers to spoken varieties that have no standard writing system, there has still been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.

African-American English
Black English
Region United States
Ethnicity African Americans
Latin (English alphabet)
American Braille
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –
Glottolog None

African-American English began as early as the seventeenth century, when the Atlantic slave trade brought African slaves into the majority-white culture of British-colonial North America in an area that became the Southern United States in the late eighteenth century.[3] During the development of plantation culture in this region, nonstandard dialects of English were widely spoken by British settlers,[4] as well as likely some creolized varieties, resulting in second-language English varieties developed by African Americans.[3] The nineteenth century's evolving cotton-plantation industry greatly contributed to spread of some of the first of these varieties as native and stable forms of English, including the direct ancestors of modern African-American Vernacular English.

Contents

African-American Vernacular EnglishEdit

Main article: African-American Vernacular English

African-American Vernacular (AAVE) is the native variety of the vast majority of working- and middle-class African Americans, particularly in urban areas,[1] with its own unique accent, grammar, and vocabulary features. Typical features of the grammar include an implicit copula (e.g., She my sister instead of She's my sister), simplification of the possessive form (e.g., my momma friend instead of my mom's friend), and complexification of verb aspects and tenses beyond those of other English dialects (e.g., constructions like I'm a-run, I be running, I BIN runnin, etc.). Common features of the phonology include non-rhoticity (dropping the r sound at the end of syllables), metathesis (e.g., aks instead of ask), simplification of diphthongs (e.g., eye typically sounds like ah), and a wider range of intonation or "melody" patterns that General American accents. AAVE is used by middle-class African Americans in casual, intimate, and informal settings as one end of a sociocultural language continuum, and it shows some slight variations by region or city.

African-American Standard EnglishEdit

African-American Standard English is the prestigious end of the middle-class African-American language continuum, used for more formal, careful, or public settings than AAVE. This variety exhibits standard English vocabulary and grammar but often retains elements of the unique AAVE accent.[5][6] Most middle-class African Americans are typically bi-dialectal between this variety and AAVE, learning this variety through schooling. Adults will frequently even codeswitch between the two varieties within a single conversation.

African-American Appalachian EnglishEdit

The small numbers of black Appalachian Americans have been reported as increasingly accommodating to the Appalachian/Southern dialect commonly associated with white Appalachians. These similarities include an accent that is rhotic, the categorical use of the grammatical construction "he works" or "she goes" (rather than the AAVE "he work" and "she go"), and Appalachian vocabulary (such as airish for "windy"). However, even African-American English in Appalachia is diverse, with African-American women linguistically divided along sociocultural lines: culturally conservative and "proper" church-goers tending to use more Appalachian regional features, but "porch sitters" affiliated with nationwide black youth culture and music tending to use more AAVE features.[7]

African-American Outer Banks EnglishEdit

African-American English in the North Carolina Outer Banks is rapidly accommodating to urban AAVE through the recent generations, despite having aligned with local Outer Banks English for centuries.[8]

Older African-American EnglishEdit

Older or early African-American English refers to a set of many varieties studied and reconstructed by theoretical linguists as spoken by the first African Americans and African slaves in the United States.

GullahEdit

Sea Island Creole English, or "Gullah" is the distinct language of some African Americans along the South Carolina and Georgia coast. Gullah is an English creole: a natural language developed independently from English while using mostly English vocabulary. A majority of Gullah speakers today probably form a continuum with the English language. A sub-dialect of Gullah is also spoken in Oklahoma and Texas, known as Afro-Seminole Creole.

In literatureEdit

There is a long tradition of representing the speech of blacks in American literature. A number of researchers[9] have looked into the ways that American authors have depicted the speech of black characters, investigating how black identity is established and how it connects to other characters. Brasch (1981:x) argues that early mass media portrayals of black speech are the strongest historical evidence of a separate variety of English for blacks.[10] Early popular works are also used to determine the similarities that historical varieties of black speech have in common with modern AAVE.[11][12]

The earliest depictions of black speech came from works written in the eighteenth century,[13] primarily by white authors. A notable exception is Clotel, the first novel written by an African American (William Wells Brown).[14][15] Depictions have largely been restricted to dialogue and the first novel written entirely in AAVE was June Jordan's His Own Where (1971),[16] though Alice Walker's epistolary novel The Color Purple is a much more widely known work written entirely in AAVE.[17] Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun also has near exclusive use of AAVE.[18] The poetry of Langston Hughes uses AAVE extensively.[19][page needed]

Some other notable works that have incorporated representations of black speech (with varying degrees of perceived authenticity) include:[20]

As there is no established spelling system for AAVE,[24] depicting it in literature is instead often done through spelling changes to indicate its phonological features,[25] or to contribute to the impression that AAVE is being used (eye dialect).[26] More recently, authors have begun focusing on grammatical cues,[14] and even the use of certain rhetorical strategies.[27]

Portrayals of black characters in movies and television are also done with varying degrees of authenticity.[28] In Imitation of Life (1934), the speech and behavioral patterns of Delilah (an African American character) are reminiscent of minstrel performances that set out to exaggerate stereotypes, rather than depict black speech authentically.[29] More authentic performances, such as those in the following movies and TV shows, occur when certain speech events, vocabulary, and syntactic features are used to indicate AAVE usage, often with particular emphasis on young, urban African Americans:[30]

See alsoEdit

ReferencesEdit

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  • Bailey, Guy; Thomas, Erik (1998), "Some aspects of African-American Vernacular English phonology", in Mufwene, Salikoko; Rickford, John R.; Bailey, Guy; Baugh, John, African-American English: Structure, History, and Use, London: Routledge, pp. 85–109 
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  • Holton, Sylvia Wallace (1984), Down Home and Up Town: the Representation of Black Speech in American Fiction, London: Associated University Press 
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Further readingEdit

  1. ^ a b Edwards (2004), p. 383.
  2. ^ Di Paolo, Marianna; Spears, Arthur K. Languages and Dialects in the U.S.: Focus on Diversity and Linguistics. Routledge. p. 102
  3. ^ a b Kautzsch, Alexander (2004). Earlier African American English: Morphology and Syntax. In Edgar W. Schneider, Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie & Clive Upton (eds.). A Handbook of Varieties of English. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 341.
  4. ^ McWhorter (2001), pp. 162, 182.
  5. ^ Rickford (2015), pp. 302, 310.
  6. ^ Spears (2015).
  7. ^ Wolfram, Walt. (2013). "African American speech in southern Appalachia". In Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity, and Community, edited by Nancy Hayward and Amy Clark. pp. 81-93.
  8. ^ Wolfram, Walt; Kohn, Mary E. (forthcoming). "The regional development of African American Language". In Sonja Lanehart, Lisa Green, and Jennifer Bloomquist (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on African American Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 154.
  9. ^ For example,Holloway (1978), Holloway (1987), Baker (1984), and Gates (1988)
  10. ^ cited in Green (2002:166)
  11. ^ Green (2002:166), citing Dillard (1992)
  12. ^ Walser (1955), p. 269.
  13. ^ Rickford & Rickford (2000), p. 13.
  14. ^ a b Rickford (1999), p. ??.
  15. ^ Rickford & Rickford (2000), p. 19.
  16. ^ Rickford & Rickford (2000), p. 21.
  17. ^ Rickford & Rickford (2000), p. 22.
  18. ^ Rickford & Rickford (2000), p. 28.
  19. ^ The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994).
  20. ^ Examples listed in Rickford & Rickford (2000:14)
  21. ^ "Hurston Reviews". virginia.edu. 
  22. ^ http://www2.tulane.edu/article_news_details.cfm?ArticleID=3324 Archived June 14, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
  23. ^ Sapphire (1996). Push. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780679446262. 
  24. ^ Green (2002), p. 238.
  25. ^ Green (2002), pp. 168, 196.
  26. ^ Rickford & Rickford (2000), p. 23.
  27. ^ Green (2002), p. 196.
  28. ^ Green (2002), p. ?.
  29. ^ Green (2002), p. 202.
  30. ^ Green (2002), pp. 206–209, 211.
  31. ^ Trotta & Blyahher (2011).
  32. ^ "Language Log on the Accents in "The Wire"". 9 August 2011. 
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