African American Vernacular English: phonology

Introduction

The variety of English known as AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) is spoken throughout the United States and in some parts of Canada (including Nova Scotia) primarily by African Americans. The variety is spoken most consistently by working-class African Americans, particularly in urban areas. The vast majority of middle class African Americans are bi-dialectal in AAVE and Standard American English (StAmE) and use AAVE in appropriate social contexts through a mechanism scholars have characterized as style-shifting. AAVE co-exists with the colloquial StAmE typically spoken by middle class African Americans and middle class whites; and with white vernacular American English typically spoken by working class whites, with both StAmE and white vernacular American English enjoying significantly more social prestige than AAVE. For this reason AAVE exhibits linguistic influences from both StAmE and white vernacular American English. Thus, in addition to the broad AAVE vernacular, the so-called basilect, we find StAmE and white vernacular American English-influenced varieties called the mesolect and the acrolect with the latter construct being very close to StAmE (Stewart 1968) and the former an intermediate variety. We will describe the phonological characteristics of the broad AAVE vernacular in the United States, excluding the varieties of the Caribbean and the Gullah variety spoken in the coastal Carolina area (both of which, some argue, should also be included under the umbrella of AAVE).

Historically, AAVE has been thought to have derived from some combination of native African languages and historic dialects of English. Two competing theoretical positions on the provenance of AAVE currently hold sway in the literature. The African substratum position, sometimes called the creolist position (Rickford and Rickford 2000; Rickford 1999), proposes that AAVE is the descendant of the creole language synthesis smelted on southern plantations in ante-bellum America. From this perspective, when African slaves were brought to early America, directly or via the Caribbean, they arrived speaking a variety of African languages, probably including an English-based pidgin that was current on coastal West Africa during the slave-trading era. Slaves, it is assumed, had little or no exposure to the English of their owners; thus, they fashioned the original creole by combining the grammatical and phonological resources of their African languages with the English pidgin structures, which themselves were strongly influenced underlyingly by African linguistic habits. It is this early AAVE that has evolved to the present AAVE.

A second view, the English-origins position, held by Poplack (2000) and others, argues that when these languages came into contact, the slaves learned more or less the English varieties spoken by their white owners. Under this theory, the differences we now see between mainstream white AmE and AAVE are due to preserved features of preexisting nonstandard English variants. These theories have stimulated vigorous debate in recent years, regarding both the origins and the current structure of AAVE. However, the details of these arguments will not be discussed in depth here. What is generally agreed upon is that AAVE in the United States originated in the slave plantations of the antebellum South and shares a number of phonological and grammatical features with Southern dialects of American English. Whether the southern English absorbed these features from Early AAVE or vice versa is the subject of continuing research and debate. One notes, however, that southern vernacular English is most authentically spoken in areas where large plantations once flourished and which, subsequently, experienced some racial integration soon after the Civil War, when poor whites and ex-slaves became neighboring sharecroppers (Bailey 2001).

In the early parts of the 20^th century, a “Great Migration” of African Americans and whites toward northern cities created new African American communities in many urban centers and brought AAVE to these cities. The isolation of AAVE on the basis of racial segregation, which continues up to today in many urban environments, divided working class inner-city African Americans from StAmE and white vernacular American English speaking whites in the big northern cities. It is this isolation that led to the preservation of AAVE and partially explains its apparent homogeneity, which would not otherwise be expected given the geographic distances between AAVE enclaves in northern cities such as Chicago, Cleveland and Philadelphia. Scholars such as Huang (2000) have suggested that the post 1960s desegregation is leading AAVE to become more similar to StAmE, while others (e.g., Labov 1994).