![]() They’re ungrammatical in traditional English, but they’re not without precedent. Teachers of English grammar might cringe at the offensive double negatives on display. Here are a couple of examples.Ī common AAVE construction follows this pattern: Some of AAVE’s grammatical structures closely mirror those of French. Don’t not be negative, nohowĪAVE doesn’t follow traditional American English’s rules of grammar it instead enforces its own. And, just as wrongly, they claim that AAVE is a sloppy, messy, unstructured language. ![]() “You can’t teach this stuff!” they fret, though no one wants to teach it. The other theory ( Rubba 1997) is that AAVE is simply a dialect of English that came about “through a history of social and geographic separation of its speakers from speakers of other varieties of English.”Ĭritics of AAVE attack strawmen - Jim ScareCrows, if you will. Some suggest that AAVE is a creole that developed in West Africa, from the descendants of pidgins that developed between African slaves and the Europeans who traded them between the 16th and 19th centuries. There’s debate over whether AAVE is a pidgin or a creole or something else entirely. But a creole is the mother tongue of the speaker, who has likely heard and spoken it from infancy while being raised in a world in which pidgin may be the lingua franca. Those who speak a pidgin have a native tongue and may speak several languages, and they are well aware that the pidgin is an amalgam. But a pidgin isn’t a full language it lacks the rich vocabulary and structure.Ī creole, on the other hand, develops when children start learning and speaking the pidgin as their primary form of communication. It borrows rules and words from all languages involved, and has its own rules as well. A pidgin is a simplified, ad-hoc language shared by speakers who lack a common tongue. Ingredients in language soupįolks who paid strict attention in Linguistics 101 - I majored in the subject - might remember pidgins and creoles. Oakland wanted to recognize the language’s existence. Rather, the Oakland school board’s ruling was meant to stop unfairly punishing kids whose first instinct was to speak at school the way they spoke at home. The educators in California had no plans to teach kids to speak and write AAVE this wasn’t an attempt to get “ain’t” in their grammar books. It’s not a technical term, and we seek to avoid negative associations.” Linguistics professor Rebecca Wheeler notes, “When the public uses the term Ebonics, it pulls with it all the societal negative connotations - the ridicule, the jokes, the sneering, all of that - so linguists don’t use the term. The more accurate - and less politically charged - label is African American Vernacular English (AAVE). No modern linguist embraces the term Ebonics. Controversy erupted when it issued its decree, but its action was almost entirely misunderstood. The Oakland, California, school board officially recognized the legitimacy of Ebonics in 1996. I came across the attached picture and this thread and thought both provide a explanation of why it's problematic.A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect. To answer my own question, I absolutely agree with what they're saying. So I got curious and wanted to see if other Black posters have noticed the same thing here or elsewhere on BBC?Īlso, do y'all (BP) think Black Twitter has a point? While most of the ones that do this are mildly annoying, there is a particular non-Black poster who actually gets on my LAST nerve because they frequently do it. Personally, outside of the "stan language" aspect cause it's not something we've debated here, I have noticed that there are more than a few non-BP posters here who co-opt words and phrases associated with AAVE. ![]() The appropriation of AAVE has also been excused by non-BP as "gay slang" and "Gen Z language". ![]() Apparently some non-Black person tried to say chile wasn't AAVE but "stan Twitter language". AAVE is trending on Twitter and it piqued my interest so I go looking to see why. ![]()
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