A LOOK AT REGIONAL VARIATION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH ACCENTS

Last April, at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, I defended my dissertation. It will come as no surprise to anyone that I’m only now getting around to writing about it — everyone I know who has a PhD needed some distance from their dissertation before they could really condense it and get out of the weeds enough to talk to regular people about it.

My 2020 dissertation was the first ever general description of regional variation in African American English accents. Plenty of other researchers have studied individual phonological variables (like whether or how often you pronounce an /r/ after a vowel, or if you pronounce words with a syllabic /r/ like Nelly saying “it’s getting hot in hurr”), other researchers have studied differences between places (like if you pronounce fewer /r/s if you’re from New York, or more hurrs for heres if you’re from St. Louis), and other researchers had studied entire vowel systems — roughly, how you pronounce all the vowels in English, so what does it really sound like when you say GOOSE and FOOT and is the vowel sound you make there different than someone else’s? — but mainly in one place. (shoutout, though, to Charlie Farrington, who wrote an excellent dissertation, available here, that looked at a single understudied variable — replacement of /t/ or /d/ with a glottal stop — and how it varied across four cities. He used the growing Corpus of Regional African American Language, or CORAAL, and his diss has the excellent title: Language Variation and the Great Migration: Regionality and African American Language). My dissertation was the first work to look at the entire vowel system for African American English speakers across the entire country. 

To do this, I used a standardized reading passage. But it’s not as simple as it sounds, because I had to write a new one (with help and input from lots of linguists who are also native speakers of AAE, to reduce regionalisms from my own personal experience with AAE — y’all know who y’all is).  Existing reading passages were, to quote a friend of mine who I had read one, "wack” (check it out for yourself). The reading passage I used is a short story about Marcus Junior, AKA Junebug, going to the barber shop by himself for the first time, just before his 12th birthday. It was intentionally designed with lots of characters and quotes to encourage using AAE instead of formal classroom English. (I’ve actually been asked about illustrating it and making it into a children’s book — if you’re connected to that world, get at me) I did some technological workarounds so people could go to my website and record themselves reading the passage, “Junebug Goes to the Barber”, and upload it from the comfort of their own homes. I solicited participation from friends, family, extended family, Facebook, Twitter — you name it. I got big pushes from connected people like Jon Jon Johnson, Lee Colston II, @afrothighty, and NPR’s Gene Demby. Ultimately, I got more than 200 recordings, about 180 of which I used for my analysis. That’s not a lot, but it’s also 12 full hours of audio and hundreds of thousands of vowels to measure. I asked people to change things they felt were unnatural, so that means I also had to retranscribe and align each of the recordings manually. The biggest difference was that there is a near universal preference in AAE for “everybody” and the reading passage had a few “everyone”s in it — this word preference is not something that has been written about by any linguists, to my knowledge. Shout out to Gene Demby for getting that conversation started. The whole survey and reading passage are available here.

I wanted to compare to the gold standard, the Atlas of North American English, but our data collection techniques were very different. To compare against the ANAE, I decided to use modern geostatistical methods (kriging, getis-ord Gi* statistic, etc.), and I had to first show that these methods got results at least as good as the ANAE on the ANAE data. So I did that, corroborating the ANAE findings, but also making some new observations about the Northern Cities Vowel Shift along the way, challenging the dominant interpretation of how that shift started and spread. Then I used the same techniques to map pronunciation patterns in AAE. Lastly, instead of drawing dialect region boundaries by hand and superimposing my hand drawn maps to make dialect regions (a classic technique!), I used techniques from computational historical linguistics and from biology to allow the data themselves to tell me where the boundaries and clusters are. I used k-means clustering and hierarchical clustering analyses to determine how many regional varieties of AAE they are, and what their boundaries are.

My participants were overwhelmingly young, female, and well-educated, meaning that for all of my findings about how AAE differs from white Englishes, these findings are conservative, and understate the differences. As any sociolinguist will tell you, in general, the higher the level of education we attain, the more work we do to erase our unique, local accents — insofar as the features of the accent are something we are consciously aware of.

A note on maps: Some of the maps below use a technique that’s used in mining and in weather maps, to interpolate values for visualization. Do not over interpret where there are no people. I don’t have any participants from Wyoming, so the values there are just a computer’s statistical best guess based on what’s near by and what’s farther away. More research is definitely needed, and bigger projects with more people in each city (like the Corpus of Regional African American Language, or CORAAL), will shed more light on these nuanced differences. For all of the maps, the lighter color is usually more intensity of the shift under discussion, and the darker color is usually less intensity (or absence).

A note on audio: Some audio examples here are from my dissertation, others are celebrities, and some are recordings from the street. If they are only labeled with a place, they are from my dissertation research, and I am protecting the participants’ identities.

So what did I find?

This is barely scratching the surface, since this is just the first in a series of blog posts, but my main findings were:

There is no one Black Accent. 

Black folks (and linguists) been knew this. AAE exhibits strong regional variation, so people from NYC sound different from Philly and they both sound different from Atlanta and Chicago. California is different from all of them (but has similarities to DC and Baltimore, by coincidence), and Kansas City is doing its own thing. This sometimes surprises people to hear, but think about celebrities’ voices: Jay-Z (NYC) doesn’t sound like Kevin Hart (Philadelphia), and you’d never confuse either for Ryan Coogler (Richmond, CA). 

This dramatic variation existed even among highly educated people who have a strong command of “classroom” “standard” English. Even during a reading task, which are known to cause people to speak more formally and more carefully than in casual conversation. 

This means that…

Things claimed to be universal in AAE are not.

The PIN-PEN merger has historically been claimed to be a universal feature of AAE. That’s great, except it is absolutely not universal in the Northeast. Yes, I hear it in Harlem. I also hear vernacular AAE speakers who distinguish between PIN and PEN, in both NYC and Philadelphia. (Sharese King has already written about this in California, see below for some NYC examples). 

AAE is supposed to not exhibit the COT-CAUGHT merger, and by and large it doesn’t, even in places where everyone else has it. So for instance, Black folks from California tend to pronounce “on” like white New Yorkers (or sometimes, white Southeasterners) and not like white Californians. Don’t believe me? Listen to how Tiffany Haddish pronounces “on” “dog” and “ball”, or how Snoop Dogg says “on.” Yes, they’re different from one another, but they’re also very different from the pronunciations in other California accents.

But here’s the thing. AAE speakers in parts of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina often do have the COT-CAUGHT merger, opposite local white people. As an aside, I remember years ago explaining the COT-CAUGHT merger to a friend from Atlanta in a cafe in Harlem, so I expected this finding, but it seemed to really surprise quite a few linguists (when you read this, hi Bri-bri!).

That brings me to the next finding:

AAE has a lot of the same kinds of changes as white dialects, but they follow a completely different geographic distribution, and may have developed completely independently. So white people have the COT-CAUGHT merger in California but not in Georgia, and Black people have it in Georgia but not in California. White people say words like DOWN so it sounds like day-own in parts of the Deep South, black people do it in New York (compare Jay-Z saying “bounce (with me),” “down,” or “uptown” to Robert De Niro saying those same words). White folks are slowly moving where they pronounce words like GOOSE and GOAT further forward in the mouth in the Southeast, moving westward toward Texas, and Black folks do it in the Midatlantic (most especially DC and Baltimore) and in California.

These shared patterns include chain shifts (not just one-off changes) described in the Principles of Linguistic Change, but, again, for totally different regions. For instance, the Back Upgliding Shift, also known as the “second Southern vowel shift” is present in AAE, but it’s not limited to the South, and isn’t present for Black folks in my sample from all the places it is present among white English speakers.

The “back upgliding” shift, or “second south” shift, from the Atlas of North American English

The Back Upgliding Shift in my data.

For reference, here’s the same shift in the Atlas of North American (white) English:

That’s because:

Black accents pattern with the Great Migration. As black people fled racial terrorism in the South, and migrated across the country, their patterns of movement were very different than the patterns of movement of white people across the country. To over simplify, black people moved south-to-north, white people moved east-to-west. Segregation and Jim Crow only amplified this, so Black people in Chicago tend to sound more like Black people in Mississippi than white people in Chicago. In fact, one linguist made a convincing argument that, at a minimum, you can’t rule out “fear of a black phonology” as a main driver of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (Van Herk, 2008). If there were already black people in decent numbers, as in New York, there was a founder effect — newcomers learned to speak like the people who were already there. If there wasn’t already a large Black population, like in Chicago, this didn’t really happen. These things play out in complex ways that are dependent on which parts of an accent are really noticeable to people and which aren’t.  

Even more than that, there were already differences in Black accents across the South. Regional variation in Black accents today are the product of modes of travel in the 19th and 20th centuries (rivers and railways). But the starting point was shaped by the location of shipping routes and slave ports where abducted and enslaved Africans were first taken. 

what are the patterns?

I was curious what story the data would tell without me interpreting them, so I used a few different clustering algorithms on people’s vowel spaces. I gave the computer all the vowel measurements for each of the vowel classes for each person, but did not give the computer any geographical data, and I asked for it to group similar with similar. Using Agglomerative Nesting, or AGNES, to look at hierarchical structure without geographic data, the results showed strong geographic patterns. People from The Bronx sounded like other people from The Bronx, and when you measure all of their pronunciations, they’re closer to each other than to people from anywhere else. But people from Brooklyn form the next closest grouping. And people from Philly are closer in their pronunciations to people from Brooklyn and The Bronx than people from Atlanta are. And so on. 

An example sub tree from my dissertation research. (I know this is tiny; I will share more readable versions of the trees in future posts).

The question is then, how do you group these clusters? There are a handful of different statistical techniques to determine this from the data, and they all seemed to suggest around 10 groupings. Using knowledge about the real world, it looks like it should probably be about 12: the computer wants to group California with the DMV (D.C., Maryland, and Virginia), probably because they both pronounce the GOOSE and GOAT vowels with the body of the tongue further forward in the mouth (audio examples below); and it wants to group North Carolina and Michigan, which may be one group based on patterns of migration, or may not. 

In the future, I plan to build on this research, and to make more artistic maps — these were for my dissertation, which is a target audience of about 3 people. 

Mapping with 5 clusters really captures the Great Migration, but loses some of the granularity of the East Coast, and important differences up the Mississippi. It also looks almost exactly like the maps I produced of lexical variation in Twitter data in 2015.

Mapping 10 clusters gives a better perspective on regional differences, especially in the Northeast, and shows more granularity up the Mississippi. Chicago and Jackson, Mississippi are more similar to one another than to New York, but this higher level of granularity captures that Chicago and Minneapolis are more alike than Chicago and Jackson, 50 years after the Great Migration.

Agglomerative hierarchical clustering with vowel data (and no geographic data), with 10 clusters.

Remember that in each of these we need to add a little world knowledge: California and DC are probably not a real cluster, they just share common features, likely by chance. Specifically, fronting of the vowels in GOOSE and GOAT. (I have given semi-exaggerated audio examples here).

Hotspots for fronting and raising of /uw/ as in GOOSE and /ow/ as in GOAT on the East Coast.

GOOSE fronting in California.

GOOSE fronting.

For comparison, here’s fronting of /uw/ in the Atlas of North American (white) English, where fronted /uw/ is circled in Orange.

How do you tell where someone is from by their accent?

In the last few years, I’ve been able to pinpoint where new people I meet are from. It’s almost a party trick at this point — I’m no Henry Higgins, but I’ve astonished and impressed quite a few people by pinpointing what state, or part of a state, they’re from. Obviously, I can’t teach everything there is to know, but there are some geographic patterns that are very salient. In future posts, I will do some deep dives into individual local accents.

Here are some of the patterns. These are generalizations and do not mean that all people from that location have that pronunciation. Rather, it reflects where a particular sound is more common.

The “African American Vowel Shift” (AAVS) involves swapped vowel nuclei for /iy/ as in FEET and /i/ as in KIT, swapped nuclei for /ey/ as in FACE and /e/ as in DRESS, and raised /uh/ as in STRUT. AAE speakers with the AAVS are from (eastern) North Carolina, and a broad path upward from the Gulf states to the Great Lakes. Note that it’s gradient, so for instance, Snoop Dogg, from California, has the shifted nuclei of /iy/ and /i/, but in general it was less prominent in my participants from California than it was in the Gulf.

The “African American Vowel Shift” (AAVS)

The “African American Vowel Shift” (AAVS)

Fronted GOOSE and GOAT vowels? That’s Washington D.C., Baltimore, and to a lesser extent, California (see above).

MARY-MARRY-MERRY merger, with centralized /r/ for MARRY (so MARY-MERRY are pronounced like “may-ree” and MARRY is pronounced like “Murray”)? Baltimore and DC only. Same goes for “fear” rhyming with “fur,” but this isn’t universal by any means, it’s just the main place this shift is attested at all.

Back GOOSE and GOAT, no PIN-PEN merger, and none or few of the reversals of the AAVS? That’s the Northeast, especially New York City and Philadelphia. (That’s the dark color on the AAVS map). The fact that many, many AAE speaking New Yorkers do not have the PIN-PEN merger should not come as a surprise to anyone who has heard any hip hop from New York since, well, ever (like how Whodini says “friends” in 1982, or how Biggie Smalls says everything).

Strongest PIN-PEN merger in the AAE data.

PIN-PEN merger on the east coast. Strongest in Virginia Beach, weakest in NYC.

Distributions of some PIN and PEN words among New Yorkers. Notice how you can divide them up pretty well.

As an aside, it has always perplexed me how linguists can teach that the PIN-PEN merger is a core, universal feature of AAE, and then go home and listen to hip hop from NYC where entire rhyme schemes are built on not having that merger. That Whodini track is 40 years old, and both cuts I included here for educational purposes were hit songs. The counter-evidence to our textbooks is literally all around us, every day.

COT-CAUGHT Merger? Your best bet is Florida, but you could go as far afield as Georgia and parts of South Carolina. Compare the vowel spaces for Florida and New York, below (AA refers to the COT vowel and AO refers to the CAUGHT vowel).

COT and CAUGHT vowels for Florida.

COT and CAUGHT vowels for New York.

Just look at that beautiful separation in the second on the top (from Brooklyn) or the entire second row!

Raised and fronted /uh/ as in STRUT? Best bet is Kansas City or St. Louis, and parts of Oklahoma. This is why a colleague of mine from Oklahoma says he’s country with the same vowel I have in the word book.

Vowel in DOWN/TOWN/MOUTH sounds like /æ/ (as in “cat”) or even /e/ (as in “bed”) or /ey/ (as in “say”) at the onset? Atlanta or NYC are most likely. For instance, listen to how the conductor on the 1 train in New York says “town” and “bound” in the clip below (“one-two-five where it always stays live. This is Harlem, one hundred and twenty fifth street. This is a one-three-seven bound uptown one. The next and last stop is 137, stand clear”), or how Jay-Z says “down” in the clip below that, from an interview on the Breakfast Club.

Vowel in CAUGHT/HAWK/DAWN starts with an oo sound? New York and Philadelphia. (and most places if it’s before an n).

Vowel in CAUGHT/HAWK/DAWN starts with /æ/ as in “cat”? Strongest in Mississippi and Alabama, but you’ll also find it in Tennessee, Kansas, Missouri, etc.

There are tons more patterns that I haven’t even touched on (what vowel do you have for “there”? How often do you pronounce /v/ after a vowel as in love or believe? What vowel do you have in words like thing? How often do you pronounce /r/ or /l/ after vowels? If you don’t pronounce it, do you replace it with a /w/ sound?). And these all work together as a coherent system.

Some AAE vowel systems.

Note the difference between bought and bot patterns in the Northeast and Southeast, or the patterns around where bait and bet are in North Carolina and the Gulf states, or where bat is relative to other words in these charts…these are very distinct sound systems.

So what now?

My biggest hope for the future is that researchers stop treating AAE like local divergences from white dialects, and really lean into treating it as its own set of systems instead of writing papers about a single vowel or consonant in a single place or two — this is why I tend to prefer Sonja Lanehart (and others’) approach to AAL, where the L is for Language. Theres so much more to say about this, and about regional variation, but I’ll stop here for now. My full dissertation is available here, but may only be interesting to readers interested in highly technical and detailed explanations of the statistics. I am, however, in the process of turning this material into a more digestible form for people outside of academic linguistics. Over the next few months, I will be writing posts that detail the accents of specific places, and what their unique features are, including some that I observed, but that did not make it into my dissertation (like regional patterns in how people pronounce thing). I hope that my work helps contribute to the growing chorus of voices in and outside of academia who are challenging the myth that there is one black accent, and who are challenging the academic approach that treats African American Language as just a few extra bells and whistles on local white varieties and not as its own rich linguistic variety not defined by its relationship to other language varieties.

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©Taylor Jones 2021

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What's in a name? Why do some linguists not call it African American Vernacular English (AAVE) anymore?

Today’s post will be a short one, but it’s something I should have written a long time ago. 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. However, just as people on Twitter are taking the term AAVE mainstream, linguists are moving away from it. 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. I tend, now, to use African American English or African American Language. Here’s a breakdown:

African American Language: This is the term now most used by linguists studying this language variety. The 2015 Oxford Handbook of African American Language has very thorough discussion as to why. 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. 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). But we don’t know that, and it’s actually quite a contentious claim. 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. Calling it AAL sidesteps any strong stance on origins, and does not presume mutual intelligibility with other varieties of English. 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. This is an area of ongoing research and contention.

African 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. Most English speakers understand most of the AAE they hear, and can be trained to understand all of it. They also intuitively understand that there are different varieties of English, and so tying it in to Appalachian, Southern, Scottish, Received Pronunciation, etc. helps people understand how it can be different, but still valid. This term is very similar to AAVE, but…it’s missing the V.

African American Vernacular English: AAE is missing the V because the V is for “vernacular”, which, in this case, means something like “casual”. 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 is still basically the case, although it’s changing. One result of this fact was that even the people attempting to valorize AAE implicitly viewed it as a casual register. 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. Think about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. giving a speech. 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. 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). Most white Americans would pronounce /t/ as a flap in that situation, no matter the formality of the speech (think ladder/latter). However, many AAE speakers, when speaking formally, will release the /t/ similar to how it is released at the beginning of a word. So “identity” might be ‘eye-dennidy” [ɑ͡ɪdɛɾ̃ɪɾi] for even the most formal of white speakers, but “ah-dint-ih-tea” [ɑːdɪ̃tɪtʰi] for some AASE speakers. (I’m told that many HBCUs used to, or still do, have “diction” classes which cultivate this style of speaking). Notice that in the second example, there are features AAE shares with Southern (white) American English, like ah for eye and dint for dent, and that these are common in AAE but not universal, so someone from Harlem might say [ɑ͡ɪdɛ̃tɪtʰi] when speaking formally. The point is, historically AAE was thought of as being exclusively the domain of casual speech, and studies often privileged the way teenagers and gang members (!) spoke, and it wasn’t until there were more Black voices in the academy that this blind spot began to be corrected. It’s still a problem for the general public, as even the most well meaning people, many of whom speak AAE, will still assume that AAE is slang and miss that it is a complete linguistic system. On fleek is not AA(V)E from a linguistic perspective, but they don’t think it be like it is but it do is AAE. Much of the discussion of AAE and borrowing/appropriation misses that what is being borrowed often is slang, and that AAE is much, much harder to accurately imitate!

Ebonics: This term was originally coined to describe a variety of contact languages with African influence, and is a blend word of “ebony” and “phonics” for “black sounds”. This means that not only did Ebonics refer to African American Language, but it also refers to Gullah, to Black Canadian English, to Dominican Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Jamaican Patwa, and Brazilian Portuguese, among others. In the 1990s there was a massive media storm over the term, after the Oakland school board attempted a (smart) maneuver to increase funding to teach literacy and classroom English to children who spoke AAL at home — they argued that AAL was not the same thing as English, and therefore funding earmarked for second language English learners should also go to underfunded English classes in primarily Black neighborhoods. The media latched onto this, and it was misrepresented as Oakland trying to teach all kids to “speak Ebonics” and there were tons of articles with titles like “Ain’t ain’t a word” (side note, imagine if it actually wasn’t — this would read like “blorf blorf a word!”). After 1996, the term ebonics became associated in the popular consciousness with (1) African American Language and (2) the idea that it is broken, bad, and defective. Because it is now effectively a pejorative for AAL, linguists no longer use it.

There are also a lot of historical names that are no longer used. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that linguists took AAL seriously, and in the beginning you’ll find papers talking about things like “Northern Negro English”, “Black English Vernacular (BEV")” or “Black English” (some linguists from that time still use the latter, although both BE and BEV seem to be about whether one prefers “Black” or “African American” which is an entirely separate conflict to wade into).

For all of these, it should be noted that the language variety is not exclusive to Black people, although they comprise the vast majority of the fluent speakers of AAL. This is similar to the situation with Russian. The vast majority of its speakers are from a handful of ethnic groups, but this is because of history and geopolitics, and not DNA. There’s no AAL gene that’s magically associated with melanin, but there is massive residential and educational segregation in the US, and a strong social stigma against AAL, so it’s rare to find fluent, native, non-Black speakers. Because it is the language of an oppressed people, there are also strong feelings around ownership and who has the right to speak it, even seemingly paradoxically, among black folks who don’t speak it.

I think most linguists working on AAL would love to see AAL catch on in the mainstream, but I think this is highly unlikely. I do, however, hope to see AAE replace AAVE, as that V is doing a lot of work. I have published papers that use AAVE, where appropriate — like when Christopher Hall and I wrote about “the n-word” which only occurs in informal speech — but it feels weird to see people attempting to valorize AAL while simultaneously implicitly calling it informal and vernacular.

For more on these, check out the videos below. The first is an interview with Dr. Lanehart, the editor of the Oxford Handbook of African American Language (OHAAL), and a proponent of the term AAL. The second is a discussion of African American language use with four experts.

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©Taylor Jones 2020

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Closed (minded) captions

Today I was tagged into a conversation on Twitter by New York Times best-selling author Morgan Jerkins, who had been watching an episode of The Cleveland Show and happened to have the closed captions on. She wrote:

So last night I was watching "The Cleveland Show" and I want someone to explain the last few captions to me. pic.twitter.com/j5r84Xn5zG

— Morgan Jerkins (@MorganJerkins) December 13, 2020

I was expecting closed captions that were, at least, an attempt at accurately captioning what was said. Perhaps the transcriptionist misheard or misunderstood, but transcribing in good faith.

Instead, there was this:

The caption reads “dam-fa-foo-dun-may-hebeyad-shoot.”

That was followed by:

The caption reads “Naw-a-gah-may-mah-beyad, dayum.”

This raises an important question: what is the function of closed captions? Ostensibly, it’s so the viewers know what was said.

In this case, what was said was:

In IPA (this will be relevant later) that’s:

[dæ̃ fæ fuw dʌ̃ me͡ɪ hɪ beːʲɪʔ ʃːuʔ næ͡w ɑ͡ɪ gɑː me͡ɪk̚ mɑː beːʲɪd̥ deʲɪ̃ʰ]

The transcript should read “damn fat fool done made his bed? Shoot. Now I gotta make my bed. Damn.”

There are a couple of things happening here.

First, the character is a black character being voiced by a white voice actor, who does not, evidently, have early life contact with AAE speech communities necessary to speak it natively. He’s very good, but he also is not perfect, and it’s clear that while he’s nailed some of the harder parts of some black accents, he’s also missed some important nuance, overgeneralized some parts of the accent, and applied the wrong accent to the wrong place. He’s noticed that word final consonants are often deleted, unreleased, realized as glottal stops, or deleted altogether, but he has overgeneralized, and left no word final consonants in places where they should appear. In fact, it was his second word — [fæ] instead of [fæʔ] — that made me look up who was voicing the character — I’ve never heard an AAE speaker who would say fah for fat. He noticed that word final nasals (n, m, ng) are often pronounced as nasalization on the vowel, like in French, and not as a following segment. He also noticed that the vowel in bed is often split, so it sounds like the vowels in “play hid”. However, the show takes place in Stoolbend, Virginia, and this accent feature is not as common in Virginia AAE. It’s common in parts of the Carolinas, and from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, along the Mississippi, but not most of the mid-Atlantic or Northeast. He also overdoes the consonant deletion — this level of syllable coda deletion is only really plausible in Georgia. He also over does it with “gotta.” That kind of reduction does happen, but not exactly in that context: the word is too slow and too carefully pronounced, so it comes across as caricature.

Caricature brings me to the second: This is a white actor voicing a black character on a comedy show, where part of the humor is evidently making fun of how he speaks. It should not be controversial for me to plainly state that it looks a lot like minstrelsy. I’m not entirely clear on how Rallo Tubbs is significantly different from Amos ‘n Andy, or from Thomas D. Rice. Evidently, after the killing of George Floyd, even the voice actor realized it was probably a bad look, and he publicly announced he would not be voicing black characters anymore. Why George Floyd, but not Mike Brown or Emmett Till, changed his mind remains a mystery. He made it clear he doesn’t want to take work from Black voice actors, but I’m not sure if the broader context is clear to him, given that statement and, you know, the decade or so of him doing this work. As I mentioned in my replies on Twitter, it’s uncomfortably evocative, to me anyway, of Jim Crow in Dumbo. The crows are clearly a vaudeville/minstrel act, and clearly intended to be speaking AAE (“I-uh be done seen most ev’rything/when I seen an elephant fly!”). They’re also voiced by white actors in the 1950s, and the line between imitation as flattery and caricature as mockery is razor thin there (and they’re on the wrong side of that line anyway). We can say that they clearly have contact with AAE speakers, and that there’s clearly a certain level of respect, but at the end of the day they’re taking a job that a Black man simply could not have at that time, to play at the culture, music, and language for laughs. It’s no longer the case that a Black voice actor could never get the job (just look at the cast of the Cleveland Show), but there’s still a direct line from Al Jolson, through Amos ‘n’ Andy, through the crows in Dumbo, right up to the Cleveland Show.

Third, and most importantly for this discussion, there’s the captions on top of all of that. If you’re reading the captions to know what was said, you still don’t know what was said! What you get is that the character said something unintelligible. The way I look at it, there’s two plausible possibilities, neither of which is good: first, the transcriptionist couldn’t make sense of the utterance and did the best they could, assuming it was some kind of gibberish. Or Jive (note to self: write post about Airplane). Second, the transcriptionist thought it was more important to show that the character wasn’t speaking “right” than to actually, you know, transcribe what was said. That would explain why “done” was written as “dun”. They’re pronounced the same, but any time a writer chooses to write something like “eye dun tole yew” instead of “I done told you”, they’re not telling us much about how a character sounds, but they’re telling us a great deal about how we’re supposed to perceive that character. Is it really possible that the transcriptionist who had flawlessly transcribed up to that point could no longer tell from context that the character was talking about making his bed? That he said “now” — a recognizable word of English — and not “naw”?

This is a really interesting case to me, because it is in some ways very subtle. What has to be behind this choice, any way you slice it, is a certain often unstated linguistic ideology. Most of us were taught explicitly in school that writing takes precedence over speech, and that for both writing and speech, there is one correct way to do things, which coincidentally overlaps with how well educated, wealthy White people (but not White Ethnics!) speak. This manifests itself in all aspects of our society, from arguments about pronunciation, to whether something “is (really) a word.” Built into that ideology is that there is some reason why one way of doing things is better — clarity, logic, authority — and it’s never the truth: that the prestige variety exists based on social norms, not linguistic facts. Lastly, this ideology positions ways of speaking that are not “classroom” English as inferior (and lacking in clarity, logic, and authority). This captioning only makes sense if we recognize that the transcriptionist, the service running these captions unquestioningly (in this case, Hulu), and likely most of people involved in the show’s production either view AAE as unintelligible, as something that can function as the butt of a joke, or both. It’s a subtle form of anti-blackness that’s not necessarily predicated on overt or deep hostility. It’s casual.

That’s not to say that all nonstandard spellings are inherently racist, or offensive, or what have you. I’ve even written chapters on how people intentionally represent how they speak with novel spellings (as in “dis tew much”). But in this particular case, there’s no valid reason I can think of why turning on the captions on Hulu should result in “dam-fa-foo-dun”. And this is, weirdly, something you only really see with AAE, and some socially stigmatized varieties of English spoken by (generally poor) white people, like Appalachian English.

As a thought experiment, can you imagine what would happen if Downton Abbey were captioned this way?

“noaw mayde? noaw nah-nee? noaw valette eevun?”

“ihts nayntiyn twuntee sevun, wi-uh mahdun foake”

(If that wasn’t transparent to you, It was the first lines in the Downton Abbey movie trailer).

This was a very interesting counterpoint for me this week, as I’ve been reviewing transcripts of a deposition and I was blown away by the accuracy and professionalism of the court reporter. While mistranscription of AAE (and mock AAE!) is a systemic problem, it’s not a universal one.

I don’t know where people stand on this issue, but I know where I do. While I see mistranscriptions of AAE everywhere, from Netflix to Turner Classic Movies, this is different, in that it’s apparently intentional. We can do better than this.

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©Taylor Jones 2020

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On "woke"

I recently read a fantastic thread on Twitter from Dr. Alayo Tripp, aka @phonotactician, discussing changing use of “woke” — a participle that originated in (some) varieties of African American English, but that has been adopted into mainstream, white varieties of English with dramatically changing meanings. Dr. Tripp wrote about the intersection of borrowing, semantic change, and anti-blackness, and did an excellent job of explaining something I had been struggling to articulate.

NonBlack people here’s a thread for you about the word “woke.” Since “no mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” 🧵

— Alayo Tripp, PhD (@phonotactician) September 1, 2020

I thought the thread was great, especially the discussion of superlative morphology (“the wokest”), and have reproduced the thread here, with their permission:

The Thread:

NonBlack people here’s a thread for you about the word “woke.” Since “no mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.”

TL;DR: If you are using the word “woke” to denigrate people then you are an agent of antiBlack racism. If you’re not Black and you’re using this word at all you should think carefully about why.

You might already be aware that the word “woke” comes from African American English (AAE). It even has a perfectly literal sense which we can readily translate to standard American English (SAE). SAE: is he asleep or awake? AAE: he sleep or woke?

This usage is demonstrated in the 1962 essay published by William Melvin Kelley publishes in the New York Times entitled “If You’re Woke, You Dig It.” Despite the subject of the piece being extant Negro idiom, he is variously credited with coining the usage.

The application of the asleep/awake concept to specifically social justice gains a lot of traction in the decade to follow. See: Malcom X, 1965

To “stay” in AAE expresses an intensified continuative and habitual aspect of a verb. To “stay tweeting” is to tweet continuously and habitually. Combining the AAE grammar with the social nuance, i will now give a definition of what it means to stay woke:

remain aware of the value of Black people in an antiBlack world which seeks to devalue, exploit and destroy us. Seek solidarity with those who have woken and have compassion for those who are still sleeping.

This phrase is widely used in the protest movement of the 1970s, but because antiBlackness, Erykah Badu is often credited with coining it decades later in 2008. It later reaches new popularity and visibility with the Black Lives Matter movement and the ubiquity of social media.

NonBlack folks begin widely adopting it as a term, using it to define nonBlack identities... unmindful of how use of the *stative verb* connects to Black conceptions of engagement with social issues and invent comparative terms to facilitate competition amongst themselves.

nonBlack people instead adopted woke as an *adjective* and quickly took to discussing the properties of being woker than one another, and what might characterize the wokest among them. (This sounds as ungrammatical to my ear as “awakest.”)

The practice of defining nB identities as either more or less woke of course goes hand in hand with establishing nB ideology regarding the value of “wokeness.” Is it a virtue, or a flaw? How can white people determine which wokeness is authentic and which is “performative?*”

*it’s of course all performance wrt speech act theory but here we will use “performative” in the colloquial sense which means “(inauthentically or inappropriately) signaling a belief in ideological superiority”

White people have been gripped in a heated discussion about whether and how they should aspire to be woke, and what performances of “wokeness” are appropriate and acceptable.

But missing from this conversation is always “why?” It is for white folk somehow a foregone conclusion that discussions of wokeness are important.

Black conversations using the word historically present the state of being woke as an unquestionable good *for the sake of Black people.* Criticisms of the application of the word in this community explicitly center the worth and value of Black people.

So to review, nonBlack people have been gripped in a very heated public discussion about whether and how this label can denote something truly awful. This is because collectively, nonBlack people are antiBlack.

As the term reached widespread recognition particularly among white people, dictionaries begin to add the term, and its history is whitewashed. The year is 2017, 55 years after Kelley’s NYT essay.

(The line in the first tweet is the subtitle of that essay.) Dictionaries broadly redefine “woke” to reference alertness to injustice, with racism sometimes being highlighted as an afterthought in the definition (but not antiBlackness.)

This entire conversation necessarily dislocates the language and the issues it addresses from the people it was unquestionably created to affirm and uplift. It’s not a coincidence that this dislocation admits so much derision to the conversation.

It’s a really consistent cycle where racists on the right adopt Black language and then see white liberals adopt that same language to deride and mock their white political opposition. AntiBlackness is the commonality. Also see: simp, cancel, hater and king

If people in your sphere are using this language pejoratively and you say nothing then you are normalizing antiBlackness. You can do better.

This thread is not about the broad phenomenon of language change or borrowing; it is about antiBlack appropriation. Derails will get summarily blocked.

I accidentally a whole tweet in this thread pivoting from the literal to the figurative interpretation but OH WELL

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©Taylor Jones 2020

(Tweets from @phonotactician are their intellectual property and are reproduced here with their permission).

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Testifying While Black

[content warning: language] [co-authored with Jessica Kalbfeld]

For the last four years I've been working on a large-scale project distinct from writing my dissertation that my family and friends know I refer to as my "shadow dissertation." It's a co-authored paper, with Jessica Kalbfeld (Sociology, NYU), Ryan Hancock (Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, WWDLaw), and my advisor, Robin Clark (Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania), and we just received word that it has been accepted for publication in Language. Many of my other projects, including my work on the verb of quotation talkin' 'bout, on first person use of a nigga, and on the spoken reduction of even to "eem", among others, were all in service of this project.

Simply put: court reporters do not accurately transcribe the speech of people who speak African American English at the level of their industry standards. They are certified as 95% accurate, but when you evaluate sentence-by-sentence only 59.5% of the transcribed sentences are accurate, and when you evaluate word-by-word, they are 82.9% accurate. The transcriptions changed the who, what, when, or where 31% of the time. And 77% of the time, they couldn't accurately paraphrase what they had heard.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that all court reporters mistranscribe AAE. However, the situation is dire. For this project, we had access to 27 court transcriptionists who currently work in the Philadelphia courts -- fully a third of the official court reporter pool. All are required to be certified at 95% accuracy, however the certification is based primarily on the speech of lawyers and judges, and they are tested for speed, accuracy, and technical jargon. 

We recruited the help of 9 native speakers of African American English (if you're new to my blog, African American English is a rule-governed dialect as systematic and valid as any other), from West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, Harlem, and Jersey City (4 women and 5 men). Each of these speakers were recorded reading 83 different sentences, all of which were taken from actual speech (that is, we didn't just make up example sentences). These sentences each had specific features of AAE, 13 in total, as well as combinations of features. Examples of sentences included:

• When you tryna go to the store?

• what he did?

• where my baby pacifier at?

• she be talkin’ ‘bout “why your door always locked?”.

• Did you go to the hospital?

• He been don’t eat meat.

• It be that way sometimes.

• Don’t nobody never say nothing to them.

Features we tested for included: 

• null copula (deletion of conjugated is/are, as in he workin’ for “he is working”).

• negative concord (also known as multiple negation or “double negatives”).

• negative inversion (don’t nobody never say nothing to them meaning “nobody ever says anything to them).

• deletion of posessive s (as in his baby mama for his baby’s mama).

• habitual be (an invariant grammatical marker that indicates habitual action, as in he be workin’ for “he is usually working”).

• stressed been (this marks completion in the subjectively distant past, as in I been did my homework meaning “I completed my homework a long time ago”).

• preterite had (this is the use of had where it does not indicate prior action in the past tense, but rather often indicates emotional focus in the narrative, as in what had happened was… for “what happened was…”).

• question inversion in subordinate clauses (this is when questions in subordinate clauses invert the same way as in matrix clauses in standard English, as in I was wondering did you have trouble for “I was wondering whether you had trouble”).

• first person use of a nigga (This is where a nigga does not mean any person, but rather indicates the speaker, as in a nigga hungry for “I am hungry”).

• spoken reduction of negation (this is the reduction of ain’t even to something that sounds like “eem”, or the reduction of don’t to something that sounds like “ohn”).

• quotative talkin’ ‘bout (this is the use of talkin’ ‘bout, often reduced to sounding like “TOM-out” to introduce direct or indirect quotation, as in he talkin’ ‘bout “who dat?” meaning “he asked ‘who’s that?’”).

• modal tryna (this is the use of tryna to indicate intent or futurity, as in when you tryna go for “when do you intend to go?”).

• perfect done (this is a perfect marker, indicating completion or thoroughness, as in he done left meaning “he left”).

• be done (this is a construction that can mark a combination of habitual and completed actions, or can mark resultatives, as in I be done gone home when they be acting wild for “I’ve usually already gone home when they act wild”).

• Expletive it (this is replacing standard English “there” with it, as in it’s a lot of people outside for “there are a lot of people outside”).

• combinations of the above, as in she be talkin’ ‘bout “why your door always locked?” meaning “she often asks ‘why is your door always locked?’”

These are by no means all the patterns of syntax unique to AAE, but we thought they were a decent starting point. However, not only does AAE have different grammar than other varieties of English, but more often than not, African Americans have different accents from their white counterparts within the same city. Think about it: Kevin Hart's Philadelphia accent is not the same as Tina Fey's (it's also why Kenan Thompson's Philly accent is so weird in that sketch). 

All of the court reporters we tested were given a 220Hz warning tone to tell them a sentence was coming, followed by the same sentence played twice, followed by 10 seconds of silence. We asked them to 1) transcribe what they heard (their official job) and 2) to paraphrase what they heard in "classroom English" as best as they could (not their job!). The audio was at 70-80 Decibels at 10 feet (that is, very loud). The sentences and voices were randomized so they heard a mix of male and female voices, and they didn't hear the same syntactic structures all at the same time. All of the court reporters expressed that what they heard was:

• better quality audio than they're used to in court

• consistent with the types of voices they hear in court (more specifically, they often volunteered "in criminal court").

• spaced with more than enough time for them to perform the task (they often spent the last 5 seconds just waiting -- they write blisteringly fast).

What was the result? None of them performed at 95% accuracy, no matter how you choose to define accuracy, when confronted with everyday African American English spoken by local speakers from the same speech communities as the people they are likely to encounter on the job. If you choose to measure accuracy in terms of  full sentences -- either the sentence is correct or it is not -- the average accuracy was 59.5% If you choose to measure accuracy in terms of words -- how many words were correct -- they were 82.9% accurate on average. Race, gender, education, and years on the job did not have a significant effect on performance, meaning that black court reporters did not significantly outperform white court reporters (we think this is likely because of the combination of neighborhood, language ideologies, and stance toward the speakers -- black court reporters distanced themselves from the speakers and often made a point of explaining they "don't speak like that."). Interestingly, the kinds of errors did seem to vary by race: there's weak evidence that black court reporters did better understanding the accents, but still struggled with accurately transcribing the grammar associated with more vernacular AAE speakers. 

For all the court reporters, their performance was significantly worse when we asked them to paraphrase (although individual court reporters did better or worse with individual features. For example, one white court reporter nailed stressed been every time -- something we did not expect). Court reporters correctly paraphrased on average 33% of the sentences they heard. There was also not a strong link between their transcription and paraphrase accuracy -- in some cases they even transcribed all the words correctly, but paraphrased totally wrong. In a few instances, they paraphrased correctly, but their official transcription was wrong!  The point here is that while the court reporters did poorly transcribing AAE, they did even worse understanding it -- which makes it no surprise they had difficulty transcribing.

In the linguistics paper, we go into excruciating detail cataloguing the precise ways accent and grammar led to error. However, the takeaway for the general public is that speakers of African American English are not guaranteed to be understood by the people transcribing them (and they're probably even less likely to be understood by some lawyers, judges, and juries), and not guaranteed that their words will be transcribed accurately. Some examples of sentences together with their transcription and paraphrase include (sentence in italics, transcription in braces <>, and paraphrase in quotes):

• he don’t be in that neighborhood — <We going to be in this neighborhood> — “We are going to be in this neighborhood”

• Mark sister friend been got married — <Wallets is the friend big> — (no paraphrase)

• it’s a jam session you should go to — <this [HRA] jean [SHA] [TPHAO- EPB] to> — (no paraphrase)

• He don’t eat meat — <He’s bindling me> — “He’s bindling me”

• He a delivery man — <he’s Larry, man> — “He’s a leery man”

Why does this matter?

First and foremost, African Americans are constitutionally entitled to a fair trial, just like anyone else, and the expectation of comprehension is fundamental to that right. We picked the "best ears in the room" and found that they don't always understand or accurately transcribe African American English. And crucially, what the transcriptionist writes down becomes the official FACT of what was said. For 31% of the sentences they heard, the transcription errors changed the who, what, when, or where. Some were squeamish about writing the "n-word" and chose to replace it with other words, however those who did often failed to understand who it referred to (for instance, changing a nigga been got home 'I got home a long time ago" to <He got home>, or in one instance <Nigger Ben got home>, evidently on the assumption it was a nickname). 

And it's not just important for when black folks are on the stand. Transcriptions of depositions, for instance, can be used in cross-examination. In fact, it was seeing Rachel Jeantel defending herself against claims she said something she hadn't that sparked the idea for this project. (And she really hadn't said it -- I've listened to the deposition tape independently, and two other linguists -- John Rickford and Sharese King -- came to the conclusion the transcription was wrong, and have published to that effect). Transcriptions are also used in appeals. In fact, one appeal was decided based on a judge's determination of whether "finna" is a word (it is) and whether "he finna shoot me" is admissible in court as an excited utterance. The judge claimed, wrongly, that it is impossible to determine the "tense" of that sentence because it does not have a conjugated form of "to be", claiming that it could have meant "he was finna shoot me." If you know AAE, you know that you can drop "to be" in the present but not in the past. That is, you can drop "is" but not "was". The sentence unambiguously means "he is about to shoot me," that is, in the immediate future.

This is excluding misunderstanding like with the recent "lawyer dog" incident in which a defendant said "I want a lawyer, dawg" and was denied legal counsel because there are no dogs who are lawyers.

All of this suggests a way that African Americans do not receive fair treatment from the judicial system; one that is generally overlooked. Most of us learn unscientific and erroneous language ideologies in school. We are explicitly taught that there is a correct way to speak and write, and that everything else is incorrect. Linguists, however, know this is not the case, and have been trying to tell the public for years (including William Labov’s “The Logic of Nonstandard English,” Geoffrey Pullum’s “African American English is Not Standard English with Mistakes,” the Linguistic Society of America statement on the “ebonics” controversy, and much of the research programs of professors like John Rickford, Sonja Lanehart, Lisa Green, Arthur Spears, John Baugh, and many, many others). The combination of these pervasive language attitudes and anti-black racism leads to linguistic discrimination against people who speak African American English — a valid, coherent, rule-governed dialect that has more complicated grammar than standard classroom English in some respects. Many of the court reporters assumed criminality on the part of the speakers, just from hearing how the speakers sounded — an assumption they shared in post-experiment conversations with us. Some thought we had obtained our recordings from criminal court. Many also expressed the sentiment that they wish the speakers spoke "better" English. That is, rather than recognizing that they did not comprehend a valid way of speaking, they assumed they were doing nothing wrong, and the gibberish in their transcriptions (see above examples) was because the speakers were somehow deficient.

Here, I think it is very important to point out two things: first, many people hold these negative beliefs about African American English. Second, the court reporters do not have specific training on part of the task they are required to do, and they all expressed a strong desire to improve, and frustration with the mismatch between their training and their task. That is, they were not unrepentant racist ideologues out to change the record to hurt black people — they were professionals, both white and black, who had training that didn't fully line up with their task and who held  common beliefs many of us are actively taught in school.

What can we do about it?

There is the narrow problem we describe of court transcription inaccuracy, and there is the broader problem of public language attitudes and misunderstanding of African American English. For  the first, I believe that training can help at least mitigate the problem. That's why I have worked with CulturePoint to put together a training suite for transcription professionals that addresses the basics of "nonstandard" dialects, and gives people the tools to decode accents and unexpected grammatical constructions. Anyone who has ever looked up lyrics on genius.com or put the subtitles on for a Netflix comedy special with a black comic knows that the transcription problem is widespread. For the second problem, bigger solutions are needed. Many colleges and universities have undergraduate classes that introduce African American English (in fact, I've been an invited speaker at AAE classes at Stanford, Georgetown, University of Texas San Antonio, and UMass Amherst), but many, even those with linguistics departments, do not (including my current institution!). Offering such classes, and making sure they count for undergraduate distribution requirements is an easy first step. Offering linguistics, especially sociolinguistics in high schools, as part of AP or IB course offerings could also go a long way toward alleviating linguistic prejudice, and to helping with cross dialect comprehension. Within the judicial system more specifically, court reporters should be encouraged to ask clarifying questions (currently, it's officially encouraged but de facto strongly discouraged). Lawyers representing AAE speaking clients should make sure that they can understand AAE and ask clarifying questions to prevent unchecked misunderstanding on the part of judges, juries, and yes, court reporters. Linguists and sociologists can, and should, continue public outreach so that the general public has an informed idea about what science tells us about language and discrimination.

This is a disturbing finding that has strong implications for racial equality and justice. And there's no evidence that the problem of cross-dialect miscomprehension is only limited to this domain (in fact, we have future studies planned already, in medical domains). This study represents a first step toward quantifying the problem and what the key triggers are. Unfortunately, the solutions are not all clear or easy to enact, but we can chip away at the problem through careful scientific investigation. On the heels of the 19th national observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day (It has only been observed in all 50 states since 2000(!)), it seems appropriate to reaffirm that “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

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©Taylor Jones 2019

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African American English and Cross Dialect Comprehension

A while back, I wrote a handful of tweets in response to someone describing a linguist giving students a test on their comprehension of African American English. I explained that I am a linguist and part of what I study is cross-dialect comprehension between AAE and mainstream, “classroom” (white) English. Or really, the lack of comprehension on the part of the mainstream speakers. The tweet was seen by over 50,000 people (!) and a lot of people asked for DMs with more information about AAE. I figured it was easier to put some information all in one place here.

I'm a linguist who researches AAE and cross dialect comprehension. You're right about Habitual 'be' and stressed 'been'. Some other things white people usually don't understand:
-Preterite had: using "had" in sentences that don't place the events before other past events. 1/

— Language Jones (@languagejones) June 25, 2018

I’ve written elsewhere about what AAE is, and about borrowing and appropriation, especially those based on not quite understanding what is being borrowed, but here I want to dig a little more into whether and to what extent people who don’t speak AAE actually understand it.

I have a co-authored paper under review right now that I won’t discuss further here, that investigates to what extent court reporters understand and accurately transcribe AAE, which I will blog about once it’s published (spoilers: it’s bad out there). Below is a primer on AAE, a handful of things that are not understood by non-AAE-speakers, and some recommended readings.

A quick primer on AAE:

AAE is a dialect spoken primarily but not exclusively by black Americans, and is the language associated primarily with the descendants of slaves in the American South. It is a systematic, rule-governed, logical, fully-formed language variety, and it differs significantly from other varieties of English, across all levels of the language (that is, the phonology, or sound system, is different, it has different grammatical rules, etc.). It is important to note that AAE has different grammatical rules than standard English, and not that it has no grammatical rules. Therefore, it is absolutely possible to speak it wrong — something white people who are ignorant of the rules do often when imitating black people who speak AAE.

The accent of AAE is different from white accents, and because of segregation, people in the same city often have very different accents depending on race. Take Chicago for instance. The stereotypical white Chicago accent exhibits what’s called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, which SNL made fun of with their sketch about “da bears.” But that’s not the only Chicago accent. Think about it: does Kanye West sound like that?

It’s actually not fair to say the accent of AAE, since there’s regional differences (Michael B. Jordan (Philly) sounds nothing like Ryan Coogler (Bay area)). In fact, my dissertation research is on regional variation in AAE accents (if you identify as black and grew up in the US, please think about participating in my anonymous survey — it takes 3-4 minutes and can be found here: www.languagejones.com/aaes).

The grammar:

When I talk about cross-dialect comprehension, different accents definitely play a part, but so does very different grammar. There’s not much research on how well non-AAE speakers understand or don’t understand AAE, but what there is does not look good.

Labov 1972 found that white teachers in Harlem did not understand habitual be or stressed been. When given the secnario “you ask a child if he did his homework, and he replies ‘I been did my homework’” most incorrectly interpreted that to mean the child had not completed their homework. (see #2 below) Similarly, Rickford 1975 mentions an informal survey in which white participants took “they been got married” to mean a number of different, all wrong things.

Arthur Spears coined the term “camouflage construction” for constructions in AAE that look like they mean something in standard English, but really mean something else. He did this initially when describing “indignant come”, which is a marker of indignation, not a verb of motion. John Rickford and a few of his students did work on the use of had in preterite, not perfective, constructions. Christopher Hall and I have written on first person use of a nigga, and have a paper under review right now dealing with more than 10 different uses of “the n-word” in AAE that are distinct from those available to speakers of other dialects. I’ve written about “talkin’ ‘bout'“ as a verb of quotation.

But beyond a handful of papers on individual morphosyntactic features of AAE, there’s not really any research on how well other people actually understand it. We know they don’t always understand habitual be, but not at what rate they do or don’t. Same for a ton of other features. The court reporter paper I mentioned above is, to my knowledge, the first quantitative test of cross-dialect comprehension for almost all of the features mentioned in it.

What is unique to AAE? What is not understood by others?

Keeping in mind that there’s not much quantitative research on this, I can at least point to a handful of differences between AAE and other language varieties that lead to confusion or miscomprehension. Here’s a partial list:

1. Habitual be: he be workin’ does not mean “he is at work” or “he is working.” It means he works, usually or often. In fact, a sentence like this can imply he’s not currently at work. I wrote a short post about it here, comparing hiring ads for fast food restaurants. This is one of the earliest features that sociolinguists focused on. Bill Labov, Walt Wolfram, and John Rickford, as well as many, many others have written about this.

2. stressed been: This refers to actions completed in the distant past. So I been did my homework means I finished it a long time ago. I been told you that means I told you a long time ago. They been got married means they got married a long time ago, and still are. It does not mean the same thing as standard English “have been” as in I have been doing my homework — which implies I didn’t finish yet. John Rickford has written extensively about this.

3. Preterite had: This is use of “had” for past events, but not to situate them before others. I had went to the store means the same thing as “I went to the store”, although it may have a different function in terms of emotion in a narrative. John Rickford has written extensively about this.

4. Quotative “talkin’ ‘bout”: This is “talkin’ ‘bout” used the same way white people use “like” as in “he was all like ‘oh my god’”. It’s often used with indignant come, and often used in a mocking context. I wrote a paper about it available here. It’s also touched on in Arthur Spears’ work on indignant come, and in Patricia Cukor-Avila’s work on verbs of quotation.

5. First person a nigga: this is where a nigga means the same thing as “me” or “I”. I have blogged about it here, I have a paper in conference proceedings about it here, and Christopher S. Hall and I have a paper about it (and other n-words) under review right now.

6. Negative Auxiliary Inversion: This is don’t nobody never instead of “nobody (n)ever does”. Interestingly, there’s some evidence that without context, people who don’t speak AAE interpret these as commands. Lisa Green has written about the grammar of this construction.

7. Question Inversion in subordinate clauses: instead of “I was wondering whether you did it,” you may hear I was wondering did you do it. Lisa Green has written about this. There’s some evidence that it’s below the level of consciousness even for middle class speakers of what Arthur Spears calls AASE (African American Standard English).

8. The associative plural nem (an’ them"): to my knowledge, there’s only one sentence on this in the sociolinguistics literature, in a book chapter written by Salikoko Mufwene (in African American English: Structure, History, and Use). This functions the same as associative plurals in other languages (like Zulu). Saying Malik nem (or “Malik an’ ‘em") means “Malik and the people associated with him” and from context it’s clear who that means. Could be family, could be friends, could be the people he’s sitting with right now. I have an aunt (it the African American family-by-choice-not-blood kind of way) named M., and stay asking about M nem.

9. Stay for regular or repeated action: He stay acting stupid does not mean “he’s still acting stupid” or “he remains acting stupid” but rather, he consistently, repeatedly acts stupid.

10. It instead of there: it’s a lot of people means “There are a lot of people”…

11. Deletion of the subject relative pronoun: Standard English can delete “who” when referring to a person in a subordinate clause only if the person is the direct object (“That’s the man who I saw yesterday” or “Thats the man I saw yesterday”). AAE can delete the subject version (That’s the man saw me yesterday). I recently heard 10 and 11 combined, on the radio: It’s a lot of people don’t go there (meaning, there are a lot of people who don’t go there).

12. finna and tryna as immediate future markers: There’s one conference paper written by an undergrad (who I think didn’t continue to grad school in linguistics) about tryna as marking intent or immediate future action. There’s an entire court case where the appeal decision hinged on whether finna was a word and what it means. Both can be used to mean you’re about to do something.

13. be done: White folks often know done as in “he done hit him!” but don’t know be done as in “I be done gone to bed when he be getting off work” meaning “I’ve usually already gone to bed when he is getting off work”. There’s also the be done familiar from the crows in Dumbo: I’ll be done seen most everything when I seen an elephant fly, which is a slightly different construction.

14. Set expressions, idioms, clichés: Things like it be that way sometimes, or what had happened was are not always understood, or even recognized as set expressions.

There plenty of others, but these are the main ones (in my opinion). And of course, these can all combine with each other in longer sentences (“it be a lot of people talkin’ ‘bout ‘why she always be hanging out with Malik nem?’”). Combine that with a completely different accent, even (especially?) in the same city, and you have a recipe for total miscomprehension.

The interesting thing for me, though, is that from both personal anecdotal experience and some limited research, it appears that people who don’t speak AAE, especially white folks, generally assume (1) black folks are speaking “broken” English, and (2) that they understand it even when they don’t. So people will hear I been told you that and assume it means “I have been telling you that” and that the speaker just…said that wrong. Both sentence structures exist in AAE, and they mean different things. But only one exists in “classroom” English.

Some good readings:

There’s not a lot of material aimed at regular people instead of linguists, however, I highly recommend a few books:

• Spoken Soul (Rickford and Rickford)

• African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Lisa Green)

• Language and the Inner City (William Labov — this one is from 1972, at the beginning of AAE being taken seriously as an object of study).

• African American English: Structure, History, and Use (ed. Salikoko Mufwene)

• The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (ed. Sonja Lanehart. This one is massive and new, but a lot of it is very technical).

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©Taylor Jones 2018