AAVE

This focus of this paper is to present an overview of the current research which examines the language and literacy performance of African American children who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE), as presented from a deficit versus difference perspective. Language and literacy and assessment and remediation of AAVE speakers are discussed in sections one and two. Section three of the paper provides theoretical and methodological suggestions to educational psychologists, speech pathologists and developmental psychologists investigating AAVE speakers, on ways to gain a better appreciation for, and understanding of, the intricacies associated with African American Vernacular English. The paper closes with a discussion of the litigation and controversies surrounding AAVE.

The goal of the present study is the analysis of the lexical composition of any language (or language variant) which covers not only the peculiarities of language units functioning, but also the facts of their social and ethnic specificity taking into account the system-forming cultural and national relations between language units and culturally significant concepts.
The inevitable connection of culture and its language has been proven by a number of scholars. Thus, the influence of a person's speech on his thought process is of fundamental importance. V.A. Zvegintsev claims that there is a dependence of language on the general cultural state of a nation. The study of this question has much in common with the problem of the relationship between language and thought.

Despite American schools administrators' refusal to accept the language of African-American students and their overzealousness to frame language and literacy skills in terms of an " achievement gap, " African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the language of African-American imagination and reality. This article discusses the characteristics of AAVE that make it a real language, as well as The Dozens—an original use of AAVE and one of many creative vehicles of expression used in the African-American community. The article also describes how African-American adult learners used AAVE in their composition class discussions and writings.

This paper aims to analyze explicit and implicit policies pertaining to the
use or treatment of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in
educational practice using Language Policy and Planning frameworks.
Status planning for AAVE and acquisition planning for Standard
English (SE) often intersect in this domain, with acquisition planning for
SE sometimes resulting in the raising of status for AAVE. The linguistic
culture is analyzed through a review of language attitudes literature and
analysis of the public reaction to the Oakland Ebonics controversy. The
analysis indicates that the public objects to policies which seem to be
aiming primarily to raise the status of AAVE, while the public tolerates
those that argue for acquisition planning of Standard English in order to
raise educational achievement. This holds true even though the latter
may do just as much to raise the status of AAVE in schools.

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Contents
1. Introduction

2. Methods

3. Results
3.1.1. Tupac Shakur
3.1.2. “Changes”
3.1.3. “White Man’s World”
3.1.4. “Ghetto Gospel”
3.1.5. Keep Ya Head Up”
3.1.6. „Until the End of Time“
3.2.1. Eminem
3.2.2. “Public Enemy #1”
3.2.3. “Like Toy Soldiers”
3.2.4. “We as Americans”
3.2.5. “White America”
3.2.6. “My Name Is”

4. Discussion

5. Resources:

6. Appendices

Sociolinguistics of Hip Hop music is a relatively new field in sociolinguistics and deals with both social and linguistic aspects of AAVE. Many studies were conducted to analyse Hip Hop lyrics, with both Tupac and Eminem as the target artists; Tupac being the explicitly angry rebel against racial segregation and Eminem being the sarcastic and incredibly eloquent young man who had managed to enter the Hip Hop safe zone of African-Americans and strike them dumb. However, a detailed comparison study of AAVE features and variations between the two was not yet conducted, or at least published. This small-scale research study aims to analyse five of the most popular songs by each artist, to quantify, compare and contrast AAVE features in some of the most popular lyrics globally and to provide an option for the social background of each song, analysing their purpose, message and language. This paper will answer two of the most obvious questions in Hip Hop sociolinguistics, i.e. whether there is any difference in use of AAVE features between a black rapper and a white rapper, where both are considered masters of their profession. Another question is whether any of them is linguistically “better” than the other, i.e. leaning towards SE. A common string of features was analysed and quantified for the purpose of comparison and the results were somewhat surprising. However, the songs which were selected have a serious background to them, possibly affecting both artists’ use of language.

Since 1979 and the release of The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rappers Delight’, the genre of hip hop has grown. Members of the hip hop community cite the reason for this growth as being the evolution of the music, mainly pertaining to differences in subject matter. Throughout this project the subject matter of the songs was one of three areas of interest that were discussed in an attempt to highlight the level of evolution in hip hop. Firstly, the subject matter was highlighted through semantic analysis of the lyrics with the amount of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) specific lexis noted. Secondly, the occurrence of AAVE specific lexis was examined. The final research points were related to AAVE syntax: (i) use of “ain’t” as a form of negation (cf. Howe 2005:174) and (ii) auxiliary and copula deletion (cf. Labov 1969).

The project analysed six different eras of Hip Hop with five songs representing each era. The eras were pre-defined by the hip-hop community as: Old School, Golden, Gangsta, Millennium rap, 2000s rap and the current rap scene. Due to hip hop music being accepted as a major genre after the Gangster rap era there were no widely accepted titles for the eras that occurred after. This meant new terms had to be coined. The chosen songs are considered some of the most influential – either by number of sales or being held in high esteem by the hip hop community. The latter was found from a poll of 33 of the biggest names in hip hop conducted by Rolling Stone magazine.

The areas of interest were researched by analysing every lyric of every song. The results from each era were then compared. Results indicated that the evolution of the genre did occur with the differences between the eras becoming more apparent as the time progressed. The study suggests that that the main reason for this evolution was the thematic differences between the eras with each era seemingly focusing on different topics: dance (Old school), violence (Golden and Gangster), Sex (Millennium and 2000s) and Wealth (Current). With such a large thematic change between the first era to the present day it can be suggested that when the next era is analysed (whatever that may be) the evolution will surely continue.

Analysis of Syntactic  structures in AAVE, the dangers of angauge reclamation, and the impact of conversation/shift of perspective the United  States today

-"all up in my grill" "ain't nobody got time for that" "nigga"

African American Vernacular English is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians [1, p.383]. Some people refer to AAVE as a “slang” and do not consider it a proper dialect. However, I would like to view it from a different standpoint.

This essay serves as a defense for the acceptance of the use of African American Vernacular English (hereafter AAVE) by Black people in professional and educational settings. It is racist and dehumanizing to shun, make fun of, fire, or otherwise mistreat Black people for their use of AAVE in professional and educational settings. This author discusses the long history of AAVE and African-Americans who use it (including the discrimination and racism its users have faced and still face), its influence on American society and culture, and why its use should be allowed, condoned, and accepted in classrooms and professional settings.

In recent years, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has taken up considerable space in some particular online communities, i.e. Stan Twitter and more generally Tik Tok, with non-native speakers misusing the variety. With the creation of Twitter accounts that gather these linguistic  faux pas, the African American community coined the phrase “aave struggle tweets” to describe all those instances where non-native speakers abused and misused
AAVE.

Relying on studies on crossing and linguistic stylization, this thesis focuses on a double enregisterment of AAVE. Due to a rampant process of deracialization, AAVE was first detached from its speakers to index enregistered social values like “coolness” and “realness”, to then become the new lingua franca of young people online culminating to its equation to being “Internet Culture”,de facto erasing the roots of this stigmatized variety.

In accordance with Rampton’s (2005) studies on crossing, the authors of these “aave struggle tweets” show little linguistic competence. The everyday encounter with AAVE on social media is not a guarantee of its full acquisition (Agha, 2005). Despite all this, non-native speakers feel the urge to participate in the public discourse in communities where AAVE has become  so  ubiquitous  to  become  almost  impossible  to  avoid. This  phenomenon  can  be analyzed in terms of a performance of a fleeting identity based on an Imagined AAVE informed by social and identity expectations and prejudices.

This journal is entitled Translation Procedures of African-American Vernacular English and Cultural Categories Coming from Straight Outta Compton Movie. The researcher used a descriptive qualitative method to conduct the results and explain the issues to be observed. The researcher found there are 292 utterances that contained AAVE Grammatical Features and 297 utterances that contained Cultural Categories out of 2976 movie subtitles. There are 5 types of AAVE Grammatical Features that applied in this study and the most dominant AAVE Grammatical Feature is the Verb Phrase (43, 15%). In Cultural Categories, there are 4 types that applied and the most dominant cultural categories in this study are Organizations, Custom, Concept (44, 11%). Both of AAVE and Cultural Categories are translated into Bahasa Indonesia using Translation Procedures. In translating AAVE and Cultural Categories, the researcher found only 3 types of Translation Procedures in AAVE Grammatical Features, meanwhile, there are 10 types out of 19 Translation Procedures in translating the Cultural Categories. The researcher found that Literal Translation is the most used translation procedures in this study. The proportion of Literal Translation in AAVE is 178 data (60, 94%) and Literal Translation in Cultural Categories is 65 data (21, 88%). In types of AAVE Grammatical Features, the researcher did not find the use of Special Auxiliaries Steady and Come, the same as in Cultural Categories, the researcher also did not find Gestures and Habits to be categorized through the utterances based in the movie subtitle. The researcher takes a conclusion at the end of the study that language deviation may affect in the use of both AAVE Grammatical Features and Cultural Categories. There are two types of deviation that the researcher found; they are Grammatical Deviation and Dialectical Deviation in the changing of meaning.

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is arguably the most widely studied variety of American English, including its employment to establish authenticity in literature. This study attempts to provide a descriptive account of the features of AAVE employed by Charles W. Chesnutt, an African American author from the Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem literary period, through the examination of three short stories with publication dates ranging from 1887 to 1901. Data were obtained from The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, from which a corpus constituting approximately 10,000 words was created. The present study builds upon recent descriptive accounts of AAVE, in addition to earlier work, including Foster’s (1971) focus on phonology in seven separate short stories, Green’s (2002) consideration of The House Behind the Cedars, and Minnick’s (2004) examination of The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales.

Intersection of the theory of linguistic relativity and principles of African-American Vernacular English In 20 th century cognitive linguistics actively studied language relation to person's thinking abilities. On such basis American linguists Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir have developed a theory of linguistic relativity. Linguistic relativity-the view that our way of thinking depends, at least partially, on the language we speak-is primarily associated with anthropological linguistics [1]. This article will point out to the relevance of the role of this theory in African-American Vernacular English.

Our quantitative, variationist (Rbrul) analyses of subject-auxiliary inversion in question formation across three Caribbean creole Englishes (Guyanese, Jamaican, and Bajan, the mesolectal creole English of Barbados) and two North American vernacular Englishes (AAVE and Appalachian) combine with prior comparable (Varbrul) analyses of this variable in Samaná and African Nova Scotia English to illustrate the patterning of its variable constraints. Previously, canonical descriptions held that English-based creoles differ from standard and metropolitan colloquial Englishes by forming questions with rising intonation alone (e.g., Guyanese: Jaan de hoom "John is at home"), without subject-auxiliary inversion (Is John at home?). In practice, however, we find considerable, and substantially similar, constraint-based variation across the varieties studied, with YES/NO questions and auxiliary do favoring non-inversion. These and other cross-varietal similarities are significant for understanding this variable but suggest that question formation may not be fruitful for investigating the question of prior creolization in AAVE.

Demystifying the Conventions of English Grammar in the Classroom This seminar paper examines the sociopolitical properties surrounding the Eurowestern procedures that are implemented in the discourse in our American school curriculum, our academic institutions, and the career industry. In my paper, a primary text that I will be utilizing to analyze and advance my claims is John McWhorter's Word on The Street: Debunking The Myth of a "Pure" Standard English. It is within this primary text that I will be using to synthesize an analysis by focusing on the following primary elements: prescriptivism, meritocracy, and elitism within the Euro-American education system. As a primary focus, McWhorter states: Dictionary editors and grammarians are always giving in to constructions resisted by their predecessors. No matter what the authority of the written form, or how tenaciously it holds on to the past, or how absurd the gulf between the written and the spoken form becomes, the spoken form always, always keeps on changing-and ultimately drags the written form reluctantly with it (McWhorter 17). With secondary texts that I will be using to support my seminar paper, I will be utilizing Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, JH. Samy Alim's Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race, and John Wesley White's "Deconstructing Meritocracy in the College Classroom," to explicate and elaborate on these said procedures embedded within the

Abstract: This study compares and contrasts the language attitudes of teachers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and West Indian Creole English (CE) speakers over the last fifty years, to determine if there have been any significant changes, to draw out the implications of these findings and offer reasons for the results. Teachers ‟ attitudes towards these languages were generally negative over the decades, but I noticed that as the number of teachers of colour increased in the USA, there was a slight shift in attitude towards AAVE in a positive direction. I conclude that though language attitudes are very difficult to change, teacher education which specifically targets and challenges teacher language attitudes will be a major step in helping to shift these attitudes further for the benefit of teacher and student.

This paper aims to analyze explicit and implicit policies pertaining to the use or treatment of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in educational practice using Language Policy and Planning frameworks. Status planning for AAVE and acquisition planning for Standard English (SE) often intersect in this domain, with acquisition planning for SE sometimes resulting in the raising of status for AAVE. The linguistic culture is analyzed through a review of language attitudes literature and analysis of the public reaction to the Oakland Ebonics controversy. The analysis indicates that the public objects to policies which seem to be aiming primarily to raise the status of AAVE, while the public tolerates those that argue for acquisition planning of Standard English in order to raise educational achievement. This holds true even though the latter may do just as much to raise the status of AAVE in schools.

The treatment of variable rules in a morphologically stratified framework (such as Lexical Phonology or Stratal OT) usually follows the proposal of Guy (1991a,b): the deeper an environment for a rule is morphologically, the higher the rate of application of that rule. Using the stem-word-phrase division of derivation, Guy’s model predicts that a given rule will have a greater rate of application if its environment is visible at the stem and word levels than if it is visible only at the word level. In this paper, we present two case studies which find the opposite result and propose an analysis to explain these results.
The first case study is /w/-deletion in Korean. In a study of Seoul Korean speakers aged 20–40 years, the deletion rate of /w/ in stem level CwV sequences was 21% while the deletion rate in CwV sequences arising at the word level was 32%. That is, there is more deletion when the CwV sequence is available at the word level only. There is less deletion when the CwV sequence is available at both the stem and word levels.
The second case study is /t/-assibilation (/t/![s]/ s) in African American Vernacular English
(AAVE). In a study of 6th–10th grade AAVE speakers in informal contexts from the Frank Porter Graham Corpus, we find that the assibilation rate of monomorphemic /ts/ sequences is 0%, while the assibilation rate of a stem final /t/ with the plural /-s/ is 25%. That is, the rate of assibilation is higher when the /ts/ sequence is available at the word level only. There is no (or very little) assibilation of /ts/ sequences if they are available at both the the stem and word levels.
To explain this data, we turn to the observation made in the literature on non-variable phonology. When a phonological rule is not active at a level of derivation it potentially sets up the situation known as the Strict Cycle Effect (SCE) (Kean 1974; Mascaró 1976; Kiparsky 1982) or Non-derived Environment Blocking (NDEB) (Kiparsky 1993; Burzio 2009). That is, a rule may only apply if it makes use of new derivational material from its cycle or derivational stratum.
We propose that variable rules are subject to a SCE/NDEB effect, dubbed “Cyclic Degrading”,
through which the rate of application of these rules is lowered (rather than blocked completely). If a phonological sequence is derived at stem level, but the relevant variable rule does not apply at stem level, the rule is subject to Cyclic Degrading at word level because it does not make use of new derivational material from the word level. This lowers the rate of application. In contrast, a rule applying to sequences arising only at word level does make use of new derivational material and thus is not degraded. Through this process, the data from Korean and AAVE can be explained.

In the field of linguistics, music has become an increasingly important field of study. Authors such as Alim (2006), Beal (2009), Cutler (2010) and Fought (2006), among many others, have based some of their studies on music in order to describe linguistic patterns, explore cultural phenomena, or study the use of a particular language fea- ture. While conducting a sociolinguistic research project on processes of language crossing in rap music, we came up with two independent corpora corresponding to more than 30 rap songs by each ethnic group (European American and African Amer- ican) studied. Our purpose is to explore how this data can potentially be used as a valuable source of information about these two interacting groups. This article pre- sents some significant results from processing our corpora through Wordsmith Tools, which both delimits and reinforces cultural differences in rap language usage. The use of the term nigga, the presence of different terminology to refer to females in both corpora, and the explicit skin color references made by both rap groups creates an ethnic line that delimits their language uses and has particular relevance in the hip-hop context.

Our quantitative, variationist (Rbrul) analyses of subject-auxiliary inversion in question formation across three Caribbean creole Englishes (Guyanese, Jamaican, and Bajan, the mesolectal creole English of Barbados) and two North American vernacular Englishes (AAVE and Appalachian) combine with prior comparable (Varbrul) analyses of this variable in Samaná and African Nova Scotia English to illustrate the patterning of its variable constraints. Previously, canonical descriptions held that English-based creoles differ from standard and metropolitan colloquial Englishes by forming questions with rising intonation alone (e.g., Guyanese: Jaan de hoom “John is at home”), without subject-auxiliary inversion (Is John at home?). In practice, however, we find considerable, and substantially similar, constraint-based variation across the varieties studied, with YES/NO questions and auxiliary do favoring non-inversion. These and other cross-varietal similarities are significant for understanding this variable but suggest that question formation may not be fruitful for investigating the question of prior creolization in AAVE.

This analysis considers the 1997 debate over the language type known as Ebonics.  First, the author will situate “Ebonics” within the context of a language ecology.  A language ecology framework offers a methodology that is specifically suited to this particular policy debate because a policy that is built on the features of socio-linguistics necessitates methodological structures that help to unravel the social and hegemonic nuances of language as it is situated within a society.  Then, the author will present a brief timeline of the various debates on the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in educational contexts in the United States. Finally, the researcher will examine the influence of the Ebonics discourse from a hegemonic perspective, looking at how the policy discourse is situated within social groups, political interests, and economic influences of the people affected by the policy.

It has been commonly asserted that questions do not invert in the vernacular or creole Englishes of the Caribbean, forming interrogatives purely through the use of rising intonation (Holm 1988; Bickerton 1981), as in examples (1a) and (1b). [See Examples and References.] Detailed quantitative studies of this variable have been lacking, however. We examine both syntactic and psycholinguistic processing constraints on question formation and also offer a comparison of such factors in a multi-variety study of unusually broad scope, looking at five English-lexical varieties: the deep basilectal creoles of Jamaica and Guyana, mesolectal Bajan, and vernacular American forms in African-American and Appalachian Englishes. The data come from conversations between pairs of adult native speakers within each of the five varieties, yielding nearly 3,000 interrogative tokens. On the surface, we do see a dramatic difference among the overall rates of non-inversion, more or less in line with the traditional cultural characterizations, from a low of 15% in Appalachian (85% inverted) to over 96% non-inversion (less than 4% inverted) in Guyanese. However, even the deeper creoles resist a strict categorical view, with examples such as (2). Further, several factors reveal systematic structural influences on inversion / non-inversion, even within the narrower window of variation found in the Caribbean varieties. Across all varieties, negative forms favor non-inversion, as do Yes/No questions (vs. Wh). This is consonant with Kroch's (1989) suggestion that cognitively, Yes/No forms may resist word reordering since the entire proposition is considered as a whole. Both shorter and pronominal subjects (highly correlated) favor non-inversion, while increasing sentential subject length significantly favors inversion, suggestive of potential prosodic difficulty involved in both production and comprehension of longer non-inverted questions, where rising intonation is infelicitously delayed. At the same time, distinctive socio-variation still reveals itself among the effects on inversion of differing auxiliaries, with copulas, modals, and lexical main verbs showing substantially different trends across varieties. The most characteristically creole auxiliary forms— such as Bajan habitual does—appear to categorically non-invert. Methodologically, the present work takes two steps not generally employed in previous sociolinguistic variation studies in considering the commonality of processing constraints across varieties. Existing cross-dialect studies typically identify common constraints by comparing separate regressions side by side, looking for like polarity of factor effects and similarity among coefficient weights. Given the present study's opportunity to compare uniformly collected and encoded data across varieties, greater statistical formality—and thus confidence in comparisons— is offered by bringing the data together in a single regression with common controls and formally testing for interactions of constraints by variety. This approach statistically confirms the commonality across varieties of the negation, question type (Yes/No vs. Wh) and subject-length effects, while also formally confirming—by way of a significant interaction between auxiliary type and language variety—that Caribbean creole and American vernacular Englishes do still reflect their unique characteristics.

In this paper, we discuss the interaction of morphological structure and the application of variable phonological processes. Previous work in this domain usually follows the intuitions of Guy (1991a,b): the deeper embedded an environment for a phonological process is, the more chances that process has to apply, thus the higher the rate of application of that process.
We present two cases, Korean /w/-deletion and African American Vernacular English /t/-assibilation, in which the surface rates of application show the opposite trend. We draw a parallel to the categorical phonology phenomenon of Non-derived Environment Blocking and discuss the implementation of the variable version of this phenomenon in the grammar.