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OverviewAbout "80 to 90 percent of American blacks” speak AAVE “at least some of the time".[1] Additionally, AAVE shares many characteristics with various Creole English dialects spoken by black people throughout much of the world. AAVE also has pronunciation, grammatical structures, and vocabulary in common with various West African languages (Trudgill). 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:
AAVE also has contributed to Standard American English words of African origin ("gumbo", "goober", "yam", "banjo") and slang expressions ("cool," "hip," "hep cat" "bling"). In areas of close socialization between speakers of AAVE and other groups of people, a greater number of non-black speakers exist. Grammatical featuresPhonology
Aspect markingThe most distinguishing feature of AAVE is the use of forms of be to mark aspect in verb phrases. The use or lack of a form of be can indicate whether the performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In SAE, this can be expressed only using adverbs such as usually.[7] It is disputed whether the use of the verb "to be" to indicate a habitual status or action in AAVE has its roots in various West African languages.
Remote Phase MarkerThe aspect marked by stressed 'been' has been given many names, including Perfect Phase, Remote Past, Remote Phase (Fickett 1970, Fasold and Wolfram 1970, Rickford 1999). This article uses the third. Been here is stressed; in order to distinguish it from unstressed been (used as in standard English), linguists often write it as BIN. Thus the distinction between She BIN running ("She has been running for a long time") and She been running ("She has been running").[10] With non-stative verbs, the role of been is simple: it places the action in the distant past, or represents total completion of the action. A Standard English equivalent is to add "a long time ago". For example, She been told me that translates as, "She told me that a long time ago". 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. Linguist John R. Rickford (1999) 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 utterances:
NegationIn addition, negatives are formed differently from standard American English:
Other grammatical characteristicsSome of these characteristics, notably double negatives and the use of been for "has been", are also characteristic of general colloquial American English. Linguist William Labov carried out and published the first thorough grammatical study of African American Vernacular English in 1965.
Lexical featuresFor the most part, AAVE uses the lexicon of SAE, particularly informal and southern dialects. There are some notable differences, however. It has been suggested that some of this vocabulary 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.
AAVE also has words that either are not part of Standard American English, or have strikingly different meanings from their common usage in SAE. For example, there are several words in AAVE referring to white people which are not part of mainstream SAE; these include gray, possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms; and paddy, an extension of the slang use for "Irish".[18] "Ofay," which can be pejorative, is another general term for a white; it might derive from the Ibibio word afia, which means "light-colored," and may have referred to European traders[citation needed]; or from the Yoruba word ofe, spoken in hopes of disappearing from danger such as that posed by European traders; or via Pig Latin from "foe".[19] Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty means snobbish or bourgeois.[20] AAVE has also contributed various words to other varieties of English; these include chill out, main squeeze, soulmate and threads.[21] Social contextThe “Africanized form” of AAVE and its cultural history serve as a symbol of ethnic identity and pride. AAVE's resistance to assimilation into Standard American English or other more standard dialects is a consequence of cultural differences between blacks and whites (Romaine 109). Any language used by isolated groups of people is likely to split into various dialects. Thus, language becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and pride. It is “intricately bound up with his or her sense of identity and group consciousness”.[22] 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” (Trudgill 108). Still, most speakers of AAVE are bidialectal, since they use Standard American English to varying degrees as well as AAVE. This method of linguistic adaptation in different environments is called code-switching. Each dialect, or code, is applied in different settings. Speakers of both dialects acknowledge when to use which dialect in what environment (Romaine 109). 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” (Coulmas 41). Many blacks, regardless of socioeconomic status, educational background, or geographic region, use some form of AAVE to various degrees in informal and intra-ethnic communication (Romaine 111). The use of AAVE, as with the use of SAE, can also be a conscious choice. The level of usage of any dialect is subject to the speaker’s volition. In certain situations, speakers of AAVE may deem it more appropriate to use SAE, and in other instances (most likely among other African Americans) use AAVE. The preponderance of code-switching indicates that AAVE and SAE are met with different reactions or discernments. AAVE is often perceived by members of mainstream American society as indicative of low intelligence or limited education. Furthermore, as with many other non-standard dialects and especially creoles, AAVE sometimes has been called "lazy" or "bad" English, although among linguists there is no such controversy, since AAVE, like all dialects, shows consistent internal logic and structure.[23]Particularly stigmatized forms include metathesis of ask to aks and use of ain't. OriginsIt is unclear exactly how AAVE relates to other varieties of English. One argument, put forth by Kurath, Labov, and McDavid, is that AAVE is essentially identical to nonstandard varieties of Southern American English. A similar claim is that the speech of blacks in the American South has had a great deal of influence in the speech of non-blacks living there. Another argument is that AAVE has its deepest roots in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. Unique patterns of language usage among African slaves arose from the need for 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 what are called pidgins, simplified mixtures of two or more languages. As pidgins form from close-contact between members of different language communities, the slaving trade would be exactly such a situation. Dillard (1972) quotes slave ship Captain William Smith:
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 creole languages 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 west 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. AAVE in EducationAAVE has been the center of controversy on issues regarding the education of African American youths and the role it should play in public schools and education, as well as its place in broader society. Educators have held that attempts should be made to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system. Criticisms from social commentators and educators have ranged from asserting that AAVE is an intrinsically deficient form of speech[citation needed] to arguments that its use, by being considered unacceptable in most cultural contexts, is socially limiting. It is often argued that incorporating AAVE in schools would only impede the academic progress of young African American children[citation needed]. The strongest criticisms of AAVE have come from other African Americans[24]. Most notably, Bill Cosby, in his Pound Cake speech, criticized members of the African American community for various social behaviors including exclusive use of AAVE[25]. Changes in formal attitudes regarding the acceptance of AAVE as a distinct dialect correlated with advancements in civil rights. One notable shift in the recognition of AAVE came in the "Ann Arbor Decision" of 1979 (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al., v. Ann Arbor School District). In it, a federal judge ruled that a school board, in teaching black children to read, must adjust to the children's dialect, not the children to the school. Prior to this, the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication), a sub-division of NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) issued a position statement on students’ right to their own language. This was adopted by members of the CCCC in April 1974 and appeared in a special issue of CCC in the fall of 1974. The resolution is as follows: “We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language-the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its-diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.” The formal recognition of AAVE was revisited when 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 consisting of members 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 AAVE 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" (Coulmas 51). 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 Haitian Creole, the latter being considered a separate language. The statement that "African Language Systems are genetically based" also contributed to widespread hostility (Coulmas 53). Supporters of the resolution later clarified that "genetically" was not a racial or biological term but a linguistic one (53). Proponents of AAVE instruction in public education believe that their proposals have been distorted by political debate and misunderstood by the general public. The underlying belief 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 AAVE, the Oakland resolution mandated some instruction in that dialect, both for "maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language... and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills" (Coulmas 53). 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 were features of a grammatically distinct form of English (53). Rather than teaching Standard English by proscribing non-standard usage, the idea was to teach Standard American English to Ebonics-speaking students by showing them how to translate expressions from AAVE to Standard American English (53). 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 appeared in later discussion, not in the resolution itself). For instance, if a child reads "He passed by both of them" as [hiː pæs baː boʊf ə dɪm] (rather than [hiː pæst baɪ boʊθ əv ðɛm]), 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 interprets "passed" from the word "pass" (Coulmas 54). Pedagogical techniques similar to those used to teach English to speakers of foreign languages appear to hold promise for speakers of AAVE. Stewart introduced the use of "dialect readers"—sets of text nearer to the child's dialect than SAE text — to AAVE speakers (Trudgill 151). 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 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 (152). 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 (152). Opinions on Ebonics still range from advocacy of official language status in the United States to denigration as "poor English" (152). In 2002, Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy edited and contributed to the book The Skin that We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. This book takes a look at how classrooms are dealing with the English debate in practice and what that can mean for students because while policymakers are still debating exactly where they stand on the issue of Standard American English in the classroom and what else is or is not allowed, teachers are having to make their own policies on how to deal with such issues. [26] Teaching children whose primary dialect is AAVE poses problems beyond simply those commonly addressed by pedagogical techniques, and the Oakland approach has support among some educational theorists. However, such pedagogical approaches have given rise to educational and political disputes. Despite the clear linguistic evidence, the American public and policymakers remain divided over whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate dialect of English, perhaps due to unfounded beliefs that AAVE is a degradation of English. Though she had no standing in the school district, California State San Bernardino sociology professor Mary Texeira suggested, in July 2005, that Ebonics be included in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. The recommendation was met with a backlash similar to that in Oakland fifteen years before. The overwhelming controversy and debates concerning AAVE in public schools insinuate the deeper, more implicit deterministic attitudes towards the African-American community as a whole. Smitherman describes this as a reflection of the "power elite’s perceived insignificance and hence rejection of Afro-American language and culture".[27] She also asserts that since African Americans, in order to succeed, are forced to conform to European American society this ultimately means the "eradication of black language…and the adoption of the linguistic norms of the white middle class." The necessity for a "bi-dialectialism" (AAVE and SAE) has "some blacks contend that being bi-dialectal not only causes a schism in the black personality, but it also like saying black talk is 'good enough' for blacks but not for whites"[28] See alsoNotes
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