The Legitimacy of Black Vernacular English

Phillip Lee

English 110

Paper 4

The Legitimacy of Black Vernacular English

Language is a living, breathing, evolving, ever changing being. Language evolves as man does; as he discovers more of his environment and of his self he beckons upon language for definition. The languages spoken today are children of languages, definitions passed. If language is only a myriad of prior dialects and other languages is it so hard to believe that in a land filled with speakers of tongues to numerous to count, America may have birthed a few new dialects and languages itself? In particular, America’s largest ethnic group historically, African Americans, share one of these new American spawned dialects.

The African American is among the world’s newest races. Race, being the arbitrary term used to distinguish based on superficial, interchangeable commonalities the likes of religion, language and color which only truly has bearing because man gave ambiguity a name. African Americans seem to physically resemble blacks the world over in Africa and transplanted physically in the realms of skin color, hair texture, and the like. However, in the arenas of language, religion, customs, values, culture, they differ. Subscribing to the laws that attempt to govern the arbitrary, African Americans can be legitimately classified as a race just as Italians, Jews, and so forth. If African Americans have developed their own take on religion, diet, beliefs and customs in such a relatively short period of time why does it not make sense that a language too became developed?

Culture develops based on the environment surrounding a certain people. People respond, work with, and attempt to manipulate their environment to perpetuate their own existence. These interactions with their environments govern how groups of people lead their lives and the way people lead their lives is culture. Most of African American culture has its roots planted in slavery from diet, to family structure, to values, to customs, to religion, and plausibly to dialect and language. Collard greens, ham hocks, and beef ribs were all the foods plantation owners discarded and after generations passed these foods became integral parts in African American culture. African Americans are a communal people, from the tribes of West Africa to working on a plantation and caring for children other than one’s own and feeding individuals not necessarily in one’s bloodline. Understanding how much the first 200-300 years of this race’s infancy formed the beautiful culture we now see today, it becomes easier to imagine how language to may have formed from these same precedents.

Initially on the plantations of the American South were speakers of Twi, Housa, Yoruba, Wolof, Dogon, Mandinka, Akan, Kimbundu, and Bambara amongst many others. These languages and dialects then came to intermix through time; some of these early pidgins and creoles can still be heard in the speech of most namely, the Gullah people of the islands off Georgia and the Carolinas. Along with the intermixing of West African dialects and languages too came the influence of the Southern dialect of the Standard American English (SAE) of the time. What happened as a result was a myriad, a conglomeration of pronunciations and syntaxes harboring from both West African tongues and the tongue of this new land. When such elements are presented a Creole forms. Creole languages have been spoken on every inhabitable continent and are English based.

Many linguists agree there are many parallels between the patterns of West African syntaxes and pronunciations with that of Black Vernacular English (AAVE). Also what has been noted are the differences between AAVE and SAE in respect to the grammatical differences in structure in which AAVE parallels West African languages, changes in pronunciation along definable patterns characteristic of most creoles of West African influence and the world, distinctive use of vocabulary, and differences in the use of tenses. Arguably, the most apparent difference between AAVE and SAE is the absence of copulas, linking verbs to signify the transition from subject to predicate such as there, is, to, and are; words that have no meaning unto themselves but rather are used to link words of significance in a sentence. Luckily