AAVE:
AFRICAN- AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH
SEE ALSO “AFRICAN-AMERICAN HUMOR”
by Don L. F. Nilsen
and Alleen Pace Nilsen
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AAVE: AFRICAN AMERICAN
VERNACULAR ENGLISH
• During the slave trade, shippers were careful to
separate African slaves who spoke the same
language as they loaded them onto ships, so that the
language they developed was an English based
pidgin which became a creole language.
• Ironically, black wet nurses did much of the raising
of aristocratic white babies, so many Black features
can be seen also in “white” Southern dialects.
•
African-American Vernacular English (and much of
Southern “white” English) has the following
features:
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• this, that, these, those, them, there /d/
• south, mouth /f/
• during, more, Paris, star /r-less/
• help, will /l-less/
• hood, bed, test, wasp (loss of final
consonant)
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• thing, ring, sing /ey/
• r-less so that such pairs as guard-God, nor-gnaw, sore-saw,
poor-Poe fort-fought, and court-caught are not distinguished.
• police, Detroit (front-shifted stress)
• nice, boy (simplified vowels)
• invariable “be” (durative)
• zero copula (non-durative, compare Spanish “ser” and “estar”)
• (Fromkin Rodman Hyams 423-426)
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CALLING SOMEONE OUT OF THEIR NAME
• In her I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
Maya Angelou tells about Mrs. Cullinan
“calling her out of her name.”
• Rather than calling her “Margaret,” she
called her “Mary.”
• Miss Glory says that she too had been
“called out of her name.” Her name used to
be Hallelujia, but her mistress called her
“Glory,” and it stuck.
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• (Nilsen 15-16)5
!THE N-WORD
• According to Randall Kennedy, The nword is perhaps the most volatile,
derogatory, powerful and hurtful ethnic
slur in the English language.
• However, “the use of nigger by black
rappers and comedians has given the
term a new currency and enhanced
cachet such that many young whites
yearn to use the term like the blacks
whom they see as heroes and
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trendsetters” (Kennedy
45).
!!HIP HOP LANGUAGE
What is it?
What’s happenin?
What’s up?
Snoop Dog’s “-izzle” words as in “televizzle,” “Americizzle,” and “in a
minitizzle”
bro
chillin
gangsta rap (or G-rap), and
Hood (for neighborhood)
One line in Lupe Fiasco has a line in his hip-hop rap that goes, “I had to
turn my back on what got you paid. I couldn’t see, had the hodod on
me like Abu Ghraib.” (Loretz 3)
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!!!MORE HIP HOP LANGUAGE
•
•
•
•
to school (teach) someone
a trick (sexually manipulative female)
to spit (talk to a female)
props (proper respects), the opposite of “to
dis(respect)” someone
• Sweet!
• One = One Love = Good Bye!
• I gotta bounce (leave the premises)
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References # 1:
Baldwin, James. “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me
What It Is.” in Living Language. Ed. Alleen Pace Nilsen. Boston,
MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1999, 135-139.
Campbell, Kermit. Getting Our Groove On. Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press, 2005.
Clark, Virginia, Paul Eschholz, and Alfred Rosa. Language:
Readings in Language and Culture, 6th Edition. New York, NY:
St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Crystal, David. “Pidgins and Creoles” (Clark, 321-327)
DeBose, Charles. The Sociology of African American Language.
New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005.
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References # 2:
Elgin, Suzette Haden. “Notes on the Ebonics Controversy.” in Living
Language. Ed. Alleen Pace Nilsen. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1999,
112-117.
Eschholz, Paul, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. “The Power of the Mass
Media.” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers, Ninth
Edition. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005, 349-420.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to
Language. New York, NY: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2007.
Gordon, Dexter B. “Humor in African American Discourse: Speaking of
Oppression.” Journal of Black Studies 29.2 (1998): 254-276.
Kennedy, Randall. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002.
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References # 3:
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “I Have a Dream” (Eschholz 244-250).
Kitwana, Bakari. The HipHop Generation. New York, NY: BasicCivitas
Books, 2002.
Lanehart, Sonja L. Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African
American English. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2001.
Loretz, Connor. “Inner-City English Education: Using Hip-Hop as a
Pedagogy.” Tempe, AZ: ENG 312 Research Paper, 2010.
McKissack, Frederick L. “Cyberghetto: Blacks Are Falling Through the
Net” (Eschholz 528-534).
Mey, Jacob L. Pragmatics: An Introduction, 2nd Edition. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2001.
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References # 4:
Nilsen, Alleen Pace. Living Language. Needham Heights, MA,
1999.
Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen. Encyclopedia of 20th
Century American Humor. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.
http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/OXHUMOR.aspx
Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 1994.
Smitherman, Geneva “`It Bees Dat Way Sometime’: Sounds and
Structure of Present-Day Black English” (Clark, 328-354).
Staples, Brent. “Black Men and Public Spaces” (Eschholz 255257).
Vaid, Urvashi. “Separate and Unequal” (Eschholz 251-254).
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