User:Etesen67/African-American Vernacular English

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The Black Church has played a significant role in the development and maintenance of AAVE. Serving as a uniquely Black community center free of White influence, the church influenced many aspects of AAVE and Black culture in America. Some of these include the call-and-response nature of AAVE, as well as expressions such as "brotha/sista" and "gittin the spirit".

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, Howe & Walker (2000) 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.