African American English

African American English (AAE), a language variety that has also been identified at different times in dialectology and literary studies as Black English, black dialect, and Negro (nonstandard) English. Since the late 1980s, the term has been used ambiguously, sometimes with reference to only Ebonics, or, as it is known to linguists, African American Vernacular English (AAVE; the English dialect spoken by many African Americans in the United States), and sometimes with reference to both Ebonics and Gullah, the English creole spoken by African Americans in coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia and on the offshore Sea Islands.

In the 20th century much of the scholarship on AAE revolved around questions of how extensively it was influenced by African languages and whether it is in fact an English dialect, an archaic survival of the colonial English spoken by indentured servants on the plantations of the North American Southeast, or a descendant of 17th-century West African Pidgin English. The possibility that the structure of modern Ebonics is the result of decreolization has also been widely studied. (Decreolization, or debasilectalization, is the process by which a vernacular loses its basilectal, or “creole,” features under the influence of the language from which it inherited most of its vocabulary. The basilect is the variety that is the most divergent from the local standard speech.) The consensus among linguists is that Ebonics is an American English dialect differing from other dialects primarily in the higher statistical frequency of nonstandard features, such as the merger of hasn’t/haven’t and isn’t/aren’t (even didn’t/don’t in the case of Ebonics) in the form ain’t and the omission of the copula in constructions such as Jesse very tall (‘Jesse’s very tall’). The latter feature makes Ebonics typologically closer to Gullah and Caribbean English creoles. It has therefore been interpreted by some linguists as evidence that Ebonics must have creole origins. No consensus has been reached on this issue.

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Is African American Vernacular English a Language?

Since the late 1960s, Gullah has been treated as a separate language, because it shares more structures with Caribbean English creoles (e.g., usage of bin as a past tense marker in he bin go [‘he/she went’], or usage of he in the possessive function, as in he bubba [‘his/her brother’]). It can be argued, however, that since most such creole features (i.e., those associated today with creoles) come in this case from English itself, their attestations in Caribbean English creoles are not conclusive evidence for stipulating that Gullah is a separate language. The fact that creoles bear heavier influence from black African languages than does Ebonics does not make the hypothesis more compelling, in part because external influence on other nonstandard English varieties—for instance, Yiddish English—has not made such divergent varieties separate languages. (It is also significant that Gullah speakers do not use the term creole in reference to their variety.) More research is now devoted to describing structural peculiarities of both Ebonics and Gullah in detail, which may eventually shed more light on the origins and typological affiliations of AAE.