The problem I have with most things that are labeled "African American" or are designated for use by black people is twofold. First… More often than not, these inherently "African American" attributes aren't all that inherent; the traits can be found in other ethnic groups also. Second, and possibly most offensive to me, is that the characteristics they give to black people are commonly found in poorly educated people across all cultures. The connection implies to me that all black people are ignorant, which is far from true.
Anyway… This article presents what "They" are calling African American Vernacular English in a very official way, with very official sounding phonetic and grammatical rules. Sidnell even gives AAVE its own lexis. I doubt Sidnell set out to be offensive. I'm sure he's just conveying what he's "learned." Let’s look...
From the beginning, I'm irritated. Sidnell tells the reader that "the AAVE speaking community" has "complex" and "equivocal" attitudes toward the "language." WHO is "the AAVE speaking community" and WHAT "language?" From its name, I gather that "the AAVE speaking community" is generally black people. But this language…? It's English. In the article that follows, Sidnell tries to show that AAVE is a language, while also showing that it's not.
Alright… "A number of words used in standard English may also have their origin in AAVE or at least in the West African languages that contributed to AAVE's development." To illustrate this Sidnell offers "banana," "yam," "okra," and "gumbo." I'd say… these words did come to English from the West African slaves who were brought here all those years ago, but there's nothing particularly "African American" about them. (I could be wrong… But I thought bananas came from Asia.)
Sidnell offers 2 "rules" for the reduction of consonant clusters, which he says is "reduced variably […] and systematically." First, "if the next word starts with a consonant, it is more likely to reduce than if the next word starts with a vowel." Consider west side and west end. West side becomes "wes side," while west end remains the same. Second, "a final t or d is more likely to be deleted id it is not part of the past tense -ed than if it is." So… John ran fast will become "John ran fas," while John passed the teacher will stay the same.
His discussion of "th" sounds shows that when the "th" is voiced and appears at the beginning of a word, it is "regularly" pronounced as "d" (think "that" and "dat"). When it is unvoiced within a word it is pronounced as "f" ("nothing" and "nufn"). Voiced within a word produces a "v" sound ("brother" and "brovah"). Further… At the end of a word, "th" is pronounced "f" ("south" becomes "souf").
He goes on to discuss "l" and "r" sounds and vowels, but you get the picture… The "rules" and examples Sidnell produces are not unique to black people. Much of this can be attributed to lazy speech. Moreover, the letters are phonetically similar. From the bits of linguistics I remember, "th" is a dental fricative and "s" is an alveolar fricative. When similar sounds appear near each other, ease of language calls for them to blend. It's easier to say "wesside" than it is to say "wesT Side." You don't have the same environment with "west end," and thus the reduction isn't made. Phonetics also explains the change in the voiced dental fricative "th" and the voiced alveolar stop "d," and there's nothing particularly "African American" about phonetics.
In his discussion about AAVE grammar, Sidnell writes about the verb "be:" Standard English uses a conjugated be verb […] in AAVE this verb is often not included." He has many examples, but you're already familiar with this concept. True, black people are known to leave out any conjugated form of be. However, I have heard people of all cultures do this. And living in the South has taught me that Southerners leave out any conjugated form of be just as regularly as black people. And… seeing as how white people own this country, there's nothing particularly "African American" about being Southern.
None of Sidnell's examples are unique to black people. The vocabulary Sidnell offers here is certainly used in by other people . These phonetic reduction and grammatical errors are regional occurrences. Ignorant people also often make these mistakes. SO. Black people are ignorant? And they all sound Southern?
I don't want to harp on and on about black people NOT being a monolith. But… we're not. I reject the notion that this set of random "rules" is a separate language with a special community of speakers. This isn't "African American" Vernacular English. It's not "Ebonics" (an "ebony"+"phonics" mash up). It’s just English. For a variety of reason ALL native speakers of English make a variety of errors speaking English. And… there is NOTHING particularly "African American" about that.
Hi Nicole – You make a lot of good points about this “article” which I wrote a long time ago (About ten years ago when I was teaching a course on AAVE at UCLA and things were just getting started in Oakland). I’m not sure that I still agree with everything I wrote at that time since there’s been a lot of new research since then. I haven’t asked for the original article to be removed despite these reservations because it seems to be a useful and easily accessible source for many people who are interested in this topic (though, it really only provides the most basic kinds of information). I would like to respond to some of your comments:
ReplyDeleteYou write:
“More often than not, these inherently "African American" attributes aren't all that inherent; the traits can be found in other ethnic groups also.”
There’s some truth to this but it’s also not the whole story. While you can find many of the characteristic features of AAVE in other dialects of English (and in the Creoles of the Caribbean), the particular configuration of features seems to be unique to it. So, if AAVE has features X, Y and Z, you may find X in one dialect, Y in another and Z in another, but only find this cluster of features in AAVE. Also there are some features – understood not just as words, but as grammatical patterns and thus as rules – that do seem to be pretty much unique to AAVE. An example of this is the construction exemplified by sentences such as “Ain’t nobody see things like I see them”. Now of course you may find such constructions in other (particularly Southern) dialects but it seems quite likely that they come to those dialects through contact with AAVE. Another example is the use of “ain’t” in past tense contexts (many years ago the eminent African American Linguist John Baugh identified this as a usage peculiar to AAVE) as in sentences such as “I ain’t step on no line!” (an actual example from a game of hopscotch).
http://www.stanford.edu/~jbaugh/
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pnp/people/index.php?person_id=96
“Second, and possibly most offensive to me, is that the characteristics they give to black people are commonly found in poorly educated people across all cultures. The connection implies to me that all black people are ignorant, which is far from true.”
I don’t think the logic here is sound nor are the premises. In terms of the premise, while it may be true that many people – you, me, whomever else – associate AAVE and other non-standard dialects with a lack of education and poverty, in reality many well-educated, middle class persons are perfectly well-able to speak these varieties and do in fact speak them in the appropriate context. I lived in Guyana for over a year in the 1990s and can tell you that many university professors and well-educated business people in that country are very competent in the local, highly stigmatized variety of creole and they use it when the situation calls for it. As for the logic, it’s simply not true that in the case of AAVE the features associated with it are everywhere associated with “poorly educated people across all cultures.” For example, deleting the copula is considered a more refined way of speaking Vietnamese – including it sounds clumsy… And just a note, none of the many linguists that I know that work on these topics believe that black people are ignorant – indeed, many of them are black themselves or were taught linguistics by black professors!
You go on to write:
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning, I'm irritated. Sidnell tells the reader that "the AAVE speaking community" has "complex" and "equivocal" attitudes toward the "language." WHO is "the AAVE speaking community" and WHAT "language?" From its name, I gather that "the AAVE speaking community" is generally black people. But this language…? It's English. In the article that follows, Sidnell tries to show that AAVE is a language, while also showing that it's not.
The question of who is the AAVE speaking community is one of the most difficult to answer because it depends so much on what you mean by AAVE and by community. If you are interested, I point you to the important work of Marcy Morgan who has considered this in some detail:
http://stanford.edu/group/hiphoparchive/mmorgan/
But I think in a very basic sense, one can easily see who belongs to this community. It is that group of people who speak AAVE and, crucially, are recognized by other speakers as speaking AAVE. Now of course, most of the people so defined are “black” (and of course we are assuming that this is an easy group to define which it’s certainly not) but there’s no essential connection between the language variety and the people. The founder of American Anthropology and Linguistics, Franz Boas, made this point long ago in the Introduction to the Handbook of the American Indian Languages. So of course you can get “white” people who speak AAVE and “black” people who don’t because the relationship between some biologically/epidemiologically defined group and a language is entirely contingent – it’s a matter of history. I don’t believe that AAVE is a language separate from English – if I implied that, I’m sorry – but I do believe that AAVE is an at least partially independent grammatical system (my current position on this is close to that of sociolinguist William Labov). That claim of partial independence is supported by literally hundreds of papers and over 40 years of sociolinguistic research on various aspects of AAVE’s structure. If you want evidence a good place to start is the work of John Rickford of Stanford University:
http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/
One last response. You write:
In his discussion about AAVE grammar, Sidnell writes about the verb "be:" Standard English uses a conjugated be verb […] in AAVE this verb is often not included." He has many examples, but you're already familiar with this concept. True, black people are known to leave out any conjugated form of be. However, I have heard people of all cultures do this. And living in the South has taught me that Southerners leave out any conjugated form of be just as regularly as black people. And… seeing as how white people own this country, there's nothing particularly "African American" about being Southern.
What you’re addressing here is one of the most controversial issues in sociolinguistics and although the jury is still out, I think there’s some pretty good evidence that while copula deletion (the BE verb) is a feature of many dialects of English, the systematic patterns of copula deletion found in AAVE are specific to that variety (this has to do with the rates at which it is deleted in different grammatical environments – so you get “She ∅ nice” more often than “She ∅ a teacher”). I won’t try to summarize the argument here but if you are interested you can find some discussion of this as well as references to many relevant research papers in the summary of AAVE grammar I prepared for students at UCLA and Northwestern. That’s accessible here:
http://individual.utoronto.ca/jsidnell/SidnellAAVEGrammar.pdf
I hope this response is of some interest to you. Jack