ROUGH DRAFT

Research Essay draft for peer review

African American Vernacular in New York

The linguistic community in the United States has taken a rather ambivalent stance. Few expert linguists will admit that “Ebonics” differs enough from Standard English to justify its designation as a separate language. Ebonics and Standard English speakers generally comprehend one another, and it is this standard of mutual intelligibility that divides dialects from languages, according to most definitions. African Americans’ speech took numerous different forms, exhibiting various mixtures of Standard English and black Creole. When dealing with whites, the Negro usually adopted one set of speech habits and another when speaking with his own people. 

The United States’ black slave population is thought to have developed an African-based creole, which was exacerbated by slavery and racial segregation. This creole is said to be the genesis of African American Vernacular English since it retains key grammatical and phonological traits common to West African languages while also acquiring English lexicon. However, the argument that American blacks maintained a separate language system from white society is dubious. The institution of slavery appears to have promoted rather than inhibited communication between whites and blacks. While a small percentage of landowners held hundreds of slaves, the vast majority of slaveholders only had one or two, and they were typically treated as family. Many slave owners accompanied their men to the fields on a regular basis.

African American Language Sense of Diversity 

Linguists have diverse views on this issue. Most of the vocabulary in Ebonics comes from English, and many of the pronunciations (such as “f” for the final th) and grammar constructions (such as “I don’t want none”) may have been influenced by the nonstandard dialects of English indentured servants and other workers with whom African slaves interacted. There are many who argue that the th sound and final consonant clusters (such as past) are absent from many West African languages, which are frequently substituted or simplified in American Ebonics and West African English varieties spoken in Nigeria and Ghana. Ebonics tense-aspect system distinguishes between completed activities (“He done walked”) and habitual actions (“We be walkin”) because both sorts of actions are frequent in West African language systems, and this distinction applies to other features of Ebonics sentence structure as well.

The capacity to omit the letter d, b, and g in tense-aspect markers (Caribbean examples include habitual/progressive (d)a, past tense (b)en, and future (g)on) has been identified by other linguists. It’s not uncommon for Caribbean Creole English to omit the in Ebonics and vice versa. They show that some American Ebonics varieties went through the simplification and blending typical of Creole formation in the Caribbean and other regions. Ebonics’ origins may also be linked to the enormous number of Caribbean Creole-speaking slaves brought to America’s thirteen original colonies during their early settlement periods. In relation to the origins debate, arguments and evidence are continually put forth. It’s hard to say if Ebonics is becoming more or less comparable to other American vernacular varieties of the English language. More and more people are asking ‘historical’ inquiries recently. This dynamic, distinctive variation of American English is one of the most commonly studied and discussed variants of American English, and it is likely to continue to be so for many years to come. Many aspects of African American literature, education, and social life are connected with this period of time in African American history.

Politics surrounding African American Vernacular 

There are a lot of politics surrounding AAVES which have ultimately spiked discussions on racial lines.  Some hypotheses claim that AAVE is a surviving version of 18th-century English, claiming that strict subject-verb agreement rules are a recent development, and that older English grammar reflects present AAVE speech patterns. The resemblance of AAVE to American South accents, which represent the accents of white indentured servants who worked alongside enslaved Africans on plantations, supports this theory. Others argue that AAVE resembles the grammatical structure and pronunciation of West African languages and Creole English variations, implying that AAVE originated in the relevant cultural groupings.

AAVE is generally viewed poorly in white-dominated professional areas in the United States, such as politics and academia, regardless of origin. Many parts of American society have long viewed AAVE as a symptom of poor socioeconomic level and a lack of formal education. The outcry against the Oakland resolution was largely motivated by these views. Many Black people in America today endure discrimination because of how they speak; many AAVE speakers use code-switching to purposefully shift how they communicate with different groups. For some, it’s a method of improving their careers in mostly white fields, but for others, it’s a means of surviving police brutality and the lethal consequences of systematic racism.

Academics disagree over AAVE’s linguistic classification, with some arguing that its close proximity to normal English makes it a dialect of English rather than a language. Critics argue that classifying AAVE as a stand-alone language has societal ramifications, citing AAVE’s distinctive grammatical structure and lexicon as reason. Some also question the strictness and pervasiveness of standard English. Correcting or discarding someone’s communication style, regardless of AAVE’s status, is essentially discriminatory.