So “identity” might be ‘eye-dennidy” for even the most formal of white speakers, but “ah-dint-ih-tea” for some AASE speakers. However, many AAE speakers, when speaking formally, will release the /t/ similar to how it is released at the beginning of a word. Most white Americans would pronounce /t/ as a flap in that situation, no matter the formality of the speech (think ladder/latter). One example of AASE is the full closure and release of /t/ in the middle of a trochee (two syllables where the first is stressed). He’s still got all of the phonological markers of African American speech, and many of the morphosyntactic markers, but it’s not vernacular by any stretch of the imagination. Arthur Spears, however, has argued very convincingly (for at least 20 years) that there is also a “Standard” register which is different from white, mainstream, classroom English, and which is recognized as a formal standard register. One result of this fact was that even the people attempting to valorize AAE implicitly viewed it as a casual register. This is still basically the case, although it’s changing. In the 1970s and 80s, most of the work on AAVE was being done by white researchers who did not speak the language variety. This term is very similar to AAVE, but…it’s missing the V.Īfrican American Vernacular English: AAE is missing the V because the V is for “vernacular”, which, in this case, means something like “casual”. helps people understand how it can be different, but still valid. They also intuitively understand that there are different varieties of English, and so tying it in to Appalachian, Southern, Scottish, Received Pronunciation, etc. Most English speakers understand most of the AAE they hear, and can be trained to understand all of it. This is an area of ongoing research and contention.Īfrican American English: I tend to use this when talking with the general public, in part because people haven’t heard of AAL, and in part because I’ve found that most people will understand AAE better as a valid variety of English than as a language variety in its own right that may seem mutually intelligible but isn’t always. This last part is important, as there is a growing body of evidence that English speakers who don’t also speak AAL actually don’t understand a lot of AAL. Calling it AAL sidesteps any strong stance on origins, and does not presume mutual intelligibility with other varieties of English. Others (like John Rickford) argue convincingly for the Creole Origins Hypothesis, which says that AAL started as a creole - not a variety of English - and later became more like English through contact. But we don’t know that, and it’s actually quite a contentious claim. That is, people saying AAE in an academic environment might suggest they believe the Anglicist hypothesis that the language variety is basically English with some West African flavor (see Labov 1998 for an articulation of this argument). The basic idea is that, in an academic environment, calling it African American English seems to suggest a particular position on the origin of the language variety. The 2015 Oxford Handbook of African American Language has very thorough discussion as to why. Here’s a breakdown:Īfrican American Language: This is the term now most used by linguists studying this language variety. I tend, now, to use African American English or African American Language. This has created some awkward situations, in which well meaning lay people are suspicious of linguists doing cutting edge work, precisely because they are not using the same terminology. However, just as people on Twitter are taking the term AAVE mainstream, linguists are moving away from it. Thanks to social media, there is a rising awareness among the general public of the validity of the language variety most associated with Black Americans who are the descendants of enslaved people. Today’s post will be a short one, but it’s something I should have written a long time ago.
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