AAVE

- Although many people refer to this variety as "Ebonics", most linguists prefer the term African American English (AAE) or or African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

- This term serves to place AAVE in the context of the many regional, national, and sociocultural forms of English such as Southern English, British English, Cajun English, and so forth; it also avoids the strong emotions and misunderstandings sometimes associated with the term Ebonics.

- AAVE has been an important topic of discussion among linguists and the public for almost a half-century now, and is often discussed in sociolinguistics courses.

Dr Wolfram

"No variety of English has been more closely scrutinized over the past half-century than African American English. We have learned much about its historical development and structural description, and its status as a legitimate variety of English is unquestioned. At the same time, it remains embedded in enduring controversy, due no doubt to the sensitivity of race and ethnicity in American society."

-Dr. Walt Wolfram (Sociolinguist), July 2007

Two issues in the development of AAVE

1) the question of whether AAVE's predecessors, two or three hundred years ago, included creole languages similar to Gullah (spoken on the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia) or the English-based creoles of Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Hawaii or Sierra Leone.

2) The second is the "divergence issue"--the question of whether AAVE is currently diverging or becoming more different from white vernacular dialects in the US

(Rickford, 1998)

Two positions on the development of AAVE

- From the point of view of the creolist/dialectologist debate, the fundamental question is whether a significant number of the Africans who came to the United States between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries went through processes of pidginization, creolization and (maybe) decreolization in acquiring English (the creolists' position),

- or whether they learned the English of British and other immigrants fairly rapidly and directly, without an intervening pidgin or creole stage (the dialectologists' position).

Interesting facts:

- there were striking differences from one region to another. A creole is much more likely to have developed in South Carolina, where "blacks constituted over 60% of the total population within fifty years of initial settlement by the British" (Rickford 1986:255)

- than in New York, where blacks constituted "only 16% of the population as late as the 1750's, one hundred years after British settlement" (ibid).

When one considers that from 1750 to 1900, 85% to 90% of the Black population lived in the South, and that African Americans in other parts of the country are primarily the descendants of people who emigrated from the South in waves beginning with World War I (Bailey and Maynor 1987:466),

it is clearly the demographics of the South rather than the North or Middle colonies which are relevant in assessing the chances of prior creolization (Rickford 1997).

Types of evidence that favor the Creole Hypothesis

1. Sociohistorical conditions (suitable for pidginization and/or creolization)

2. Historical attestations (literary texts; ex-slave narratives and recordings)

3. Diaspora recordings (Samaná, Liberian Settler, African Nova Scotian English)

4. Creole similarities (between AAVE and Caribbean creoles, Gullah, Hawaiian, etc.)

5. African language similarities (between AAVE and West African varieties)

6. English dialect differences (between AAVE and British/White American dialects)

7. Age group comparisons (across

different generations of AAVE speakers)

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Ebonics

The variety known as "Ebonics," "African American Vernacular English" (AAVE), and "Vernacular Black English" and by other names is systematic and rule-governed like all natural speech varieties. In fact, all human linguistic systems -- spoken, signed, and written -- are fundamentally regular.

The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years.

Characterizations of Ebonics as "slang," "mutant," "lazy," "defective," "ungrammatical," or "broken English" are incorrect and demeaning.