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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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

Big Data and Black Twitter

This post is a story of how combining century old linguistic methods with new sources of data can reveal unexpected insights. It's a small preview of my upcoming talk at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, where I will discuss my recent research using social media to map previously undescribed dialect regions in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). It's the intersection of historical linguistics, dialect geography, spatial statistics,  and #swag.

Prelude: Maps are Cool

I recently took a class with Bill Labov on Dialect Geography: an under-appreciated subfield of linguistics that had a bit of a heyday in the late 1800s, and which is now starting to make a come back, thanks in no small part to popular dialect surveys like this one from the New York Times.

In the class, we learned methods of mapping and interpreting spatial data to glean information about regional variation in language use, and to begin to understand language variation and change. We learned how maps like this were made:

 l'Atlas linguistique de la France published from 1902 to 1920 by J. Gilliéron and E. Edmont – added colors from the version in Lectures de l'Atlas linguistique de la France de Gilliéron et Edmont. Du temps dans l'espace, published in G. Brun-Trigaud, Y. Le Berre & J. Le Dû (2005)

...but we also learned how to map data using newer, more sophisticated computational methods. For instance, reading geographic data from a comma separated file and mapping the data in the R programming language. More importantly, we learned what the interaction between geographic features, historical migrations, and a 'snapshot' of linguistic data can tell us about our language and ourselves.

Now, in the late 1800s, there were basically two ways that you could collect data for linguistic atlases: informally known as the German Method, and the French Method. The German Method was the method Georg Wenker used in 1876, when he sent out 50,000 surveys to German schoolmasters who dutifully sent back 45,000 completed surveys. The flaw in this method is that there is no guarantee of standardization as far as how the data is collected and interpreted. The French Method is what Jules Gilliéron used a decade later: send one trained linguist galavanting around the countryside on a bicycle for four years, eating baguettes, drinking wine, and conducting sociolinguistic interviews with everyone he can as he moves from town to town. My kind of job! Both methods resulted in gorgeous, detailed, and informative atlases...decades after the data were collected. More recently, enterprising linguists (among them, Dr. Labov) conducted telephone surveys, resulting in the "gold standard" Atlas of North American English. The ANAE gives an enormous amount of granularity to the study of regional dialects in North America -- seriously, click the link and play around, it's awesome.

Big Data

What the ANAE achieves, it does with a mere 792 speakers, intelligently sampled by region. It is a feat of ingenuity and economy.

However, we now have some intriguing new tools at our disposal, thanks to the internet and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. To give you an idea: a search for the word "the," -- a pretty good proxy for English use -- returns 607 million tokens in the last month alone. All of it is literally published work. It is, in effect, an enormous corpus of written language.   Given the right tools and know-how, anyone can search that published material.

The Speech Problem: Graffiti and The Writing on the (Facebook) Wall

The only hitch is this: writing is not speech. In fact, if you try to figure out how English speakers anywhere pronounce English based on the spelling conventions of academic written English, you're gonna have a bad time. A few sound shifts here, a few hundred years of weird convention there, and you've got a system that doesn't tell you much of anything useful.

Notice, though, I said the spelling conventions of academic English. Many people have a pet peeve they're more than willing to share (especially on reddit, it seems): they hate when others write should of in lieu of should have. This kind of mistake is any historical linguist's favorite thing ever. Why? Because it tells us something about pronunciation. People who write should of have reduced should have to should've and it is coming out in their writing -- should of and should've are totally indistinguishable in casual speech.

It's precisely this kind of error, along with the writings of hand-wringing pedants lamenting the decline of language (among other things), that allow us to reconstruct the pronunciation of Latin as it changed through time. (aside: ever wonder why it's "inconvenient" but not "inpolite"? A historical linguist can tell you why, and when it happened). In fact, we get an enormous amount of phonologically relevant information from things like graffiti dick jokes in places like Pompeii Who says historical linguistics isn't fun?

Error isn't the whole picture though. It's one thing to say that people who struggle  spelling will fall back on sounding things out. It's quite another when the non-standard spelling is intentional. For instance, one task for computational linguists interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is to group various spellings into sets that computers can recognize are all the same word. To simplify: a computer needs to know that color and colour are the same thing if it's going to process language quickly and effectively. Recent research in NLP has demonstrated that people on social medial platforms intentionally write how they speak. That is, they go out of their way to spell things in a non-standard way in order to better communicate how they talk informally. The best part is that this research holds across languages. While an American might be sittin (instead of sitting), a Dutch user of Twitter may well sitte (instead of zitten). This is especially true the further a dialect diverges from the written standard, as in modern dialects of Arabic. It's also true in AAVE, where the orthography you learn in school can't capture the phonological and grammatical nuances of the dialect -- something that writers like Zora Neal Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison grappled with.

Black Twitter: Stigmatized Speech, Innovative Writing

Around the time I was taking the class on dialect geography, I stumbled upon a Youtube video purporting to explain #Blackfolkslang. It's a fun example of what linguists call enregisterment: when a dialect feature gets (consciously) noticed and becomes an overt marker of linguistic belonging. A classic example is the stereotypical Brooklynese fugeddaboudit.

Being a native speaker of AAVE (due to childhood speech community), the forms made intuitive sense to me and were a lot of fun. When I showed them to non-speakers of the dialect out of context, however, they were baffled. "What is ioneem? Is that Arabic?"

I thought it would be fun to dig into their use, and see where these forms were used, and how often. I got help writing a script in Python, using the Twitter API and the Twython package to extract tweets, and started using the mapping tools I was learning in R to check them out.

It became an obsession.

A few months and a few hundred thousands tweets later, I came to a few realizations. First, there's not consensus. Some people tweet nun (for "nothing"), while others tweet nuttin, and others still tweet nuffin. Second, the forms used vary regionally. Third, the phonological clues these tweets provide can be corroborated by both other media and linguistic informants (informant: a fancy term for people who both speak whatever a linguist is interested in and are willing to talk to one). Lastly, there's not just one "Black Twitter." The Black Twitter that blogs, contributes to NPR, and live-tweets sociology conferences was not the Black Twitter I was reading. I was reading tweets from young adults not represented in the Pew Research Center Internet Project, from young gang members who signal affiliation with spelling (fun fact: crips superstitiously avoid the combo "ck" because it could stand for "crip killa," and will instead favor spellings like "fucc"), and from people who use Twitter as a free analog to both texting plans and dating sites.

Some of the writing was not immediately recognizable. For instance, I was perplexed by yeen for "you ain't" (in part because it's not used in NYC or Philadelphia, I would later find). That is, I was perplexed right until I searched for it on YouTube, and came across dozens of different songs, often self-produced, which use yeen in the lyrics. Similarly, nun could conceivably be pronounced in a number of different ways. French Montana to the rescue! People often tweet lyrics to their favorite songs, and quite a number of them tweeted "nigga i ain't worried bout nun". Whether there is a  glottal stop or it's elided for some of these tweeters is not clear, but what is clear is that it is two syllables, not one -- the only way to fit the rhythm.

Ultimately, I gathered data on ~30 terms (among them: yeen, talmbout, eem, ion, sumn -- you ain't, talking about, even, I don't, and something, respectively), and found that all of the variation could be explained by recourse to a handful of variations in pronunciation -- variations which can be corroborated by other means.

The Discovery: The Maps Don't Line Up

A handful of computationally minded linguists and linguistically minded computer scientists have been doing work on dialect geography using Twitter data, and I've found their work invaluable in developing this research. One of them, Gabriel Doyle (at UCSD), has demonstrated that dialect forms on Twitter correspond exceptionally well to the established gold standard of the ANAE. Like, uncannily, eerily well. He concluded, after some sophisticated statistical verification, that it's possible to glean geographic information about dialects from Twitter data.

His maps of double modals ("might could") and of the "needs washed" construction ("your car needs washed") line up perfectly with the maps produced by the ANAE and by the Harvard Dialect Survey (HDS).

My maps, however, did not line up.

Now, it has been known for a long time that including data from speakers of AAVE muddies things. In some ways, AAVE speakers do what other people in their general vicinity are doing, but in other ways they seem to do things differently. There's a large body of literature on this, but no national level description of regional variation in AAVE.

The standard maps of dialect regions in North America look like this:

Image from The ANAE, via the Texas English Project website: www.texasenglish.org

Notice the main feature is horizontal bands across the country, spreading from the East Coast. In some maps, the North, Midland, and South extend across the West, which is not given its own region. These regions follow patterns of westward expansion and settlement. In fact, maps of differences in building materials used in making cabins line up nicely with maps of dialect regions.

The thing is, AAVE does not share the same history as other North American dialects. Obviously, it is meaningless to discuss patterns of "settlement" when referring to black Americans, and while there is no consensus on the mechanics of how AAVE developed, it is understood to be largely an ethnolect, the product of a culture that developed in the last few hundred years shaped by (and despite) slavery, systemic racism, and extreme segregation.

In theory, then, the geographic distribution of AAVE should look different, and it should look roughly like the geographic distribution of Black Americans:

Image courtesy the Rural Assistance Center, from US Census 2010 data.

In some instances, this is what we see. For instance, when mapping AAVE-specific grammatical features like stressed been (which I discuss further here), the pattern lines up nicely with the population data:

initial exploratory plot of stressed been on Twitter

Note that tweets are concentrated in the South and the Northeast, and the areas with the highest black populations have the most tokens. Atlanta stands out particularly, but so do Oakland and LA, Chicago and Detroit. This pattern appears with other terms we'd expect to be non-regional, including nigga, tryna, and finna.

Similarly, enregistered lexical items (that is, local words famous for being local words) show up where we would expect them:

Philly's famously local word, "jawn," mapped on Twitter. Some of the unexpected points, on closer investigation, are people originally from Philadelphia. The two in Florida are someone referring to a friend named Jawn.

DC's newly famous "Jont." for more information, see Frances Sellers' fantastic article in the Washington Post, Is There a D.C. Dialect? It's a Topic Locals are Pretty Cised to Discuss, which discusses research by Georgetown's Minnie Annan.

We see other, unexpected things, however. Things like this distribution of sholl for "sure":

This pattern sholl is peculiar.

Once we map everything, we get a broad pattern, with some words (tryna, finna) completely non-regional, some (talmbout, sholl) in a band up the middle of the country, some (ioneem, nuffin) solely along the East Coast I-95 corridor, and some (yeen) only in the South:

When I compared the maps of broad patterns of use in AAVE on Twitter to a map of the Second Great Migration from the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, the pattern, and its most likely historical cause, revealed themselves.

What we see on Twitter is exactly what a historical linguist would expect from migration and dispersal, followed in some regions by innovation. The South Central to Midwest corridor and the South share terms like the quotative talmbout and phonological features like the replacement of /r/ with /l/ in the word sure (e.g., "sholl is."). The South, and the South alone, has  so called /ey/-raising, consistent with Southern American English, making you ain't into yeen, (whereas other parts of the country simplify it to yain). New York says "nuttin" and "suttin," but D.C. has nuffin, and Philly is split right down the middle by these competing forces:

"My bruva neva syced bout nuffin" - You a bama.

The above is just a small taste; I will be presenting quite a few more maps, and discussing the phonological data in much greater detail in my talk at the American Dialect Society annual meeting, this January. I'm also preparing a paper for publication. The key finding is that the pattern looks like what any historical linguist would expect after migration and innovation.

Why is this a big deal?

I'm extremely excited about this line of research, for a number of reasons:

1. Not many linguists have been riding the big data wave. Instead, computer scientists with no training in linguistics are compiling huge data sets of, well, language, and they're doing their best to analyze it, and similarly linguists with no training in computer science are often ignoring the new tools at our disposal. In some instances, computer scientists are beating us to interesting discoveries. In others, they're getting flawed research past peer review because they're so unfamiliar with established concepts in linguistics that they think they've discovered "super dialects" when in reality they've stumbled upon register. We should all be collaborating, instead of reinventing the wheel.

2. This is the first attempt at defining dialect regions in AAVE on a national level, providing a baseline of research - a starting point for other researchers (and me, of course) to refine. For instance, there is a significant body of research that suggests "th-fronting" (that is, pronouncing words with a th like they have f/v, as in nuffin) is universal. While it may be possible to find everywhere (especially now that a Philly rapper has a hit song with the word "mouf" in the title!), it does not appear that way in these data. Moreover, in NYC, it's often interpreted as a marker that the speaker is not from here. Conversely, an informant I interviewed who had recently moved to Waldorf, MD, told me how he had to insist that his children do not say "nuffin,"  because he didn't want them "sounding like their peers in school," going on to say "everyone around here talks like that." In this way, participation or non-participation in these phonological patterns may be performatively indexing (non)local identity.

3. This research relies on a new method of gathering data that can be complementary to traditional methods, and can help point toward new hypotheses, and new areas of research. For instance, some of the data suggest a syntactic change in progress (distinct from the one I'm presenting on at LSA 2015, in fact).

Ultimately, I'm excited because social media are new sources of data for linguists to take advantage of, and they're sources that are extremely rich and extremely large. Whereas Georg Wenker needed decades to send out 50,000 surveys and process the results, given the right question, we're on the cusp of being able to gather more data than that in just the better part of an afternoon.

I'm also excited because this research puts black folk back on the map, literally. It's time for a large scale, systematic description of regional patterns in AAVE like what we already have for other North American dialects, and this is a step toward it!