AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH

Presenter: Marta HannichOctober - 2011

African American Vernacular English

• The history of the English Language is divided in periods with different dialects within each of them.

• The three main periods of the English language are: The Old English, the Middle English, and the Modern English.

• Within the Modern English period there is one variety known as the African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

• The AAVE is a variety of the American English dialect. It was spoken at the beginning by African people who were brought as slaves to the American Continent.

Historical Background

• During the early years of American settlement a highly distinctive form of English was emerging in the islands of the West Indies and the southern part of the mainland, spoken by the incoming black population.

• This was as a consequence of the importation of African slaves to work on the sugar plantations.

• The first 20 African slaves arrived in Virginia on a Dutch ship in 1619. The policy of slave-traders was to bring people of different language backgrounds together in the ships, to make it difficult for them to plot rebellion.

LABELS Other labels attached to this

variety currently known as African American Vernacular English are:

Negro Dialect Non standard Negro English Black English Vernacular Black English Afro American Ebonics African American (vernacular)

English African American Language.

DEFINITION• African American Vernacular English is an ethnic variety of

the language spoken in the United States by many African Americans whose African ancestors were formally colonized in America from the 16th through the 19th centuries.

• The term “vernacular” applies to the unmonitored, everyday speech spoken in a local community; it contains and is defined by socially stigmatized grammatical elements and linguistic structures that contrast with the official standard.

• African American Vernacular English differ in some way from community to community but shared patterns of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar identify it all as AAVE

THEORIES OF ORIGINTHE DIALECTOLOGIST OR ANGLICIST HYPOTHESIS

• The roots of AAVE can be traced to the same sources as the early European American dialects, the dialects of English spoken in the British Isles.

• Africans simply learned the regional and social varieties of surrounding white speakers as they acquired English and that over the course of a couple of generations only a few minor traces of the African languages remained.

• This view concentrates on the English origins of AAVE to the exclusion of African influence

THE CREOLIST HYPOTHESIS

• It states that AAVE developed from a creole language.

• A special language developed from language contact situations in which the vocabulary from one primary language is imposed on a specially adapted, restricted grammatical structure.

• Over time, through contact with surrounding dialects, this creole language was modified to become more like other varieties of English in a process called decreolization .

CHARACTERISTICSLINGUISTIC FEATURES:

Morphological and Syntactic Features:• Existencial It: AAVE speakers often use it as the empty subject

where speakers of other dialects would use there, as in It’s some coffee in the kitchen.

• Absence of plural –s marking: For example four girl.• Absence of positive –s: For example: at my mama house. • Absence of third person singular –s marking: For example, It

seem like…or She have three kids.• Deletion of the verb Be: is a syntactic feature that

characterizes AAVE. For example: He nice for He’s nice; They mine for They’re mine; Here I for Here I am.

• Stressed (remote past or emphatic) BEEN: Indicates an action that has been true for a long time or is emphatically true. For example, She BEEN tell me that, meaning “She told me that a long time ago”

• Use of ain’t for negation: For example, I ain’t lying’. The usage that is unique to AAVE is its alteration with didn’t, as in He ain’t go no further than third or fourth grade, meaning He didn’t go further than third or fourth grade

• Multiple Negation: . In multiple negation constructions, negations can be marked on auxiliaries (e.g. don’t) and indefinitive nouns such as anybody (nobody) and anything (nothing).

e.g.: “I sure hope it be no leak after they finish” meaning “I hope there won’t be a leak after they finish.”

“Bruce don’t want no teacher telling him nothing about no books” meaning “Bruce doesn’t want any teacher telling him anything about (any) books.”

PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES• R- Deletion: AAVE English as many other dialects of both

British and American English, includes a rule of r- deletion that deletes /r/ everywhere except before a vowel. For example: “guard” is pronounced “god”; “nor” is pronounced “gnow”, “sore” pronounced as “saw”; “poor” as “pa.”

• L-Deletion: They delete the letter /l/ in words such as toll [toe]; all [awe]; and help [hep].

• Consonant Cluster Simplification: This rule of AAVE simplifies consonant clusters, particularly at the end of words and when one of the two consonants is an alveolar (/t/, /d/, /s/, and /z/). The application of this rule may delete the past tense morpheme so that “meant” and “mend” are both pronounced as /men/ and “past” and “passed” may both be pronounced like /pass/.

CONCLUSION

• African American Vernacular English is somewhat different from what it is considered “Standard English”. That difference is what makes AAVE a singular and rich variety of English and it should be seen as such.

• The Creolist Hypothesis is the widely accepted to explain the origin of this variety. This theory states that “AAVE developed from language contact situations in which the vocabulary from one primary language is imposed on a separately adapted, restricted grammatical structure.”

• AAVE is a rule governed variety of English with unique linguistic features regarding its use and therefore should neither be considered as “bad English” nor as an inferior variety of the English language.

THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION!!!