There’s no denying that African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), known more informally as a “blaccent” or as “ebonics”, has had a huge cultural impact over the last few centuries. But how did the dialect, with its own complex structure and set of rules, come into being?
Well, there are two schools of thought where the origins of AAVE are concerned. The forced transportation of Black Africans to the US during the transatlantic slave trade dates back to the early 17th century, and some believe AAVE came about as a result of slaves - who mostly spoke their respective West African languages - coming into contact with white indentured servants.
These indentured servants would have been poor and nonproficient in Standard English. They had their own particular dialect, and African slaves may have had to learn this dialect in order to communicate with them. This dialect would eventually evolve into what we now know as AAVE.
Now, the other hypothesis is the creole theory, which proposes that the mixing of West African languages with English created new ways of communicating, and over time, this creole language became an intelligible English dialect.
Creolization refers to the process of groups of people who speak different languages, essentially combining their languages to make an entirely new one.
Even among the slaves themselves, there would have been a need for a common language as there were hundreds of languages in the region of Africa that they were forcefully taken from.
Also, the situation was made much more difficult due to legislation that forbade African slaves from being taught to read English, and, paradoxically, prohibited them from speaking their native languages.
In his 1979 essay, ‘If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?’, writer and activist James Baldwin argued that languages come “into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.”
He continued: “The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other — and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.”
In any case, AAVE first developed in the south as slaves were mostly concentrated in southern plantations. Because of this, AAVE shares many grammatical features with dialects spoken in the south - for instance, the word “ain’t” is a part of the vocabulary of many southerners regardless of race.
AAVE would later spread throughout the country as Black people moved around the States. For example, the Great Migration, which occurred in the early 20th century saw millions of African-Americans migrate to different parts of the country to escape the KKK and the south’s more extreme discriminatory laws. They also hoped to find more opportunities elsewhere in the country.
Of course, as AAVE spread throughout the US, it began to branch out into localized versions of the dialect. For example, AAVE in Los Angeles differs, to an extent, from AAVE in New York. It also differs depending on whether the AAVE speakers are in rural locations or urban ones.
The widespread use of AAVE has had an immeasurable impact on Standard English, with slang terms such as “girl” and “beef” commonly used in Western English-speaking countries.
The reality is, the internet has made AAVE slang a global phenomenon, with words and phrases like “It’s the ––– for me”, “and that’s on periodt” and “not y’all…” spreading rapidly via memes and social media comments.
And now, phrases like “vibe check”, “sis” and “GOAT” are used, not only by Black people but by social media users of all races - from all around the world.
In fact, in a recent study about new slang terms that tend to crop up on social media, it was found that Black American users had a remarkable influence on the way in which language evolves over time.
The researchers found that “African American culture is an especially important source of lexical innovation… Although African Americans are somewhat overrepresented on Twitter compared to the general population… they are still clearly in the minority, whereas three of our five common patterns of lexical innovation appear to be primarily associated with African American English, showing the inordinate influence of African American English on Twitter.”
But while AAVE has made its mark on mainstream culture, there has been some hostility towards its use. It is often regarded as broken English and as an unintelligent way of communicating. Speakers of the dialect often feel forced to code-switch in predominantly non-Black settings. Code-switching refers to the act of alternating between different languages or dialects depending on what company you’re in.
A good example of this was the Trayvon Martin trial. On February 26, 2012, a then-28-year-old George Zimmerman shot dead an unarmed Black teenager, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
In the resulting trial, Martin's friend, 19-year-old Rachel Jeantel, who had been on the phone with Martin moments before the fatal shooting, was selected as a witness for the prosecution. She spoke before the court in AAVE and, as a result, online commenters described her testimony as incoherent and even incomprehensible.
And during the actual trial itself, the judge as well as members of the jury misunderstood much of Jeantel’s testimony. The teenager was often asked to repeat herself, and the stenographer, responsible for transcribing statements made in court, misquoted her several times.
The truth is that while there’s an argument to be made that AAVE is simply a dialect like any other, speakers of the dialect are often dismissed as unintelligent, or more informally and disparagingly, as “ghetto”.
AAVE has evidently had a significant impact on the English language, both in and outside the US, it does, however, continue to be at odds with certain facets of society including the law, education, and business.
