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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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.

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’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