African American Vernacular English

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, /ˈɑːveɪ, ˈæv/), known less precisely as Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular (BEV), Black Vernacular English (BVE) or colloquially Ebonics (a controversial term), is the variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, /ˈɑːveɪ, ˈæv/), known less precisely as Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular (BEV), Black Vernacular English (BVE) or colloquially Ebonics (a controversial term), is the variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary and accent features, African-American Vernacular English is employed by middle-class African Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum; on the formal end of this continuum, middle-class African-Americans switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the nonstandard accent. As with most African-American English, African-American Vernacular English shares a large portion of its grammar and phonology with the rural dialects of the Southern United States, and especially older Southern American English, due to historical connections to the region. Mainstream linguists maintain that the parallels between African-American Vernacular English and West African and English-based creole languages are real but minor, with African-American Vernacular English genealogically still falling under the English language, demonstrably tracing back to the diverse nonstandard dialects of early English settlers in the Southern United States. However, a minority of linguists argue that the vernacular shares so many characteristics with African creole languages spoken around the world that it could have originated as its own English-based creole or semi-creole language, distinct from the English language, before undergoing a process of decreolization. While it is clear that there is a strong relationship between AAVE and earlier Southern U.S. dialects, the origins of AAVE are still a matter of debate. One theory is that AAVE arose from one or more slave creole languages that arose from the Atlantic slave trade and the need for African captives, who spoke many different languages, to communicate among themselves and with their captors. According to this theory, these captives first developed what are called pidgins, simplified mixtures of languages. Since pidgins form from close contact between speakers of different languages, the slave trade would have been exactly such a situation. Dillard quotes, for example, slave ship Captain William Smith describing the sheer diversity of mutually unintelligible languages just in Gambia. By 1715, an African pidgin had made its way into novels by Daniel Defoe, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. In 1721, Cotton Mather conducted the first attempt at recording the speech of slaves in his interviews regarding the practice of smallpox inoculation. By the time of the American Revolution, varieties among slave creoles were not quite mutually intelligible. Dillard quotes a recollection of 'slave language' toward the latter part of the 18th century: 'Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe; but me fall asleep, massa, and no wake 'til you come....'