African American Vernacular English

love my accent   Fri Mar 30, 2007 1:03 am GMT
AAVE is not universal by any stretch. Besides regional differences, social class plays a major role. I live in a major city in the south and the blacks that live in lower income areas sound totally different from middle class blacks. No matter how close a black person comes to speaking GAE, I can recognize a black speaker with my eyes closed. I think that this is even more true for black women.

It's hard being black... I change my accent at work, with friends, when I'm talking to poor blacks, and when talking to poor whites.

Oh home.......

I'm half way kidding!



--- Sleeper Cell was a great show.

Michael Ealy's accent is obviously that of a black male, but it isn't the same accent that you would hear in the hood. He has a universal middle class black accent. Some would even claim that he talks "proper" :(

OT: What the hell is proper english? I was taught the first day of comm that there is only standard and non-standard english.
SpaceFlight   Fri Mar 30, 2007 1:20 am GMT
AAVE in St. Louis is known for pronouncing /Er/ and /Ir/ as the r-colored vowel /3`/ making "bear", "beer" and "burr" all sound the same. A sample of that pronunciation can be found in this song by the St. Louis rapper Chingy:

http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/thurr.mp3

I like the way you do that right there (right there)
Swing your hips when you're walkin', let down your hair (let down your hair)
I like the way you do that right there (right there)
Lick your lips when you're talkin', that make me stare
Travis   Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:04 am GMT
>>AAVE is not universal by any stretch. Besides regional differences, social class plays a major role. I live in a major city in the south and the blacks that live in lower income areas sound totally different from middle class blacks. No matter how close a black person comes to speaking GAE, I can recognize a black speaker with my eyes closed. I think that this is even more true for black women.<<

I would have to say that such is definitely true here too. Middle class blacks and even many older lower middle class blacks definitely sound very different from lower class ones overall, generally speaking far closer to General American than to AAVE (and any AAVE-like features often come off sounding like a weak southern accent more than anything else), and yet at the same time they very rarely sound "white", so to speak, no matter how close their speech is to General American due to lack of features of the local "white" dialect (as discussed earlier).
Josh Lalonde   Fri Mar 30, 2007 3:34 am GMT
AAVE is a particularly noticeable example of dialects becoming more divergent, rather than less as was predicted with the rise of mass communication. Certain features of AAVE are much more common among younger speakers than older ones, and of course social class is important as well. The use of 'habitual be' (eg. "He be workin at the store") is a fairly recent development and is used more frequently and in a wider variety of situations by younger speakers. There are some areas of phonetic divergence too, for example non-rhoticism essentially dying out among White speakers, while being probably the majority form for Black speakers. Another interesting example is the fairly recent development of /str/ into [Skr\] (ie. 'street' sounds like 'skreet').
By the way, the second-to-last Guest above was me; I forgot to write my name again. Could you tell who it was?
And yes Travis, I'm pretty sure AAVE's final devoicing only applies to stops, though it has the same vowel-lengthening effect as in your accent. Have you noticed whether or not Black speakers tend to be affected by the NCVS? I would suspect that they wouldn't be, or at least not most.
Josh Lalonde   Fri Mar 30, 2007 3:43 am GMT
<<AAVE in St. Louis is known for pronouncing /Er/ and /Ir/ as the r-colored vowel /3`/ making "bear", "beer" and "burr" all sound the same. A sample of that pronunciation can be found in this song by the St. Louis rapper Chingy>>

I forgot to respond to this. I think this phenomenon is exaggerated. I haven't heard of any study that found a real merger of these sounds, though this is a fairly recent event. Also, songs are generally a pretty bad source of information regarding accents; just look at how many American speakers sing in a non-rhotic accent. (Which brings up an interesting question. Why do they? Is it just because of the AAVE and later British influence on rock music?)
Travis   Fri Mar 30, 2007 5:27 am GMT
>>Have you noticed whether or not Black speakers tend to be affected by the NCVS? I would suspect that they wouldn't be, or at least not most.<<

From what I have read, the NCVS really has not spread much to AAVE, unlike how the NCVS has been spreading in non-AAVE dialects. One way or another, there seems to be a level of isolation between AAVE varieties and non-AAVE dialects in North America, where sound change in either does not cross over to affect the other even when the two are spoken in close proximity. And, of course, the lack of spread of the NCVS to AAVE combined with its spread in non-AAVE dialects despite contact between AAVE and non-AAVE dialects with the NCVS is a good example of this.
Eric   Fri Mar 30, 2007 5:57 pm GMT
love my accent: <<It's hard being black... I change my accent at work, with friends, when I'm talking to poor blacks, and when talking to poor whites.>>

That's almost as if your were multilingual...


Travis: <<One way or another, there seems to be a level of isolation between AAVE varieties and non-AAVE dialects in North America>>

That sounds as though they were two seperate languages and that they would need to be spoken by the same persons to influence one another.
Travis   Fri Mar 30, 2007 11:32 pm GMT
>>That sounds as though they were two seperate languages and that they would need to be spoken by the same persons to influence one another.<<

The only thing is that they are (usually) crossintelligible and exist in relatively close contact, so it is hard to speak of them as separate languages (Note that I say "usually" because I have heard individuals speak varieties of AAVE which I found practically unintelligible, even though this does not apply that the vast majority of AAVE-speakers whom I have heard speak). My guess is that this phenomenon is primarily sociological in origin and not caused by how distant AAVE and non-AAVE dialects are from each other, even though I really cannot say much about such beyond that.
Josh Lalonde   Sun Apr 01, 2007 9:37 pm GMT
Lazar, have you noticed whether Black speakers in Boston have a father-bother distinction? I'm interested both in AAVE and Standard English as spoken by Black Bostonians. I would expect that they would be merged, but it would be interesting if they weren't. I spent part of my history class last week trying to figure out what a Boston/AAVE hybrid would sound like, and I was wondering if such an accent actually exists.