African American Vernacular English and the status it holds in

American society

In the field of language studies, it has long been accepted that there exist many
different varieties of a specific language. This classification into different varieties,
which is accounted for by the different characteristics that come about in the production
of each one, is closely related to the notion of standard, one which is not so easily
definable and upon which linguists have difficulty in characterising, but one which has a
considerable impact upon speakers’ relation with their mother tongue.

In this paper, we will explore the notion of standard, both from a linguistic perspective
and from a social one, by analysing how it relates to a specific language variety. The
case of African American Vernacular English clearly depicts the issues that arise in
society around the concept of a standard language and how this results in quite strong
reactions towards it, which in turn affects its speakers’ sense of identity as regards the
language.

As previously mentioned, the notion of “standard” is not easily definable, but it might be
tentatively defined as a variety of a language, which is also the one that is promoted
through the education system to native speakers as well as to foreign learners. Its
“authority” is based on the power that those who speak hold in a given society, which is
why Trudgill (1999), regarding the English language, chose to characterise it as a
social dialect. In his own words, its native speakers “are very much concentrated at the
top of the social scale; and the further down the social scale one goes, the more
nonstandard forms one finds.”

There is thus a clear implication between what is considered standard and the power
speakers hold in society. It is natural then, as Freeborn (1986) states, that people
should see other varieties as imperfect versions of Standard English. Moreover, the
term used to refer to the remaining varieties - non-standard- carries in itself the
implication of being subordinated to a standard language which seems to be superior in
some way.

Historically, according to (Kretzschmar, 2010), standard languages are those

associated to capital cities, given the political and social importance they possess.
More specifically, standard varieties acquired such a status given that it was the variety
associated to that portion of society with the highest degree of wealth, power and
prestige (Trudgill, 1999).
For some varieties, in this case, of the English language, the notion of standard plays a
significant role in the relation between speakers and the way they, as well as others,
conceive their mother tongue. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has
invariably received highly negative opinions, owing to it being compared to an ideal
representation of what American English is, or should be. Undoubtedly, this kind of
reaction towards this particular variety is strongly linked to the history of AAVE and its
origins.

While there are a few theories which attempt to explain the origins of AAVE, the most
accepted one is that of language contact. That is to say, AAVE is thought to have
originated through the contact between English and African languages. Kirkpatrick
(2007) mentions that AAVE has also had around 200 years of contact with Southern
American English, as African American slaves communicated with their masters, which
explains why these two varieties have features in common. Other theories suggest that
it is a creole language or that it is derived from West African languages.

In essence, linguists use the term African American Vernacular English to refer to a
variety that reflects the ethnic heritage and cultural identity of many people of African
descent in the United States. As regards the name chosen for this variety, the term
‘vernacular’ is preferred over the more semantically charged ‘non-standard’ when
referring to those varieties whose structures are not mainstream.

As suggested above, the core of the issue regarding the status of AAVE in relation to
Standard American English (SAE) partly lies in the different features that make up
these varieties. AAVE shares most of the characteristic features of the south such as
cluster reduction, as in [tʃal] ‘child’, and labiodental fricatives or dental stops instead of
dental fricatives in words, such as the use of [f] or [v] for final ‘th’ in words like tooth or
smooth.

This variety is also characterised by its simplified verb agreement system, with the
deletion of the copula verb ‘be’, as in She nice, and the lack of inflection on present
tense verbs in third person, as in She walk. Another feature is the use of uninflected
‘be’ for intermittent activity, also called ‘habitual be’, e.g. He be singing.

The use of ‘ain’t’, which replaces am not, isn't, aren't, haven't, and hasn't, for negation
is common in this variety, which also makes use of what is known as ’double negative’:
I didn't go nowhere. Done is used as an auxiliary to emphasise the completed nature of
the action: I done buy it. This is a feature shared by Southern American English as
well.
Keeping in mind the fact that Standard English is the variety promoted through the
education system, a most significant situation in the 90s brought up the subject of other
varieties entering the system. The controversy arose in 1996, when the authorities of a
school in Oakland, California decided to teach Standard English to its African American
students through the use of their mother tongue, that is, AAVE. The reason underlying
this decision was that this particular group of students had continued to show far higher
level of illiteracy than their peers, and it was thought that it was due to them not being
acquainted with the language used in the classroom, which was Standard American.

Given the opinions formed based on the differences between AAVE and General
American, and given the ethnic links existent between the former and its users, people
both in and out of the linguistic field expressed negative views towards this decision,
urging the variety to remain in the private spheres of domestic life and rejecting it to
enter academic and working environments for considering it ‘incorrect’.

Among the reasons that caused the backlash, one of them is that users of this variety
are often considered to be unintelligible and incapable of communicating effectively as
a result of speaking a language ‘full of mistakes’. However, it is wrong to consider
AAVE to be a faulty version of Standard American as it constitutes a variety in itself,
given that it possesses a complex and systematic grammar of its own. As Wolfram puts
it, AAVE ‘is a stable socio-ethnic dialect of English that is maintaining itself and, in
some cases, even intensifying’ (Wolfram, 2006, p. 340).

As regards education, one of the solutions proposed to address the low levels of
literacy of AAVE speakers at school is to teach the students Standard American
English (SAE) through contrastive techniques by which pupils are able to see the
different characteristics of each dialect. This is an approach based on the concept of
bidialectism, aimed at the students achieving fluency in both dialects - their native one
and the one used in larger society.

However, even if these bidialectism programs include the use and analysis of AAVE,
some linguists consider them to lack linguistic acceptance of speakers who are not
fluent in SAE. In Baugh’s (1999) words, these programs tend to ‘recognize an
institutionalised bias against AAVE and those who speak it’. In this sense, the issue of
AAVE being discriminated against in public environments is yet to be addressed.

In this line of thought, taking into account the low prestige that this variety has, its
speakers are often pressured to speak in General American in certain situations, such
as in the workplace or in academic environments. Thus we see the strain that is put on
speakers -of this variety and of many others as well- caused by the discrimination
towards their native language/mother tongue.

However, this raises some issues as well within the community of AAVE speakers,
given that code-switching from one variety to the other is sometimes referred to as
‘acting white’. Wolfram (2006) makes an interesting point when he explains that part of
what makes up this variety consists of avoiding those features associated with
standard ‘white speech’.

It is thus that the low status that AAVE carries in the American society can be
explained through the notion of standard and the differences that exist between this
variety and General American, which leads some people to regard AAVE as a
deformation of English.

A further point to be made is that, up to this point, we have been considering AAVE to
be a unitary variety throughout the United States. However, as Wolfram (2006) points
out, this variety admits regional variation, as there are distinguishable features between
AAVE versions from Northern metropolitan areas and Southern rural ones.
Nevertheless, the essential features of this variety remain constant across different
regions. It is noteworthy to mention, as well, that the regional varieties of AAVE are
following different paths of change and that new structures are developing, rather than
it showing a unitary trajectory.

In this sense, we can gather that, as regards AAVE, there exists a sense of identity
among speakers of this variety, which is not related just to those linguistic features that
distinguish it from the standard variety in its region; rather, it is also made up of
attitudes towards these two diverging varieties. This is the reason why AAVE speakers
feel so strongly about the negative attitudes that their mother tongue receives, as it
may very well constitute an attack on their own identity.

The idea, then, that there exists a ‘standard’ language causes quite a controversy in
the field of linguistics, as well as out of it, given that it presupposes that there is a
certain variety which is, in a sense, above others and which provides the parameters
within which they should be used to be considered ‘appropriate’. However, as was
mentioned above, the variety analysed here, as well as others in the US, constitute a
language on their own.

Considering that the US has always been a country of rich ethnic and social diversity,
and is home to the many cultures and language varieties that coexist in this region,
positing that these should be relegated to the private spheres of life is no longer a valid
point. As Carter (2002) points out, “to insist on the hegemony of standard language is
to devalue the kinds of identity and integration connoted by the sense of nation as
diverse culture and community”. Thus, the notion of standard should be revisited not
only in the academic field, but also in other public environments where many varieties
of English as well as other languages coexist.

Bibliography

Baugh, J. (1999), Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and
Educational Malpractice

Carter, R. (2002), Investigating English Discourse, Proper English: Language, Culture

and Curriculum

Freeborn, D. (1986), Varieties of English, Dialects and Standard English - the present

Kirkpatrick, A. (2007), World Englishes

Kretzschmar, W.A. (2010), The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, The

development of Standard American English

Trudgill, P. (1999), Standard English: what it isn’t

Wolfram, W. (2006), The handbook of world Englishes. African American English