African-American Vernacular English

Phonology

Many pronunciation features set AAVE apart from other forms of American English (particularly General American). John McWhorter argues that what truly unites all AAVE accents is a uniquely wide-ranging intonation pattern or "melody", which characterizes even the most "neutral" or light African-American accent. A handful of multisyllabic words in AAVE differ from General American in their stress placement so that, for example, police, guitar, and Detroit are pronounced with initial stress instead of ultimate stress. The following are phonological differences in AAVE vowel and consonant sounds.

Final consonant groups or clusters in AAVE have been examined as evidence of the systematic nature of this language variety, governed by specific rules. These analyses have been utilized to bolster arguments concerning the historical origins of AAVE. Consonant cluster reduction is a phonological process where a final consonant group or cluster, consisting of two adjacent consonant sounds, is simplified or reduced to a single consonant sound. The analysis of consonant cluster reduction in AAVE assumes that, initially, final clusters are present and intact in the language. For example, the word "tes" in AAVE originates from "test", with the final "t" of the "st" consonant cluster being deleted in word-final position.

Vowels

• Cot–caught merger: AAVE accents have traditionally resisted the cot–caught merger spreading nationwide, with lot pronounced and thought traditionally pronounced , though now often or , with the latter pronunciation most prominent in the Northeastern U.S. However, there is evidence of AAVE speakers exhibiting the cot–caught merger in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Charleston, South Carolina; Florida and Georgia; and in parts of California.
  • African American Vowel Shift: Early 2000s research has shown that the resistance to the cot–caught merger may continue to be reinforced by the fronting of lot, linked through a chain shift of vowels to the raising of the trap, dress, and perhaps kit vowels. This chain shift of vowels is called the "African American Shift". However, this shift is not universal to all AAVE speakers; it is mostly exhibited by speakers who live in all the states along the Mississippi River and in North Carolina.
• Reduction of certain diphthong forms to monophthongs, in particular, the price vowel is monophthongized to except before voiceless consonants (this is also found in most White Southern dialects). The vowel sound in choice ( in General American) is also monophthongized, especially before , making boil indistinguishable from ball.
• Pin–pen merger: Before nasal consonants (, , and ), dress and kit are both pronounced like , making pen and pin homophones. This is also present in other dialects, particularly of the South. The pin–pen merger is not universal in AAVE, and there is evidence for unmerged speakers in California, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
• The distinction between the kit and fleece vowels before liquid consonants is frequently reduced or absent, making feel and fill homophones (fill–feel merger). and also merge, making poor and pour homophones (cure–force merger).

Consonants

• Word-final devoicing of , , and , whereby, for example, cub sounds similar to cup, though these words may retain the longer vowel pronunciations that typically precede voiced consonants, and devoicing may be realized with debuccalization (where is realized as , for instance).
• AAVE speakers may not use the fricatives (the th in "thin") and (the th of "then") that are present in other varieties of English. The phoneme's position in a word determines its exact sound.
  • Word-initially, is normally the same as in other English dialects (so thin is ); in other situations, it may move forward in the mouth to (Th-fronting).
  • Word-initially, is (so this may be ). In other situations, may move forward to .
• Realization of final ng , the velar nasal, as the alveolar nasal (assibilation, alveolarization) in function morphemes and content morphemes with two or more syllables like -ing, e.g. tripping is pronounced as (trippin) instead of the standard . This change does not occur in one-syllable content morphemes such as sing, which is and not . However, singing is . Other examples include wedding → , morning → , nothing → . Realization of as in these contexts is commonly found in many other English dialects.
• A marked feature of AAVE is final consonant cluster reduction. This is a process by which the pronunciations of consonant clusters at the end of certain words are reduced to pronouncing only the first consonant of that cluster. There are several phenomena that are similar but governed by different grammatical rules. This tendency has been used by creolists to compare AAVE to West African languages since such languages do not have final clusters.
  • Final consonant clusters that are homorganic (have the same place of articulation) and share the same voicing are reduced. For instance, test is pronounced since and are both voiceless; hand is pronounced (alternatively or ), since and are both voiced; but pant is unchanged, as it contains both a voiced and a voiceless consonant in the cluster. It is the plosive ( and ) in these examples that is lost rather than the fricative; the nasal is also either preserved completely or lost with preservation of nasality on the preceding consonant. Speakers may carry this declustered pronunciation when pluralizing so that the plural of test is rather than . The clusters , are also affected.
  • More often, word-final , , and are reduced, again with the final element being deleted rather than the former.
  • For younger speakers, also occurs in words where other varieties of English would have instead. As a result, for example, street is pronounced .
  • Clusters ending in or exhibit variation in whether the first or second element is deleted.
• Similarly, final consonants may be deleted, although there is a great deal of variation between speakers in this regard. Most often, and are deleted. As with other dialects of English, final and may reduce to a glottal stop. Nasal consonants may be lost while nasalization of the vowel is retained (e.g., find may be pronounced ). More rarely, and may also be deleted.
• Use of metathesized forms like aks for "ask" or graps for "grasp".
• General non-rhotic behavior, in which the rhotic consonant is typically dropped when not followed by a vowel; it may also manifest as an unstressed or the lengthening of the preceding vowel. Intervocalic may also be dropped, e.g., General American story () can be pronounced , though this doesn't occur across morpheme boundaries. may also be deleted between a consonant and a back rounded vowel, especially in words like throw, throat, and through.
  • The level of AAVE rhoticity is likely somewhat correlated with the rhoticity of White speakers in a given region; in 1960s research, AAVE accents tended to be mostly non-rhotic in Detroit, whose White speakers are rhotic, but completely non-rhotic in New York City, whose White speakers are also often non-rhotic.
• is often vocalized in patterns similar to that of (though never between vowels) and, in combination with cluster simplification (see above), can make homophones of toll and toe, fault and fought, and tool and too. Homonymy may be reduced by vowel lengthening and by an off-glide .

"Deep" phonology

McWhorter discusses an accent continuum from "a 'deep' Black English through a 'light' Black English to standard English," saying the sounds on this continuum may vary from one African American speaker to the next or even in a single speaker from one situational context to the next. McWhorter regards the following features as rarer and characteristic of only deep African-American Vernacular English, though speakers of light African-American Vernacular English may occasionally "dip into for humorous or emotive effect":

• Lowering of before , causing pronunciations such as for thing (sounding something like thang).
• Word-medially and word-finally, pronouncing as (so for month and for mouth), and as (so for smooth and for rather. This is called th-fronting. Word-initially, is (so those and doze sound nearly identical). This is called th-stopping. In other words, the tongue fully touches the top teeth.
• Glide deletion (monophthongization) of all instances of , universally, resulting in (so that, for example, even rice may sound like rahss).
• Full gliding (diphthongization) of , resulting in (so that win may sound like wee-un).
• Raising and fronting of the vowel of words like strut, mud, tough, etc. to something like .

Grammar

Tense and aspect

Although AAVE does not necessarily have the simple past-tense marker of other English varieties (that is, the -ed of "worked"), it does have an optional tense system with at least four aspects of the past tense and two aspects of the future tense. The dialect uses several tense–aspect–mood markers integrated into the predicate phrase, including gon or gonna (future tense), done (completive aspect), be (habitual aspect, state of being), and been (durative aspect). These can function separately or in conjunction.

Linguist Charles E. DeBose notes that these markers form part of a broader and systematic tense, modality, and aspect (TMA) grammar in AAVE, in which native speakers distinguish between nuanced temporal categories—such as remote versus recent past—through constructions like BIN (e.g., "He BIN left") to indicate a long-completed action that remains relevant.

^aSyntactically, I bought it is grammatical, but done (always unstressed, pronounced as ) is used to emphasize the completed nature of the action.

^bI'ma, also commonly spelled Imma, is pronounced as . Harvard professor Sunn m'Cheaux claims I'ma originated in the Gullah language (an English creole), which uses "a-" instead of "-ing" for this type of verb inflection. Alternatively, other sources suggest it is a further shortening of I'm gonna.

As phase auxiliary verbs, been and done must occur as the first auxiliary; when they occur as the second, they carry additional aspects:

He been done working means "he finished work a long time ago".

He done been working means "until recently, he worked over a long period of time".

The latter example shows one of the most distinctive features of AAVE: the use of be to indicate that performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In most other American English dialects, this can only be expressed unambiguously by using adverbs such as usually.

This aspect-marking form of been or BIN is stressed and semantically distinct from the unstressed form: She BIN running ('She has been running for a long time') and She been running ('She has been running'). This aspect has been given several names, including perfect phase, remote past, and remote phase (this article uses the third). As shown above, been places action in the distant past. However, when been is used with stative verbs or gerund forms, been shows that the action began in the distant past and that it is continuing now. Rickford (1999) suggests that a better translation when used with stative verbs is "for a long time". For instance, in response to "I like your new dress", one might hear Oh, I been had this dress, meaning that the speaker has had the dress for a long time and that it isn't new.

To see the difference between the simple past and the gerund when used with been, consider the following expressions:

I been bought her clothes means "I bought her clothes a long time ago".

I been buying her clothes means "I've been buying her clothes for a long time".

Auxiliaries in African American Vernacular English are related in a typical pattern. They can be grouped into negative forms and affirmative forms for each of the words. For example, "had" is an affirmative form, while "hatn" is the corresponding negative form. These same auxiliaries can be used to mark sentences for the anterior aspect. As another example, was marks type 1 sentences, which by default are present tense, and transforms them to a time before the present. Take, for instance, "She at home": the word was can be inserted to mark this sentence, making the marked equivalent "She was at home". Auxiliaries such as these also have opposing negative and affirmative forms. In its negative form the auxiliary verb "wadn" is used to convey the opposing affirmative form.

• ^a Finna corresponds to "fixing to" in other varieties. It is also written fixina, fixna, fitna, and finta.

In addition to these, come (which may or may not be an auxiliary) may be used to indicate speaker indignation, such as in Don't come acting like you don't know what happened and you started the whole thing ("Don't try to act as if you don't know what happened, because you started the whole thing").

The irrealis mood marker be, having no intrinsic tense refers to a current or future event that may be less than real.

Modals

The dialect uses double modals, such as might could, which can function in various ways, including as adverbs.

Negation

Negatives are formed differently from most other varieties of English:

• Use of ain't as a general negative marker. As in other English dialects, it can be used instead of am not, isn't, aren't, haven't, and hasn't. However, some speakers of AAVE distinctively use ain't instead of don't, doesn't, or didn't (e.g., I ain't know that). Ain't had its origins in common English but became increasingly stigmatized since the 19th century .
• Double negation, as in I didn't go nowhere. If the sentence is negative, all negatable forms are negated. This contrasts with standard written English convention, which interprets a double negative to mean a positive (although this was not always so; see double negative). There is no limit to how many negators can be used.
• In a negative construction, an indefinite pronoun such as nobody or nothing can be inverted with the negative verb particle for emphasis (e.g., Don't nobody know the answer, Ain't nothing going on.)

While AAVE shares these with Creole languages, early recordings of African Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and recordings of former slaves indicate that negation was likely inherited from nonstandard colonial English.

Other grammatical characteristics

• The copula be in the present tense is often dropped, as in Russian, Hungarian, Arabic, and other languages. For example: You crazy ("You're crazy") or She my sister ("She's my sister"). This extends to questions: Who you? ("Who're you?") and Where you at? ("Where are you (at)?"). This has been sometimes considered a Southern U.S. regionalism, though it is most frequent in African-American speech. On the other hand, is can be included for emphasis: Yes, she is my sister. The general rules are:
  • Only the forms is and are (often replaced by is) can be omitted; am, was, and were are not deleted.
  • These forms cannot be omitted when they would be pronounced with stress in Standard American (whether or not the stress serves specifically to impart an emphatic sense to the verb's meaning).
  • These forms can be omitted only when the corresponding form in standard English can be contracted. For example, I don't know where he is cannot be reduced to *I don't know where he, and correspondingly Standard English forbids the contraction *I don't know where he's. Compare the acceptable forms I don't know where he at in AAVE, paralleling I don't know where he's at in Standard English.
• Verbs are uninflected for number and person: there is no -s ending in the present-tense third-person singular. Example: She write poetry ("She writes poetry"). AAVE don't for standard English doesn't comes from this, unlike in some other dialects which use don't for standard English doesn't but does when not in the negative. Similarly, AAVE was is used for standard English was and were.
• The genitive -'s ending indicating possession may or may not be used. Instead, genitive case is inferrable from adjacency. This feature is similar to many Caribbean creoles. Many language forms throughout the world use an unmarked possessive; it may here result from a simplification of grammatical structures. Example: my momma sister ("my mother's sister").
• The words it and they denote existence of something, equivalent to standard English's there is or there are.
• Word order in questions: Why they ain't growing? ("Why aren't they growing?") and Who the hell she think she is? ("Who the hell does she think she is?") lack the inversion of most other forms of English. Because of this, there is also no need for the auxiliary do.
• Relative clauses do not require a relative pronoun when they modify a noun in the object or in the predicate nominative position.

Vocabulary

AAVE shares most of its lexicon with other varieties of English, particularly that of informal and Southern dialects, such as, the relatively recent use of y'all. The main sources for new words are combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating. It has also been suggested that some of the vocabulary unique to AAVE has its origin in West African languages. However, etymology is often difficult to trace and, without a trail of recorded usage, these proposed origins cannot be considered proven.

Early AAVE and Gullah contributed a number of words of African origin to the American English mainstream, including gumbo, goober, yam, and banjo.

Compounding in AAVE is a very common method in creating new vocabulary. The most common type of compounding is the noun–noun combination, followed by adjective–noun combination. AAVE also combines adjectives with other adjectives less frequently, but more often than in standard American English.

AAVE has also contributed slang expressions such as cool and hip, to dig, jazz, tote, and bad-mouth, a calque from Mandinka. In many cases, the proposed West African etymologies are not recognized by linguists or the Oxford English Dictionary. Innovative African American slang is often formed by combining, shifting, shortening, blending, and borrowing English words and phrases that are regarded as informal.

AAVE also has words that either are not found in other American English dialects or that have strikingly different meanings. For example, there are several words in AAVE referring to White people that are not part of mainstream American English; these include gray as an adjective for Whites (as in gray dude), possibly from the color of Confederate uniforms; and paddy, an extension of the slang use for "Irish". "Red bone" is another example of this, usually referring to light-skinned African Americans.

"Ofay", which is pejorative, is another general term for a White person; it might derive from the Ibibio word afia, which means "light-colored", from the Yoruba word ofe, spoken in hopes of disappearing from danger. However, most dictionaries simply say its etymology is unknown.

Kitchen refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, and siditty or seddity means "snobbish" or "bourgeois".

AAVE has also contributed many words and phrases to other varieties of English, including chill out, main squeeze, soul, funky, and threads.

Influence on other dialects

African-American Vernacular English has influenced the development of other dialects of English. The AAVE accent, New York accent, and Spanish-language accents have together yielded the sound of New York Latino English, some of whose speakers use an accent indistinguishable from an AAVE one. AAVE has also influenced certain Chicano accents and Liberian Settler English, directly derived from the AAVE of the original 16,000 African Americans who migrated to Liberia in the 1800s. In the United States, urban youth participating in hip-hop culture or marginalized as ethnic minorities may also adopt AAVE, or prominent elements of it: for example, Southeast-Asian Americans embracing hip-hop identities.

Internet slang has borrowed heavily from AAVE, which has often been characterized as cultural appropriation. The term blaccent broadly refers to the accent associated with AAVE, but more often refers to the use of AAVE by non-African American speakers.

Variation

Urban versus rural variations

Early research on African-American Vernacular English took place in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. These studies concluded that AAVE was linguistically homogenous, or spoken roughly the same way everywhere around the country. Later sociolinguists found that these cities lacked the influence of the rural South and that earlier studies had not considered the representation of the Southern United States.

While AAVE began as mostly rural and Southern, today it is mostly urban and nationally widespread. Its more recent urban features are now diffusing back into rural areas. Urban AAVE alone is intensifying with the grammatical features exemplified in these sentences: "He be the best" (intensified equative be), "She be done had her baby" (resultative be done), and "They come hollerin" (indignant come). On the other hand, rural AAVE alone shows certain features too, such as: "I was a-huntin" (a-prefixing); "It riz above us" (different irregular forms); and "I want for to eat it" (for to complement). Use of the word bees in place of be to mean is or are in standard English, as in the sentence "That's the way it bees", is one of the rarest of all deep AAVE features today. Most middle-class AAVE speakers would recognize the verb bees as part of only a deep "Southern" or "country" speaker's vocabulary.

Local variations

There are at least 10 distinct regional accents in AAVE. Regional variation in AAVE does not pattern with other regional variation in North American English, which broadly follows East-to-West migration patterns, but instead patterns with the population movements during the Great Migration, resulting in a broadly South-to-North pattern, albeit with founder effects in cities that already had existing African American populations at the beginning of the Great Migration.

New York City AAVE incorporates some local features of the New York accent, including its high thought vowel; meanwhile, conversely, Pittsburgh AAVE may merge this same vowel with the lot vowel, matching the cot–caught merger of White Pittsburgh accents, though AAVE accents traditionally do not have the cot–caught merger. Memphis, Atlanta, and Research Triangle AAVE incorporates the dress vowel raising and face vowel lowering associated with White Southern accents. Memphis and St. Louis AAVE are developing, since the mid-twentieth century, an iconic merger of the vowels in square and nurse, making there sound like thurr. Californian AAVE often lacks a cot–caught merger, especially before nasals. Regional patterns of pronunciation and word choice are also apparent on social media.

There is general uniformity of AAVE grammar, despite its vast geographic spread across the whole country. This may be due in part to relatively recent migrations of some African Americans out of the American South (see Great Migration and Second Great Migration) as well as to long-term racial segregation that kept these speakers living together in largely homogeneous communities.

Social perception and context

African-American Vernacular suffers from persistent stigma and negative social evaluation in American culture. By definition, as a vernacular dialect of English, AAVE has not received the social prestige of a standard dialect, leading to widespread and long-standing misconceptions that it is a grammatically inferior form of English, which linguistics research of the twentieth century has debunked. However, educators and social commentators traditionally have advocated for eliminating AAVE usage through the public education system for a variety of reasons, ranging from a continued belief that AAVE is intrinsically deficient to arguments that its use, by being stigmatized in certain social contexts, is socially limiting. Some of the harshest criticism of AAVE or its use has come from African Americans themselves. A conspicuous example was the "Pound Cake speech", in which Bill Cosby criticized fellow African Americans for various social behaviors, including the way they talked.

Educators traditionally have attempted to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system, perceiving the dialect as grammatically defective. In 1974, the teacher-led Conference on College Composition and Communication issued a position statement affirming students' rights to their own dialects and the validity of all dialects. Mainstream linguistics has long agreed with this view about dialects. In 1979, a judge ordered the Ann Arbor School District to find a way to identify AAVE speakers in the schools and to "use that knowledge in teaching such students how to read standard English." In 1996, Oakland Unified School District made a controversial resolution for AAVE, which was later called "Ebonics". The Oakland School board approved that Ebonics be recognized as a language independent from English (though this particular view is not endorsed by linguists), that teachers would participate in recognizing this language, and that it would be used in theory to support the transition from Ebonics to Standard American English in schools. This program lasted three years and then died off.

In music and artistic culture

Many notable genres, styles, and movements within African-American music, and cultural and artistic movements or subcultures, are offshoots of African-American culture. The genres of Christian spirituals, blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop all originated from Black Americans. AAVE, thus, is the typical dialect employed in their lyrics, often even among these genres' non-Black musicians. Two such cultural movements with particular international prominence are jazz culture of the late 1930s and 1940s (with its associated AAVE slang, jive talk) and hip-hop culture of the late 20th century into the present.