I just saw a segment on Vice News Tonight that I was interviewed for, and the correspondent, Alzo Slade, pauses and asks “what the hell'?“, because he immediately caught the ungrammatical sentence we embedded as a “trick question” in the AAE quiz they had us write for the segment.

The producers asked me and Christopher Hall to write a multiple choice AAE Quiz for Slade, and we did so — with a few bad sentences that actually don’t make sense in AAE. Slade aced the quiz, and hesitated only on the ungrammatical sentences. (He mused he was afraid his black card would be revoked: I don’t have that authority, and there’s plenty of black folks who don’t speak AAE, anyway, but he aced the quiz they asked us to make).

We made the quiz drawing on 60 years of linguistic research into AAE, drawing directly from structures discussed in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language, the Cambridge Introduction to African American English, African American English: History, Structure, Use, and of course, our babershop. We corroborated the questions with a few black, AAE speaking professors of linguistics, and with black, AAE speaking friends.

Three sentences made it into the segment. The third one that made it into the piece was bad because it had two habitual markers. Both are fine in AAE, but not in the same sentence.

The sentences he read were: “It always be drunk guys on the subway testing my patience” This was there for “habitual be” and “existential it.” Slade picked the correct answer out of five possible answers. The second was “don’t nobody never tell him nothing” That was for negative concord (multiple negation), and Negative Auxiliary Inversion. Slade correctly picked the right answer out of five, here too.

The third was intentionally wrong. It’s ungrammatical in AAE: “she don’t stay be talking about what he done got.” This doesn’t make sense in AAE, because AAE has rules. You can’t use stay and be like that any more than you can say “I was am” in “standard” English. Slade correctly paused here.

Even though we gave the option “this sentence is meaningless”, because Slade is a kind, good person, he did his best to find a meaning in it — he explained in the segment that “if someone said it, they were trying to communicate something” (the trick is nobody said it — we made a “broken” sentence by intentionally taking a structure that works, and breaking it on purpose to test if he noticed. This is standard practice in linguistics.)

The funny part of all of this is that the incorrect sentence that is ungrammatical in AAE is the only one that closed captions got correct! This is wild: Slade said a sentence we provided (so we know the exact content of the sentence): “it always be drunks on the subway, testing my patience” but the closed caption says “I always be drunk on the subway.” If this were a court of law, the record would look like he admitted wrongdoing!

Alzo Slade reading “It always be drunks on the subway testing my patience” but captioned incorrectly.

The real test that the court reporters had in our study was of course not a multiple choice comprehension test (although there are a few of varying quality circulating around). They heard recordings of native speakers from Philadelphia and NYC.

The quiz here is a little artificial, but the point is that AAE has structure. And it’s entirely possible for outsiders to get it wrong. (More on this when I publish my interview with Dr. Sonja Lanehart, editor of the Oxford Handbook of African American Language.

I want to give a special thanks to Christopher Hall, who was not an author on this study but who has an acknowledgment in the text for his input. He and I have coauthored other research, and his work is well worth reading. While I’m at it, here are some other black scholars who work on AAE: Sharese King, Sonja Lanehart, Lisa Green, Minnie Quartey, Jamie Thomas, Tracey Connor, Zion Mengesha, Kelly Wright, Nandi Sims, John Rickford, Arthur Spears, Salikoko Mufwene, and Hiram Smith. (It’s not an exhaustive list, but it will get you started!)

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