African American Vernacular English: Encyclopedia II - African American Vernacular English - History and social context

African American Vernacular English - History and social context

AAVE's development has its deepest roots in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade, but it also has features of English spoken in Great Britain and Ireland during the 16th and 17th centuries. Distinctive patterns of language usage among African slaves arose out of the need for multilingual populations of African captives to communicate among themselves and with their captors. During the Middle Passage, these captives (many already multi-lingual speakers of dialects of Wolof, Twi, Hausa, Yoruba, Dogon, Akan, Kimbundu, Bambara and other languages) developed pidgins (simplified mixtures of two or more languages). Over time, some of these pidgins became fully developed creoles in the Americas. Significant numbers of blacks still speak some of these creoles, notably Gullah on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

Any language used by isolated groups of people is likely to split into various dialects. The pronunciation of AAVE is based in large part on Southern American English, an influence that no doubt was reciprocal in many ways. The traits of AAVE that separate it from Standard American English (SAE) include:

• grammatical structures traceable to West African languages;
• changes in pronunciation along definable patterns, many of which are found in creoles and dialects of other populations of West African descent (but which also emerge in English dialects uninfluenced by West African languages, such as Newfoundland English);
• distinctive vocabulary; and
• differences in the use of tenses.
  AAVE also has contributed to Standard American English words of African origin ("gumbo", "goober", "yam", "banjo", "bogus") and slang expressions ("cool," "hip," "hep cat"). In areas of close socialization between speakers of AAVE and other groups of people, a greater number of non-black speakers exist.

AAVE's resistance to assimilation into Southern American English or other more standard dialects is a natural consequence of cultural differences between blacks and whites. Language becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and pride. AAVE has survived and thrived through the centuries also as a result of various degrees of isolation from Southern American English and Standard American English—through both self-segregation from and marginalization by mainstream society.

Most speakers of AAVE are bidialectal, since they use Standard American English to varying degrees as well as AAVE. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with the rise in socioeconomic status, although almost all speakers of AAVE at all socioeconomic levels readily understand Standard American English. Most blacks, regardless of socioeconomic status, educational background, or geographic region, use some form of AAVE to various degrees in informal and intra-ethnic communication (this selection of variety according to social context is called code switching).

AAVE is often erroneously perceived by members of mainstream American society as indicating low intelligence or educational attainment. Furthermore, as with many other nonstandard dialects and especially creoles, AAVE sometimes has been called "lazy" or "bad" English by those who do not understand creolization or the role of null phonemes. Such appraisals also may be due in part to AAVE's use of aspect for tense in some cases. Some challenge whether AAVE should be considered a valid form of English at all. However, among linguists there is no such controversy, since AAVE, like all dialects, shows consistent internal logic and structure.

In the late 1990s, the formal recognition of AAVE ("Ebonics") as a distinct language and its proposed use as an educational tool to help black students become more fluent in SAE became a controversial subject in the United States.

African American Vernacular English - AAVE as a Creole

When European slavers arrived in Africa to buy slaves, they found that many had no common language. Dillard (1972) quotes slave ship Captain William Smith:

As for the languages of Gambia, they are so many and so different, that the Natives, on either Side of the River, cannot understand each other.… [T]he safest Way is to trade with the different Nations, on either Side of the River, and having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel

Some slave owners preferred slaves from a particular tribe. For consigned cargoes, language mixing aboard ship was sometimes minimal. There is evidence that many enslaved Africans continued to use fairly intact native languages until almost 1700, when Wolof became one of the bases of a sort of intermediary pidgin among Africans. It is Wolof that comes to the fore in tracing the African roots of AAVE.

By 1715, this African pidgin had made its way into novels by Daniel Defoe, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. Cotton Mather claimed to have been very familiar with his slaves' speech, knowing enough to affirm that one of his slaves was from the Coromantee tribe. Mather's imitative writing shows features present in many creoles and even in modern day AAVE.

By the time of the American Revolution, slave creoles had not quite established themselves to the point of mutual intelligibility among varieties. Dillard (1972) quotes a recollection of "slave language" toward the latter part of the 18th century:

It was not until the time of the Civil War that the language of the slaves became 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 soldiers' language. In particular, this book contains the first reference to the distinction within AAVE "been" between stressed BÍN and unstressed bin.

After emancipation, some freed slaves traveled to West Africa, taking their creole with them. In certain African tribal groups, such as those in east Cameroon, there are varieties of Black English that show strong resemblances to the creole dialects in the U.S. documented during this period. The languages have remained similar due to the homogeneity within tribal groups, and so can act as windows into a past state of Creole English.

African American Vernacular English - Educational issues

Proponents of various bills across the U.S., notably a resolution from the Oakland, California school board on December 18, 1996, wanted "Ebonics" officially recognized as a language or dialect. At its last meeting, the outgoing Oakland school board unanimously passed the resolution before stepping down from their positions to the newly elected board, who held different political views. The new board modified the resolution and then effectively dropped it. Had the measure remained in force, it would have affected funding and education-related issues.

The Oakland resolution declared that Ebonics was not English, and was not an Indo-European language at all, asserting that the speech of black children belonged to "West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems". This claim was quickly ruled inconsistent with current linguistic theory, that AAVE is a dialect of English and thus of Indo-European origin. Furthermore, the differences between modern AAVE and Standard English are nowhere near as great as those between French and the Haitian Creole language, the latter of which is considered a separate language. The statement that "African Language Systems are genetically based" also contributed to widespread incredulity and hostility. Supporters of the resolution later stated that "genetically" was not a racist term but a linguistic one.

Proponents of Ebonics instruction in public education believe that their proposals have been distorted by political debate and misunderstood by the general public. The belief underlying it is that black students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English if textbooks and teachers acknowledged that AAVE was not a substandard version of standard American English but a legitimate speech variety with its own grammatical rules and pronunciation norms.

For black students whose primary dialect was Ebonics, the Oakland resolution mandated some instruction in that dialect, both for "maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language [sic]... and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills." Teachers were encouraged to recognize that the "errors" in standard American English that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or effort, and indeed were not errors at all but instead features of a grammatically distinct form of English. Rather than teaching standard English by proscribing non-standard usage, the idea was to teach standard English to Ebonics-speaking students by showing them how to translate expressions from AAVE to standard American English.

Framers of the Oakland resolution recognized that, when teaching anyone a language or variety with which they are unfamiliar, it is important to differentiate between understanding and pronunciation (this consideration appears in later discussion, not in the resolution itself). For instance, if a child reads "He passed by both of them" as "he pass by bowf uh dem", a teacher must determine whether the child is saying passed or pass, since they are identical in AAVE phonology. Appropriate remedial strategies here would be different from effective strategies for an SAE speaker who read "passed" as "pass".

Pedagogical techniques similar to those used to teach English to speakers of foreign languages appear to hold promise for speakers of AAVE. Stewart (in Baratz & Shuy, 1969) introduced the use of "dialect readers"—sets of text nearer to the child's dialect than SAE text — to AAVE speakers. This helps the child focus on translating symbols on paper into words without worrying about learning a new language at the same time. Simpkins, Holt, and Simpkins (1977) developed a comprehensive set of dialect readers, called bridge readers, which included the same content in three different dialects: AAVE, a bridge version, which was closer to SAE without being prohibitively formal, and a Standard English version. The results were very promising, but in the end the program was not widely adopted for various political and social reasons related to the refusal of school systems to recognize AAVE as a dialect of English. Opinions on Ebonics still range from advocacy of official language status in the United States to denigration as "poor English".

Teaching children whose first language is AAVE poses problems beyond simply that of which common pedagogic techniques deal with, and the Oakland approach has support among some educational theorists. However, such pedagogical approaches give rise to educational and political disputes that often show strong racial and cultural biases. Despite the clear linguistic evidence, the American public and policymakers remain divided over whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate variety of English.

In July 2005, Mary Texeira, a sociology professor at Cal State San Bernardino, suggested that Ebonics be included in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Though she had no standing in the school district, the recommendation was met with a backlash similar to that in Oakland nine years before.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History and social context", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki