African American Vernacular English

Language is that thing which connects human beings to each other and separates Homo sapiens sapiens from the rest of the carbon-based life forms out there. Unfortunately, it can also be the thing which separates man from his fellow man, often for little or no reason. Nowhere (at least in America) is this more evident than when one considers the case of African American English Vernacular, or AAVE, as it is referred to by linguists. Well, some linguists that is the name given by those of the school of thought that AAVE is a non-standard derivation of English, with many borrowings from the English spoken in the South. There is another school of thought which prefers the term Ebonics and believes it to be a creole that derived independently of Standard English. There is a third, more pragmatic school of thought is that it doesn’t really matter where it came from so much as where it is going to the subscribers of this belief AAVE is just another version of English (Wardhaugh 344).

The differences between AAVE and Standard English (also known as SE) can lead to misunderstandings that vary in severity ranging from low- frustration at miscommunication, to high, such as when racial tensions get stirred. The first happens on a daily basis, more times than could possibly be counted. Fortunately the latter is not as ubiquitous but it does happen, such as when Bill Cosby raised almost everyone’s ire with his disparaging comments about both Ebonics and the proposition passed by the Oakland school board to teach Standard English to students using Ebonics. Oakland is just one of many cities where the majority of the inner-city youth predominantly speak AAVE. He made it very clear that he felt that AAVE was an illegitimate language and that is was (at least partially) responsible for what he felt was a poor image of black American youth as a whole.

African American Vernacular English is spoken almost exclusively in the United States with the exception of some hip-hop performers in other places around the world and American servicemen and servicewomen stationed abroad. It is not found (save for the exceptions which must exist to prove the rule) in the ex-pat community, for that is primarily the oeuvre of the educational set, which uses Standard English almost exclusively. Within the United States, AAVE is most commonly heard in the regions with highest concentration of African-Americans, such as the South and urban centers of major metropolitan areas. AAVE can be heard in all walks of life in the United States and is becoming more prevalent as an increasing number of people have cable television, where the vast majority of professional athletes and music stars (read: role models) employ the use of AAVE. There can be little doubt any more that youth are greatly influenced by television and by their heroes; just from a casual overview of pop culture, say walking on a college campus, one can attest to the increase in use of AAVE.

That, while being true, only tells part of the story according to Wardhaugh, “AAVE may not limit its users cognitively but it certainly limits them socially, and one of the purposes of education is the achievement of social equality” (348). This seems to lend some credence to Bill Cosby’s famous diatribe. Watch sports television and you will realize very quickly that almost nobody in any position of prominence (head coach, general manager, owner etc.) uses AAVE, at least not when they are on camera. Players, on the other hand, use a lot of AAVE, both off and on-camera. To a lesser degree, the same can be said to be true of music stars they know that in order to have crossover appeal necessary to draw in a wider (and whiter) audience and get the money of the majority of the majority demographic, they are going to have to “talk more white”. Alicia Keyes is an excellent example of this if one were to watch an interview with her on BET, then watch one on MTV, one might well be surprised to learn that it was the same person speaking. Russell Simmons, who is considered the first hip-hop mogul, can adjust the way he speaks to fit his surroundings and the sensibilities of the hearers he is addressing. From this, we can ascertain that there is certainly still attached to the use of AAVE, except within peer groups.

While many speakers of AAVE do often tone down some of the syntactic features that they think whites might find “offensive” (when the hearer is white), it is not really a diglossic situation per se, in that the perceived need to do that is not mandated by the hearer’s class level nor dictated by the hearer. During the Oakland debate of 1997, many prominent black leaders, such as Jesse Jackson, came out against the teaching of SE through the use of Ebonics because they felt that using Ebonics to teach SE would pre-suppose a diglossia. There are certainly many near parallels that can be drawn between the relationship shared by AAVE and SE and a true diglossia, but none are actual parallels. There are some (primarily older) black Americans who believe that they were never taught Standard English because the government wanted to keep them uneducated but there has been no evidence to support that claim.

Due to the latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) racism that is still undeniably alive and sick in America, there may be the existence of a sort of a “false reverse diglossia”, to possibly coin a phrase. By that I mean a situation where some upper class whites feel that blacks use AAVE either because they are too lazy to learn the “right way” to speak (which is ironic because it just shows how uneducated they are on the matter) or that their use of AAVE is some code to which whites are not privy. This issue has been addressed by numerous hip-hop artists, perhaps most famously the notable and blunt album from the group Public Enemy, titled “Fear of a Black Planet”. The flip side of that coin is how frequently hip-hop terminology becomes homogenized and “adoptedby the mainstream culture and usedto sell all kinds of products in the popular media”. (Meier 43)

While any case where abject terror was actually ascribed to AAVE would be hyperbole at best, it is not so far a stretch of the truth to consider the belief of some white Americans that AAVE is a code that is used to indicate solidarity and brother/sisterhood. While that may not ostensibly be the case, it is not unfair to say that the results bear that being part of the equation most African-American children are taught the vernacular of their neighborhood and social circle with the intent of being hard for many mainstream white Americans to understand, but that ends up being the result.

One common misconception about AAVE is that it is “lazy English”, which is patently untrue but it is easy to see how people can be lead to make that assumption. One of the things most Americans were taught at a very early age is to not use double negatives, and phrases such as ain’t got none prevail in AAVE. Another way in which the differences between AAVE and SE can lead to difficulties is in the area of education, where a students’ use of AAVE in their neighborhood conflicts with the way they are being taught to write at school (Orr 132). A black student repeatedly using a double negative does not indicate that that student does not understand the grammar rules; it merely reflects how that child was taught to communicate.

Given that language is alive, who is to say what the future holds for African-American Vernacular English and Standard English their paths could be either converging or diverging. Or neither. Or both. Those potentials can be extrapolated from any number of data sets to show any number or outcomes; what is important to remember is that, like man, no two languages are the same, but every one should have rights and their presence should never be demeaned.

Works Cited

Meier, Terry. Black Communications and Learning to Read : Building on Children’s Linguistic and Cultural Strengths. Danbury: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Incorporated, 2007.

Orr, Eleanor W. Twice as Less : Black English and the Performance of Black Students in Mathematics and Science. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2001.

Osborn, Terry A., ed. Language and Cultural Diversity in U. S. Schools : Democratic Principles in Action. New York: Praeger, 2005.

Richardson, Elaine. Hiphop Literacies. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Tagliamonte, Sali, and Shana Poplack. African American English in the Diaspora. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2001.

Wardhaugh, Ronald. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2005.