Linguistic Аspects of Black English

While these are features that AAVE has in common with Creole languages, Howe and Walker use data from early recordings of African Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and Ex-Slave recordings to demonstrate that negation was inherited from nonstandard colonial English.

The use of "invariant be" is almost only found in Black English. This refers to repeated actions over a considerable extent of time, and the distinction between he walk, he walkin´, he be walkin´ has no exact parallel in Standard English. These three verb forms have different negatives: He don´t walk, he ain´t walkin´, he don´t be walkin´. One might say 'He rich' instead of 'He is rich'; and 'Dey ugly' for 'They are ugly', and so on. (14,447) A brief version is:

In African-American Vernacular English you may omit forms of the copular verb 'be' provided all of the following conditions are met.

It must not be accented. You never leave 'is' out of something like 'There already is one!'

It mustn't end the sentence. You never say, 'I don't know what it is' without the 'is'.

It mustn't begin the sentence. You never leave out the 'is' in a question like 'Is dat right?'

It mustn't be an infinitive. You never leave out 'be' in something like 'You got to be strong' or an imperative like 'Be careful', or in one of those habitual aspect cases like 'He be laughin'.'

It mustn't be in the past tense. You never leave out 'was' or 'were'.

It mustn't be negated. You never leave out 'ain't' from something like 'He ain't no fool.'

It mustn't be first person singular. You never leave out the 'am' of sentences like 'I'm yo' main man.'

The frequency of inclusion has been shown to depend on a variety of factors. Here are some examples:

In future sentences with gonna or gon (see below):

I don't care what he say, you __ gon laugh.

...as long as i's kids around he's gon play rough or however they're playing.

Before verbs with the -ing or -in ending(progressive):

I tell him to be quiet because he don't know what he __ talking about.

I mean, he may say something's out of place but he __ cleaning up behind it and you can't get mad at him.

 Before adjectives and expressions of location:

He __ all right.

And Alvin, he __ kind of big, you know?

She __ at home. The club __ on one corner, the Bock is on the other.

Before nouns (or phrases with nouns)

He __ the one who had to go try to pick up the peacock.

I say, you __ the one jumping up to leave, not me.

The dropping of the inflectional plural suffix is another feature of Black English ("He hab two dog.") The number itself (two) carries the plural. Speakers of Black English make "mooses" the plural of "moose", or "fishes" the plural of "fish". Words like "childrens", "foots" or "womens" are also not unusual in Black English.

The optionality of the plural is also a grammatical feature of Black English, and a similar feature is the optionality of the past tense. The same form of the verb is sometimes used for both present and past. Because of the weakening of final clusters it is impossible to decide whether a verb form is the present tense used for the past or a past tense form with the final -d or -t dropped in pronunciation.

American Black English does not possess the third-person singular present tense marker (-s). "He walk " is acceptable Black English grammar. In the case of words like "have" and "do", Black English uses the full forms of "have" and "do" ("He have my name"). (17, 57)

The articles "a" and "an" seldom appear in the speech of young Blacks, especialy those who have not had a Standard English education. They do appear, especially the "a", in the speech of Blacks who have come in contact with Standard English.

There is also a phenomenon called "semantic inversion" which appears in Black English. A Black "dude" who is considered to be "bad" by those "on the street" has a lot to be proud of. A true semantic inversion would equate "bad" in Black English with "good" in Standard English. However, quite often the meaning is not completely opposite, and in fact may be on different levels.

The study of American Black English remains controversial. Attempts to wipe out Black English have failed, and so have attempts to give Black English a universal acceptance. Black English (or Black Vernacular English) has grammatical characteristics similar to other English based creoles, such as the English creole spoken in parts of the Dominican Republic that still retain a population of ex-slaves from the US.

There exists a continuum between Black Vernacular English and Standard English, as usually occurs with post-creoles and their "parent" languages. Individuals have large ranges of variance between their ethnic dialect and Standard English. (30, 66)

 Black Vernacular English is often unintelligible to speakers of Standard English. Cross-cultural misunderstanding, arising from wrong assumptions, often occurs when a speaker of Standard English encounters Black Vernacular English. The majority of English speakers tend to think Black Vernacular English, apart from the special slang; it is simply an impoverished version of English with a lot of grammatical mistakes.

There is a difference between making grammatical mistakes in Standard English and speaking correctly in a different variety of the language, one with a slightly different grammar, as is the case with Black Vernacular English which indeed has a regular, systematic grammar of its own.

Standard English varieties mark grammatical agreement between the subject and predicate in the present tense. If the subject is third person singular (he, she, it or the name of a person or object), an -s appears at the end of a regular verb. (E.g. John walks to the store). In AAVE the verb is rarely marked in this way. When regular verbs occur with such -s marking, they often carry special emphasis. Standard English also has agreement in a number of irregular and frequently used verbs such as has vs. have and is vs. are and was vs. were. In AAVE these distinctions are not always made. (38)

Tense and aspect

The verb in AAVE is often used without any ending. As is the case with the English creoles, there are some separate words that come before the verb which show when or how something happens. These are called "tense/aspect markers".

Past tense:  

In Standard British English, nearly all verbs have specially marked forms for the past tense, e.g. look-looked, come-came, go-went. In Creole the past tense is often left unmarked, so that it has exactly the same form as the present, e.g. a police van pull-up (Standard pulled up), out jump t'ree policeman (jumped), Jim start to wriggle (started).

Past tense may be conveyed by the surrounding discourse (with the help of adverbials such as, for example, "last night", "three years ago", "back in them days", etc., or by the use of conjunctions which convey a sequence of actions (e.g. "then"), or by the use of an ending as in standard English. The frequency with which the -ed ending occurs depends on a number of factors including the sounds which follow it. (25, 359)

Some past events are conveyed by placing been before the verb. Speakers of Standard English may mistake this for the Standard English "present perfect" with the "have" or "has" deleted. However the AAVE sentence with been is in fact quite different from the Standard English present perfect. This can be seen by comparing two sentences such as the following:

Standard English present perfect: He has been married.

AAVE been: He been married.

In the Standard English sentence the implication is that he is now no longer married. However, in the AAVE sentence the implication is quite the opposite: he is still married.

Sentences equivalent to Standard English perfects such as discussed above may be conveyed by the use of done in AAVE. For example the standard sentence "He has eaten his dinner" can be expressed as He done eat his dinner.

Future tense:

Future events and those that have not yet occurred are marked by gon or gonna (see above).

Events in progress:

Besides using the verb with the ending -ing or -in to convey that an event is in progress, AAVE has a number of other words which add particular nuances. For instance, if the activity is vigorous and intentional, the sentence may include the word steady. The item steady can be used to mark actions that occur consistently or persistently, as in Ricky Bell be steady steppin in them number nines.

Events that occur habitually or repeatedly are often marked by be in AAVE as in She be working all the time. (39)

Negatives

AAVE has a number of ways of marking negation. Like a number of other varieties of English, AAVE uses ain't to negate the verb in a simple sentence. In common with other nonstandard dialects of English, AAVE uses ain't in Standard English sentences which use "haven't". For example standard "I haven't seen him." is equivalent to AAVE I ain't seen him. Unlike most other nonstandard varieties of English, AAVE speakers also sometimes use ain't for standard "didn't" as in the following examples

I ain't step on no line.

I said, "I ain't run the stop sign," and he said, "you ran it!"

I ain't believing you that day, man.

As the first sentence above shows, AAVE also allows negation to be marked in more that one position in the sentence (so called double or multiple negation). In this respect, AAVE resembles French and a number of other Romance languages and also a number of English creoles. Certain kinds of nouns actually require negative marking in negative sentences. In so far as the negation must be expressed with indefinite nouns (e.g. "anything", "anyone" etc.), this is a form of agreement marking. (E.g. I ain't see nothing). (9, 56)

AAVE also has a special negative construction which linguists call "negative inversion". An example from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon follows:

Pilate they remembered as a pretty woods-wild girl "that couldn't nobody put shoes on."

In this example (in the part in italics), a negative auxiliary (couldn't) is moved in front of the subject (nobody). Some other examples illustrate this:

Ain't no white cop gonna put his hands on me.

Can't nobody beat 'em

Can't nobody say nothin' to dem peoples!

Don' nobody say nothing after that. (Ledbetter, born 1861)

Wasn't nobody in there but me an' him. (Isom Moseley, born 1856)

At the level of grammar there are important differences between Creole and Standard English. Here are some of the main ones:

The pronoun system

Standard English has separate forms for subject, object and possessive pronouns. Creole has just one form for all three: sometimes this form is derived from the subject and sometimes from the object form in British English.

STANDARD ENGLISH PRONOUN SYSTEM

1. Subject pronouns

 

	sing.	plural
1st	I	we
2nd	y o u
3rd	he/she/it	they

 

STANDARD ENGLISH PRONOUN SYSTEM

2. Object pronouns

 

	sing.	plural
1st	me	us
2nd	y o u
3rd	him/her/it	them

 

STANDARD ENGLISH PRONOUN SYSTEM

3. Possessive pronouns

 

	sing.	plural
1st	my	our
2nd	your
3rd	his/her/ its	their

 

JAMAICAN CREOLE

PRONOUN SYSTEM

 

	sing.	plural
1st	me	we
2nd	you	unu
3rd	him	them

 

See how Standard British English has 18 different pronoun forms while Creole has only 6. Creole is much more "compact", more "efficient" in using the available forms to cover the range of meaning. But Creole has two forms for "you", one (/yu/) for singular and another (/unu/) for plural. Standard English is rather unusual in not having such a distinction, so in this respect Creole could be said to be more "universal". (10, 256)

Plurals

In Standard British English, nearly all nouns have specially marked plural forms, e.g. book-books, woman-women. Creole usually does not mark plural in this way, so that plural nouns often have exactly the same form as the singular, as in: t'ree policeman. Sometimes dem is added after a noun (especially one referring to people) to show plural, e.g. di gyal-dem, "the girls".

These grammatical differences between Creole and Standard have given rise in the past to the idea that Creole speakers have "wrong" or "sloppy" grammar. However, as you can see (especially from the pronoun example) Creole grammar is systematic and has its own logic. Most Creole words look like words of English but they are combined using grammar rules which belong to Creole alone. (38)

 

3. Lexical peculiarities

 

For 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, and in many cases are not recognized by linguists or the Oxford English Dictionary.

dig from Wolof dëgg or dëgga, meaning "to understand/appreciate"

jazz

tote

bad-mouth, a calque from Mandinka (38)

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 the use of gray as an adjective for whites (as in "gray dude"), possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms, possibly an extension of the slang use for "Irish", "Ofay," which is pejorative, is another general term for a white; it might derive from the Yoruba word ofe, spoken in hopes of disappearing from danger such as that posed by European traders. However, most dictionaries simply refer to this word as having an unknown etymology. Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or seddity means snobbish or bourgeois. (39)

Past Tense Markers

Phonological Features

Consonant Cluster Simplification, or Reduction

Final Consonant Simplification, or Deletion

Final and Post-vocalic -r Variation

[I] + [n] is realized as [æ ] and [I] + [nk] is realized as [ænk]

[theta] > [f] in Word/Syllable-final Position

[ð] > [d] in Word/Syllable-inital Position

[ð] > [v] in Word/Syllable-medial Position

Remote phase marker

VOCABULARY

AAVE does not have a vocabulary separate from other varieties of English. However AAVE speakers do use some words which are not found in other varieties and furthermore use some English words in ways that differ from the standard dialects.

A number of words used in standard English may also have their origin in AAVE or at least in the West African languages that contributed to AAVE's development. These include:

banana (Mandingo)

yam (Mandingo)

okra (Akan)

gumbo (Western Bantu)

A discussion of AAVE vocabulary might proceed by noting that words can be seen to be composed of a form (a sound signal) and a meaning. In some cases both the form and the meaning are taken from West African sources. In other case the form is from English but the meaning appears to be derived from West African sources. Some cases are ambiguous and seem to involve what the late Fredric Cassidy called a multiple etymology (the form can be traced to more than one language -- e.g. "cat" below).(10,252)

West African Form + West African Meaning:

bogus 'fake/fraudulent' cf. Hausa boko, or boko-boko 'deceit, fraud'.

hep, hip 'well informed, up-to-date' cf. Wolof hepi, hipi 'to open one's eyes, be aware of what is going on'.

English Form + West African Meaning:

cat 'a friend, a fellow, etc.' cf. Wolof -kat (a suffix denoting a person)

cool 'calm, controlled' cf. Mandingo suma 'slow' (literally 'cool')

dig 'to understand, appreciate, pay attention' cf. Wolof deg, dega 'to understand, appreciate'

bad 'really good'

In West African languages and Caribbean creoles a word meaning 'bad' is often used to mean 'good' or 'alot/intense'. For instance, in Guyanese Creole mi laik am bad, yu noo means 'I like him alot'. Dalby mentions Mandingo (Bambara) a nyinata jaw-ke 'She's very pretty.' (literally 'She is beautiful bad.'); cf. also Krio ( a creole language spoken in West Africa) mi gud baad.

Black English also emplys a d sound for the voiced Standard English th at the beginning of the words such as the, that, those, there; which are replaced by duh, dat, dose, dere, and dey. Black English has the "d" mostly at the beginning of the words, but otherwise v for the voiced th. For example "other" may be pronounced as "ovvah". Another phonological characteristic is "r-lessness," or the dropping of r´s after vowels. At the end of the words that is shown by -ah, as in "evvah" for the word "ever" and "remembah" for "remember."