African-American Vernacular English

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. 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 non-standard accent. AAVE is widespread throughout the United States, but is not the native dialect of all African Americans, nor are all of its speakers African American.

As with most English varieties spoken by African Americans, African-American Vernacular English shares a large portion of its grammar and phonology with the rural dialects of the Southern United States, and especially older Southern American English, due to the historical enslavement of African Americans primarily in that region.

Mainstream linguists maintain that the parallels between AAVE, West African languages, and English-based creole languages are existent but minor, with African-American Vernacular English genealogically tracing back to diverse non-standard dialects of English as spoken by the English-speaking settlers in the Southern Colonies and, later, Southern United States. However, a minority of linguists argue that the vernacular shares so many characteristics with African creole languages spoken around the world that it could have originated as its own English-based creole or semi-creole language, distinct from the English language, before undergoing a process of decreolization.

Origins
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) may be considered a dialect, ethnolect or sociolect. While it is clear that there is a strong historical relationship between AAVE and earlier Southern U.S. dialects, the origins of AAVE are still a matter of debate.

The presiding theory among linguists is that AAVE has always been a dialect of English, meaning that it originated from earlier English dialects rather than from English-based creole languages that "decreolized" back into English. In the early 2000s, Shana Poplack provided corpus-based evidence (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.

Linguist John McWhorter maintains that the contribution of West African languages to AAVE is minimal. 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."

However, a creole theory, less accepted among linguists, posits that AAVE arose from one or more creole languages used by African captives of the Atlantic slave trade, due to the captives speaking many different native languages and therefore needing a new way to communicate among themselves and with their captors. According to this theory, these captives first developed what are called pidgins: simplified mixtures of languages. Since pidgins form from close contact between speakers of different languages, the slave trade would have been exactly such a situation. Creolist John Dillard quotes, for example, slave ship captain William Smith describing the sheer diversity of mutually unintelligible languages just in The Gambia. By 1715, an African pidgin was reproduced in novels by Daniel Defoe, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. In 1721, Cotton Mather conducted the first attempt at recording the speech of slaves in his interviews regarding the practice of smallpox inoculation. By the time of the American Revolution, varieties among slave creoles were not quite mutually intelligible. Dillard quotes a recollection of "slave language" toward the latter part of the 18th century: "Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe; but me fall asleep, massa, and no wake 'til you come...." Not until the time of the American Civil War did the language of the slaves become familiar to a large number of educated Whites. The abolitionist papers before the war form a rich corpus of examples of plantation creole. In Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), Thomas Wentworth Higginson detailed many features of his Black soldiers' language. Opponents of the creole theory suggest that such pidgins or creoles existed but simply died out without directly contributing to modern AAVE.

Phonology
Many pronunciation features distinctly set AAVE apart from other forms of American English (particularly, General American). McWhorter argues that what truly unites all AAVE accents is a uniquely wide-ranging intonation pattern or "melody", which characterizes even the most "neutral" or light African-American accent. A handful of multisyllabic words in AAVE differ from General American in their stress placement so that, for example, police, guitar, and Detroit are pronounced with initial stress instead of ultimate stress. The following are phonological differences in AAVE vowel and consonant sounds.

Final consonant groups or clusters in AAVE have been examined as evidence of the systematic nature of this language variety, governed by specific rules. Additionally, such analyses have been utilized to bolster arguments concerning the historical origins of AAVE. Consonant cluster reduction is a phonological process where a final consonant group or cluster, consisting of two consonant sounds, is simplified or reduced to a single consonant sound. The analysis of consonant cluster reduction in AAVE assumes that, initially, final clusters are present and intact in the language. 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.

Vowels

 * African American Vowel Shift: AAVE accents have traditionally resisted the cot-caught merger spreading nationwide, with pronounced  and  traditionally pronounced, though now often . Early 2000s research has shown that this resistance may continue to be reinforced by the fronting of , linked through a chain shift of vowels to the raising of the , , and perhaps  vowels. This chain shift is called the "African American Shift". However, there is still evidence of AAVE speakers picking up the cot-caught merger in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in Charleston, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia, and in parts of California.
 * Reduction of certain diphthong forms to monophthongs, in particular, the vowel  is monophthongized to  except before voiceless consonants (this is also found in most White Southern dialects). The vowel sound in  ( in General American) is also monophthongized, especially before, making boil indistinguishable from ball.
 * Pin–pen merger: Before nasal consonants (,, and ),  and   are both pronounced like , making pen and pin homophones. This is also present in other dialects, particularly of the South. The pin-pen merger is not universal in AAVE, and there is evidence for unmerged speakers in California, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
 * The distinction between the  and   vowels before liquid consonants is frequently reduced or absent, making feel and fill homophones (fill–feel merger).  and  also merge, making poor and pour homophones (cure–force merger).

Consonants

 * Word-final devoicing of, , and , whereby, for example, cub sounds similar to cup, though these words may retain the longer vowel pronunciations that typically precede voiced consonants, and devoicing may be realized with debuccalization (where is realized as , for instance)
 * AAVE speakers may not use the fricatives (the th in "thin") and  (the th of "then") that are present in other varieties of English. The phoneme's position in a word determines its exact sound.
 * Word-initially, is normally the same as in other English dialects (so thin is ); in other situations, it may move forward in the mouth to  (Th-fronting).
 * Word-initially, is  (so this may be ). In other situations,  may move forward to.
 * Realization of final ng, the velar nasal, as the alveolar nasal (assibilation, alveolarization) in function morphemes and content morphemes with two or more syllables like -ing, e.g. tripping  is pronounced as  (trippin) instead of the standard . This change does not occur in one-syllable content morphemes such as sing, which is  and not . However, singing is . Other examples include wedding → , morning → , nothing → . Realization of  as  in these contexts is commonly found in many other English dialects.
 * A marked feature of AAVE is final consonant cluster reduction. This is a process by which the pronunciations of consonant clusters at the end of certain words are reduced to pronouncing only the first consonant of that cluster. There are several phenomena that are similar but are governed by different grammatical rules. This tendency has been used by creolists to compare AAVE to West African languages since such languages do not have final clusters.
 * Final consonant clusters that are homorganic (have the same place of articulation) and share the same voicing are reduced. For instance, test is pronounced since  and  are both voiceless; hand is pronounced  (alternatively  or ), since  and  are both voiced; but pant is unchanged, as it contains both a voiced and a voiceless consonant in the cluster. It is the plosive ( and ) in these examples that is lost rather than the fricative; the nasal is also either preserved completely or lost with preservation of nasality on the preceding consonant. Speakers may carry this declustered pronunciation when pluralizing so that the plural of test is  rather than . The clusters,  are also affected.
 * More often, word-final, , and are reduced, again with the final element being deleted rather than the former.
 * For younger speakers, also occurs in words that other varieties of English have  so that, for example, street is pronounced.
 * Clusters ending in or  exhibit variation in whether the first or second element is deleted.
 * Similarly, final consonants may be deleted (although there is a great deal of variation between speakers in this regard). Most often, and  are deleted. As with other dialects of English, final  and  may reduce to a glottal stop. Nasal consonants may be lost while nasalization of the vowel is retained (e.g., find may be pronounced ). More rarely,  and  may also be deleted.
 * Use of metathesized forms like aks for "ask" or graps for "grasp".
 * General non-rhotic behavior, in which the rhotic consonant is typically dropped when not followed by a vowel; it may also manifest as an unstressed  or the lengthening of the preceding vowel. Intervocalic  may also be dropped, e.g. General American story  can be pronounced, though this doesn't occur across morpheme boundaries.  may also be deleted between a consonant and a back rounded vowel, especially in words like throw, throat, and through.
 * The level of AAVE rhoticity is likely somewhat correlated with the rhoticity of White speakers in a given region; in 1960s research, AAVE accents tended to be mostly non-rhotic in Detroit, whose White speakers are rhotic, but completely non-rhotic in New York City, whose White speakers are also often non-rhotic.
 * is often vocalized in patterns similar to that of (though never between vowels) and, in combination with cluster simplification (see above), can make homophones of toll and toe, fault and fought, and tool and too. Homonymy may be reduced by vowel lengthening and by an off-glide.

"Deep" phonology
McWhorter discusses an accent continuum from "a 'deep' Black English through a 'light' Black English to standard English," saying the sounds on this continuum may vary from one African American speaker to the next or even in a single speaker from one situational context to the next. McWhorter regards the following as rarer features, characteristic only of a deep Black English but which speakers of light Black English may occasionally "dip into for humorous or emotive effect":
 * Lowering of before, causing pronunciations such as  for thing (sounding something like thang).
 * Word-medially and word-finally, pronouncing as  (so  for month and  for mouth), and  as  (so  for smooth and  for rather. This is called th-fronting. Word-initially,  is  (so those and doze sound nearly identical). This is called th-stopping. In other words, the tongue fully touches the top teeth.
 * Glide deletion (monophthongization) of all instances of, universally, resulting in (so that, for example, even rice may sound like rahss.)
 * Full gliding (diphthongization) of, resulting in (so that win may sound like wee-un).
 * Raising and fronting of the vowel of words like strut, mud, tough, etc. to something like.

Tense and aspect
Although AAVE does not necessarily have the simple past-tense marker of other English varieties (that is, the -ed of "worked"), it does have an optional tense system with at least four aspects of the past tense and two aspects of the future tense. The term TMA marker is used for forms that are an integral part of the predicate phrase. The markers gon, done, be, and been were defined as markers of future tense, completive aspect, habitual aspect, and durative aspect, respectively. The habitual "be" helps to create emphasis and a state of being. However, these can function together but function separately as well.

Syntactically, I bought it is grammatical, but done (always unstressed, pronounced as /dən/) is used to emphasize the completed nature of the action.

Harvard professor Sunn m'Cheaux says the immediate future tense (for example "I'ma") originated in the Gullah language (an English creole), which uses "a-" instead of "-ing" for this type of verb inflection.

As phase auxiliary verbs, been and done must occur as the first auxiliary; when they occur as the second, they carry additional aspects:
 * He been done working means "he finished work a long time ago".
 * He done been working means "until recently, he worked over a long period of time".

The latter example shows one of the most distinctive features of AAVE: the use of be to indicate that performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In most other American English dialects, this can only be expressed unambiguously by using adverbs such as usually.

This aspect-marking form of been or BIN is stressed and semantically distinct from the unstressed form: She BIN running ('She has been running for a long time') and She been running ('She has been running'). This aspect has been given several names, including perfect phase, remote past, and remote phase (this article uses the third). As shown above, been places action in the distant past. However, when been is used with stative verbs or gerund forms, been shows that the action began in the distant past and that it is continuing now. suggests that a better translation when used with stative verbs is "for a long time". For instance, in response to "I like your new dress", one might hear Oh, I been had this dress, meaning that the speaker has had the dress for a long time and that it isn't new.

To see the difference between the simple past and the gerund when used with been, consider the following expressions:
 * I been bought her clothes means "I bought her clothes a long time ago".
 * I been buying her clothes means "I've been buying her clothes for a long time".

Auxiliaries in African American Vernacular English are related in a typical pattern. They can be grouped into negative forms and affirmative forms for each of the words. For example, "had" is an affirmative form, while "hatn" is the corresponding negative form. These same auxiliaries can be used to mark sentences for the anterior aspect. As another example, was marks type 1 sentences. These are sentences that are interpreted by default as being in the present tense but actually refer to a time before the present. Take, for instance, "She at home": the word was can be inserted to mark this sentence, making the marked equivalent "She was at home". Auxiliaries such as these also have opposing negative and affirmative forms. In its negative form the auxiliary verb "wadn" is used to convey the opposing affirmative form. I

In addition to these, come (which may or may not be an auxiliary ) may be used to indicate speaker indignation, such as in Don't come acting like you don't know what happened and you started the whole thing ("Don't try to act as if you don't know what happened, because you started the whole thing").
 * Finna corresponds to "fixing to" in other varieties. It is also written fixina, fixna, fitna, and finta.

Irrealis mood marker refers to be in AAVE. In AAVE be can have no tense. When this utterance occurs it is taking the future and the modality to refer to a current event that may be less than real

Modals

A specific part of AAE has certain functions such as modality. Modal properties such as double modals are used within AAE (e.g. might could), and double modals are multifaceted in their use. However, they can function as adverbs such as “might could”. Although there is a layer of pragmatics and semantics with the double modal usage; specifically the use of “might could” differs.

Negation
Negatives are formed differently from most other varieties of English:


 * Use of ain't as a general negative indicator. As in other dialects, it can be used where most other dialects would use am not, isn't, aren't, haven't, and hasn't. However, in marked contrast to other varieties of English in the US, some speakers of AAVE also use ain't instead of don't, doesn't, or didn't (e.g., I ain't know that). Ain't had its origins in common English but became increasingly stigmatized since the 19th century. See also amn't.
 * Negative concord, popularly called "double negation", as in I didn't go nowhere; if the sentence is negative, all negatable forms are negated. This contrasts with standard written English conventions, which have traditionally prescribed that a double negative is considered incorrect to mean anything other than a positive (although this was not always so; see double negative).
 * In a negative construction, an indefinite pronoun such as nobody or nothing can be inverted with the negative verb particle for emphasis (e.g., Don't nobody know the answer, Ain't nothing going on.)

While AAVE shares these with Creole languages, use data from early recordings of African Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and the recordings of former slaves to demonstrate that negation was inherited from nonstandard colonial English.

Other grammatical characteristics

 * The copula be in the present tense is often dropped, as in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages. For example: You crazy ("You're crazy") or She my sister ("She's my sister"). The phenomenon is also observed in questions: Who you? ("Who're you?") and Where you at? ("Where are you (at)?"). This has been sometimes considered a Southern U.S. regionalism, though it is most frequent in Black speech. On the other hand, a stressed is cannot be dropped: Yes, she is my sister. The general rules are:
 * Only the forms is and are (of which the latter is anyway often replaced by is) can be omitted; am, was, and were are not deleted.
 * These forms cannot be omitted when they would be pronounced with stress in General American (whether or not the stress serves specifically to impart an emphatic sense to the verb's meaning).
 * These forms cannot be omitted when the corresponding form in standard English cannot show contraction (and vice versa). For example, I don't know where he is cannot be reduced to *I don't know where he just as in standard English forms the corresponding reduction *I don't know where he's is likewise impossible. (I don't know where he at is possible, paralleling I don't know where he's at in standard English.)
 * Possibly some other minor conditions apply as well.
 * Verbs are uninflected for number and person: there is no -s ending in the present-tense third-person singular. Example: She write poetry ("She writes poetry"). AAVE don't for standard English doesn't comes from this, unlike in some other dialects which use don't for standard English doesn't but does when not in the negative. Similarly, was is used for what in standard English are contexts for both was and were.
 * The genitive -'s ending may or may not be used. Genitive case is inferrable from adjacency. This is similar to many creoles throughout the Caribbean. Many language forms throughout the world use an unmarked possessive; it may here result from a simplification of grammatical structures. Example: my momma sister ("my mother's sister")
 * The words it and they denote the existence of something, equivalent to standard English's there is or there are.
 * Word order in questions: Why they ain't growing? ("Why aren't they growing?") and Who the hell she think she is? ("Who the hell does she think she is?") lack the inversion of most other forms of English. Because of this, there is also no need for the "auxiliary do".
 * Relative clauses which modify a noun in the object or predicate nominative position are not obligatorily introduced by a relative pronoun.

Vocabulary
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), the main sources for new words are combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating. However, it has also been suggested that some of the vocabulary unique to AAVE has its origin in West African languages, but etymology is often difficult to trace, and without a trail of recorded usage, the suggestions below cannot be considered proven. Early AAVE and Gullah contributed a number of words of African origin to the American English mainstream, including gumbo, goober, yam, and banjo.

Compounding in AAVE is a very common method in creating new vocabulary. The most common type of compounding is the noun–noun combination. There is also the adjective–noun combination, which is the second most commonly occurring type of combination found in AAE slang. AAE also combines adjectives with other adjectives, less frequently, but more so than in standard American English.

AAVE has also contributed slang expressions such as cool and hip. In many cases, the postulated etymologies are not recognized by linguists or the Oxford English Dictionary, such as to dig, jazz, tote, and bad-mouth, a calque from Mandinka. African American slang is formed by words and phrases that are regarded as informal. It involves combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating new words. African American slang possess all of the same lexical qualities and linguistic mechanisms as any other language. AAVE slang is more common in speech than it is in writing.

AAVE also has words that either are not part of most other American English dialects or have strikingly different meanings. For example, there are several words in AAVE referring to White people that are not part of mainstream American English; these include gray as an adjective for Whites (as in gray dude), possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms; and paddy, an extension of the slang use for "Irish". "Red bone" is another example of this, usually referring to light skinned African Americans.

"Ofay", which is pejorative, is another general term for a White person; it might derive from the Ibibio word afia, which means "light-colored", from the Yoruba word ofe, spoken in hopes of disappearing from danger. However, most dictionaries simply say its etymology is unknown.

Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or seddity means "snobbish" or "bourgeois".

AAVE has also contributed many words and phrases to other varieties of English, including chill out, main squeeze, soul, funky, and threads.

Influence on other dialects
African-American Vernacular English has influenced the development of other dialects of English. The AAVE accent, New York accent, and Spanish-language accents have together yielded the sound of New York Latino English, some of whose speakers use an accent indistinguishable from an AAVE one. AAVE has also influenced certain Chicano accents and Liberian Settler English, directly derived from the AAVE of the original 16,000 African Americans who migrated to Liberia in the 1800s. In the United States, urban youth participating in hip-hop culture or marginalized as ethnic minorities are also well-studied in adopting African-American Vernacular English, or prominent elements of it: for example, Southeast-Asian Americans embracing hip-hop identities.

Urban versus rural variations
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. These studies concluded that the African American Language (AAL) was homogeneous, which means that AAE was spoken the same way everywhere around the country. Later, sociolinguists would realize that these cities lacked the influence of the rural south; the early studies had not considered the representation of the south of America, which caused the AAE studies to change. To make those changes, the newer studies used the diversity of the country and took into consideration the rural south.

African-American Vernacular English began as mostly rural and Southern, yet today is mostly urban and nationally widespread, and its more recent urban features are now even diffusing into rural areas. Urban AAVE alone is intensifying with the grammatical features exemplified in these sentences: "He be the best" (intensified equative be), "She be done had her baby" (resultative be done), and "They come hollerin" (indignant come). 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). Using the word bees even in place of be to mean is or are in standard English, as in the sentence "That's the way it bees" is also one of the rarest of all deep AAVE features today, and most middle-class AAVE speakers would recognize the verb bees as part of only a deep "Southern" or "country" speaker's vocabulary.

Local variations
There are at least 10 distinct regional accents in AAVE, and regional patterns of pronunciation and word choice appear on social media.

Regional variation in AAVE does not pattern with other regional variation in North American English, which broadly follows East-to-West migration patterns, but instead patterns with the population movements during the Great Migration, resulting in a broadly South-to-North pattern, albeit with founder effects in cities that already had existing African American populations at the beginning of the Great Migration. There is no vowel for which the geographic variation in AAVE patterns with that of White American English.

New York City AAVE incorporates some local features of the New York accent, including its high vowel; meanwhile, conversely, Pittsburgh AAVE may merge this same vowel with the  vowel, matching the cot-caught merger of White Pittsburgh accents, though AAVE accents traditionally do not have the cot-caught merger. Memphis, Atlanta, and Research Triangle AAVE incorporates the vowel raising and  vowel lowering associated with White Southern accents. Memphis and St. Louis AAVE are developing, since the mid-twentieth century, an iconic merger of the vowels in and, making there sound like thurr. Californian AAVE often lacks a cot-caught merger, especially before nasals.

Social perception and context
African-American Vernacular suffers from persistent stigma and negative social evaluation in American culture. By definition, as a vernacular dialect of English, AAVE has not received the social prestige of a standard dialect, leading to widespread and long-standing misconceptions that it is a grammatically inferior form of English, which linguistics research of the twentieth century has refuted. However, educators and social commentators traditionally have advocated for eliminating AAVE usage through the public-education system for a variety of reasons, ranging from a continued belief that AAVE is intrinsically deficient to arguments that its use, by being stigmatized in certain social contexts, is socially limiting. Some of the harshest criticism of AAVE or its use has come from African Americans themselves. 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.

Educators traditionally have attempted to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system, perceiving the dialect as grammatically defective. In 1974, the teacher-led Conference on College Composition and Communication issued a position statement affirming students' rights to their own dialects and the validity of all dialects. Mainstream linguistics has long agreed with this view about dialects. In 1979, a judge ordered the Ann Arbor School District to find a way to identify AAVE speakers in the schools and to "use that knowledge in teaching such students how to read standard English." In 1996, Oakland Unified School District made a controversial resolution for AAVE, which was later called "Ebonics". 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. This program lasted three years and then died off.

Although the distinction between AAVE and General American dialects is clear to most English speakers, some characteristics, notably double negatives and the omission of certain auxiliaries (see below) such as the has in has been are also characteristic of many colloquial dialects of American English. There is general uniformity of AAVE grammar, despite its vast geographic spread across the whole country. This may be due in part to relatively recent migrations of some African Americans out of the American South (see Great Migration and Second Great Migration) as well as to long-term racial segregation that kept these speakerse living together in largely homogeneous communities.