African-American Vernacular English

[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 vernacular (non-standard) accent.

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.

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.

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.

[25] Creolist John Dillard quotes, for example, slave ship captain William Smith describing the sheer diversity of mutually unintelligible languages just in The Gambia.

In 1721, Cotton Mather conducted the first attempt at recording the speech of slaves in his interviews regarding the practice of smallpox inoculation.

Final consonant groups or clusters in AAVE have been examined as evidence of the systematic nature of this language variety, governed by specific rules.

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.

[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.

[77] To see the difference between the simple past and the gerund when used with been, consider the following expressions: Auxiliaries in African American Vernacular English are related in a typical pattern.

[87] 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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[118][119] 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.

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).

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.

[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.

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.