Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

African American Vernacular English (AAVE, also Black English, Ebonics) is the language system employed within African American speech communities to communicate that society's thoughts, feelings, and experiences in their daily interactions. A speech community is a sociolinguistic concept that describes a group of speakers, whether socially or geographically located, who share unique and mutually accepted linguistic norms for communicating understanding, values, and attitudes. A vernacular speech community conveys cultural heritage and maintains linguistic legacy, employing unmonitored everyday speech acquired from family and community networks. The term vernacular differentiates an ethnic designation from a racial one, thereby allowing for some African Americans who do not use the language and some non-African Americans who do (DeBose 2005; Labov et al. 1968; Rickford 1999; Smitherman 2000; Wolfram et al. 1999).AAVE has a speech population with the most widespread usage of all the vernaculars native to American English, with speech communities established in the South and in urban centers throughout the South, East, North, West, and Midwest. Even before the 1996–7 Ebonics debates awakened new discussions of its systematic patterning, AAVE received more scholarly attention than any other social or socio-ethnic variety of American English. Most studies examined its typological aspects, ... log in or subscribe to read full text