This makes me thinking about Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry" which people seem to read as "if you have no woman in your life, you will never have any heartbreak, and therefore no reason to cry." Everyone's happy without a woman in their life." But what it actually means is that it's plea to the woman "please woman, don't cry". It's Jamaican Creole English.
@@paganjoe1 yes you are right! Sorry, I mixed the names. I wasn't even aware Stevie Wonder had sampled it. I'm just not good with names and often confuses them. I will edit. Thanks! 😇
No one ever explained that meaning to me, but I inferred it from the feel of the song. Idk, the meaning just jumped out at me. "No, woman; don't cry." I've never interpreted it having the other meaning you said.
It was so crazy to me when I learned that many people misunderstood this about the song. It's just such a clear message with clear inflection and the rest of the lyrics support it: "so dry your tears" and "little darling, don't shed no more tears" are clearly not meant to advise men to abandon intimate relationships with women.
"What's the thing you wish people knew about AAE?" "It's a thing." Hahaha, I love it. Perfectly said. It's exists, it has rules, and it's as legitimate as any other dialect of English.
But that "be" construction can actually be both habitual and present continuous, it's not a very thorough test to be sure but it does illustrate the habitual be construction in AAE which makes it helpful.
The point that not all black people speak it is right on the money. I would also add the point that not all black people can speak it well. I grew up in a predominantly white area so I wasn’t exposed to AAE/AAL as a black kid growing up in Atlanta might (I live in North Texas for context). However, I due to having black/mixed parents I was always plugged in and exposed, to some degree, to AAL. Kind of like an accent, my AAE comes out stronger when I’m happy/sad/mad/with black friends, but I’m not the best at it, as I use ASE (American Standard English) more and have to codeswitch to that more often. Because of this I might view the grammar of the Cookie Monster test through ASE (I.e., I selected Elmo instead of CM, although I also understood the AAL form of the question). I want to connect to my roots and black side of my bloodline, so it’s something that I’m still learning.
It’s really important to acknowledge the validity and legitimacy of a language because I got offended when someone said that a language that is specific to Ivorian people called Nouchi was broken French because I saw that as a personal attack on my identity. People rarely talk about the ties between language and identity but also our relationship with that said language. I often speak about the different relationship I have to different languages that I have spoken and 2 that I continue to speak, I lost my mother tongue btw so that’s really tough but people that only speak one language look at me like I’m odd for having this deep way of thinking about language not saying that there’s not people who speak one language that don’t do that but it’s been my experience that people happen to be really clueless about what I’m talking about.
The Cookie Monster test was such a perfect crossup. The distinction between AAE and AAVE was also enlightening. I had learned to engage with it as a _system with consistent rules,_ but I didn't realize I still had such basic misconceptions _within_ that.
Those are the five things I wish people knew about the variety of English I grew up speaking, and many people still speak, in the mountains of Southern Appalachia. I'm glad to see videos like this. These kinds of conversations, hopefully, will lead to less stigmatism around varieties of English.
Oh, I think I saw a video of your dialect on RU-vid! Never heard it before, and I was surprised to discover it. The clip was short, but I don’t think I was able to understand the speaker (Though there were several other English dialects in the video, so I can’t remember for sure)
I’m from the rural Ozarks, the cultural and linguistic cousin of Appalachia. More specifically, my hometown is nearly equidistant to Saint Louis, MO, Springfield, MO, and Memphis, TN. Us redneck hillbillies, save for the most racist of us, understand AAE/AAVE fairly well because we’ve either adopted linguistic principles from it, donated linguistic principles to it, or we have an adequate translation… and of course any combination of the three might be possible. Now, I know Appalachia and The Ozarks are linguistic cousins, but I’m not entirely sure to what extent this relationship manifests itself so some of my example may not apply in Appalachia but… the “cookie monster” test was understood by me because deep in these Ozarks we modify the word “stay” to stand in for the “habitual be”. In this example we’d say “Who stays eatin’ cookies?” We’d never use “stay” or “be” to describe Elmo actively eating them. Another example: we aren’t always good at conjugating the word “was”. I was, we was, he/she was, they was. It’s all fine. We do “R Centralization”, although not as extreme as AAE in STL or Memphis. For example, “I just went and bought me a purr of squrr toe boots”. I wish more linguistic studies got done on Appalachian and Ozarkian English. I also wish us hillbillies understood that AAE and our backwoods way of talkin’ ain’t really all that different.
Just for perspective, if you go to Jamaica you will see considerable ethnic diversity, and the use of Jamaican patois is not limited to any particular ethnicity. It's a cultural feature.
So in that picture, Elmo eating a cookie even tho Elmo don't be eating cookies, and Cookie Monster ain't eating cookies even tho Cookie Monster be eating cookies. That is linguistically interesting!
This is great! The guests were interesting, and you're a knowledgeable and articulate host. Would love to see more diverse linguistics videos coming from this channel. Keep it up :)
Love this. As a Black linguist, this made me so thirsty for continuing scholarship on our languages. I want to add one. Black peoples' language ideologies and social concepts of language aren't the same as mainstream / white perceptions of language. And that's okay. An example, "profanity" in our language/community doesn't follow mainstream rules. But there ARE rules. They're our own rules. We don't tend to look at terms themselves as obscene, we have contexts where they are obscene. My Black family never told or modeled that certain words were taboo. Instead they told me where certain speech was or was not allowed ("in my house" / "the streets" / "school" / "with your friends" / "outside" / "in front of me"). My white family instructed me that certain words were "dirty" or wrong, and that certain words should never be used in any context. They didn't necessarily DO that, but that was the language ideology that was passed around. I even had a Black pastor admit unashamedly that it was okay to cuss at home watching the game! Our culture treats language different.
I loved the video, too. One thing I thought when it ended was the different registers (not a linguist, sorry if I get the scientific terminology wrong!) used in music. Like, hip hop is today a huge mainstream production with a multiracial audience. I wonder how the form of AAE in big records differs from the AAE in music or art where the audience is predominately AA, or if there even is a difference.
Profanity isn't a "white" or "black" thing. There are plenty of black people who tell their children that using profanity is wrong, and there are plenty of white people who don't care about their children using profanity. Your very limited personal experience doesn't make your very broad claims about race true.
Ooh, having contexts for where certain words/phrases/whatever are appropriate, rather than hard rules to never use certain coinages, strikes me as such a better way to think about it. Good stuff.
That’s really interesting, I notice the same thing among Scots and English people in the UK. “Not at school” here is “that’s a bad word” in England. People regularly use all sorts of “forbidden” words in casual conversation, to the point they’re often the highest compliment _in the right situation._ English tourists have a hard time not being offended at being “insulted” up here even when they’re actually being heavily complimented, because it’s a “bad thing” to be called. At most they might use it “ironically”, but never sincerely.
The point on linguistic stigma is interesting to me, because I think you can find, for every established language, with its own linguistic institutions and dictionaries, a corresponding set of stigmatized forms of speech, dialects, and related languages which are viewed as simply incorrect forms of that language without any linguistic basis- and all of them have in common an associated general stigma of identity. For example, in russia, there is a sizable and genuine sentiment that ukrainian is simply bad russian. the associated south russian accent is also viewed as uncultured, and the reasons for this are not linguistic, they are historic and sociopolitical.
Right, this is making me think of Canadian french a lot...as well as pretty much any dialect of french spoken outside of France. Which, the more I think about it, the more I think may also have ties to Black culture.
@@inigo8740that’s interesting, my dad always made a point to say Castilian rather than just Spanish. But then he lived in Catalonia for a few years right after the civil war interviewing tons of people in Catalan, Castilian, and everything in between.
I wish that ppl knew there were examples of AAE/AAVE/AAL beyond the use of “ain’t” and “be” … maybe give examples of double negatives like “I’m not not going there” or “that’s not nothing” … also I was tryna figure out a way to make “she ain’t be doing it” work and I figured adding a “gon/gone” would help that sentence … “she ain’t gone be doing it” makes sense
@@angelrose6827 truuuuue but she ain’t be doing it don’t even make sense for “Standard” (American) English … like would the translation be “she is not be doing it”? …
@@Sheera612I’m a hillbilly, not any knowledge of AAE. “She ain’t be doin’ it” doesn’t even translate for us. It just sounds off. We’d typically replace “be” with “stay” for the habitual, so we’d understand that as “she ain’t stay doin’ it”. Eww. “She don’t stay doin’ it” makes far more sense, so in AAE that’s “she don’t be doin’ it”. That said, just because we have a habitual doesn’t mean we actually use it… we typically only use it for emphasis. Us hillbillies could make “she ain’t be doin’ it” work if we change our version to “she ain’t stayin’ doin’ that”. That at least sounds better. Now, I ain’t know nothin’ about AAE really, but I don’t think AAE would allow “She ain’t bein’ doin’ it” to be a sentence. That just sounds like a nerdy white boy who heard Eminem for the first time tryna fit in…
Christopher Hall's point about people caring more about the way something is said than the content of information conveyed is absolutely correct. There's the extremely relevant cases of the same idea being accepted when said by a white person but denigrated when said by a person of colour, but I also see it in my work. I'm a doctor, and more doctors are sued here in Australia over poor communication than malpractice. You get very different responses to the same content (e.g. the death of a loved one) based on the characteristics of the speaker, word choice, and paraverbal cues
I somewhat disagree. I have seen this many times when white people write grammatically incorrect sentences. I have experienced this myself and have argued the same thing about the understanding of the content and not nitpicking about the delivery of the message. Though I have definitely seen discrimination against aae speakers no matter who’s speaking it but it seems to be directly related to black speakers.
Great video ! I'm going to be teaching english as a second language and I want to discuss these social , cultural and linguistic topics, that most times you don't really see on these types of classes. I think learning a language is also about learning culture and history, because after all, everything is intertwined
The sociological things are interesting but on a pragmatic level, when teaching a language to people it serves the student best if you teach them the version of the language associated with the highest income earners in the destination where they intend to use the language.
@@fluffymcdeath I disagree! I think it depends on what the students want to use the language for (for business, for friendships, to enjoy media, out of linguistic curiosity, and plenty of other reasons), and also, I'd expect that people are definitely capable of learning and differentiating between multiple forms/dialects/etc of a language. the Spanish-as-a-new-language classes I took taught both formal and informal vocabulary, Latin American and European Spanish, etc etc, and my ability to actually communicate in Spanish has benefitted immensely from it.
Three things I'm interested in knowing more about: 1. More grammatical features like the ungrammaticality of "ain't be," and not just the well-known stuff like habitual markers, double negation, copula deletion, naked possessives, etc. The use of "come" as an indignant discourse marker is the kind of thing I mean. 2. Some of the rules for when the letter s is absent where it is present in Standard English. I hear Black speakers very often delete s's when speaking Standard English in positions that surprise me, and it seems to me to be related to more basilectal AAVE. Things like "Jone" instead of "Jones" or simple plural s deletion. Overgeneralization from absent s in possessives? 3. The level of articulation in the language. I often find myself unable to understand Black English in real life because of what I'd describe as extremely weak articulation. As a Scot, I've noticed the same thing in speakers of many varieties of Scottish English: the articulation is simply extremely weak. I have almost never seen papers on this phenomenon, but it is possible to clearly articulate and to indistinctly articulate the same speech sounds, and it seems to me that some cultures articulate very weakly as a general rule (AAVE, Scottish varieties, maaaaybe Danish and Stockholm Swedish?) and some articulate very strongly (Standard German). You often get situations where higher registers are articulated dramatically more clearly than lower ones, and in general, women articulate much more clearly than men in all languages (Russian is a notable example among the languages I speak). Just to flesh out what I mean.
#2: I don't think that's some kind of morphological generalization, but rather phonological: final consonant cluster reduction, which generally applies when the place of articulation and voicing are shared. (Since the "s" in "Jones" is of course a /z/.)
Very interesting. Thanks. I've been noticing more qualified people talking about AAE/AAVE in the past few years, and it's really good to see. Now I'm wondering if there is a similar effort for engaging the public in the reality Multicultural London English. In England (not the rest of the UK - see Scots and the Celtic languages), dialectal prejudice is usually more about class than about race, but I think in the case of MLE, it's much more comparable to the situation with AAE. But maybe I'm way off here.
The roots of AAE are Scots , Hiberno and colonial english dialects. habitual be and other forms of is/be, ain't ye-aw Ye'all. etc All from Scots via Ulster. This entire video is a joke, Every feature claimed as 'standard' is the grammar of Appalachian English (Scotch-Irish english). Why the pandering to only AAE as being somehow more relevant or unique or more 'persecuted' based on contrived 'racial' lines applies to all other "white" languages not taught or used widely in the u.s. today. Scots is the root. It's the SCOTS language and older /regional dialects of ENGLISH in England that give AAE its core. From the isle of wight to west country, to ulster. AAE is used all over pop culture and widely celebrate, in Hiphop around the world.. u.s. "Southern dialect" also celebrated worldwide in Country music fans. It all originated with the diasporas of britain/ireland.
@@AAA-fh5kdExactly. Most of these "black" regional accents which get grouped under AAVE are just southern dialects (which are also used by white people in said regions, so people need to stop making it racial)
@@nickpavia9021Yep, But that isnt discounting the unique(and shared) aspects of (great migration)AAVE< I absolutely hear+see the things that are similar in terms of lexicon/grammar+ accent features(but I know this from firsthand lived experience some decades ago, Pre net/youtube etc) 'slang' and evolved features exist in modern 'appalachia' as must as the regional disaporas of "AVE" speakers but the language stems from the original dialects. There was nothing passed on via 'dna' just as the case for any human being. Reaching further into caribbean/african creoles is all agenda driven study, not based on any logical linguistic evidence. The agenda is to find some source that is "non-white" (already a flawed term) but "non-european/anglic etc".
Well I think the big difference with MLE is that it's ... multicultural. As in not an accent perceived as completely restricted to a single racial group the way AAE is.
One of the best changes in the way we talk about language now compared to when I was a kid is that we have gotten away from the idea that there is a "correct" form of speaking. We can discuss standard American English, and the rules that generally hold, and we can discuss AAE/AAVE, and the rules that generally hold, and they're both "right" in their own way. Also, the invariant be is something we should have in standard American English.
A lot of it is slang. I would suggest avoiding it. Despite what the maker of this video says, it is NOT correct English, and it will make your communication very unclear in most situations.
Ignore that other guy. They're just bitter that linguistic prejudice is falling out of fashion. A native speaker can understand you just fine, provided that they want to understand you.
@@nickpavia9021you don't have a background in linguistics, do you? No one variety of English is more "correct" than another, some are simply more *standard*. AAE doesn't always comply with the rules of Standard American English, but neither does any other regional or cultural dialect or even idiolect. While it may be true that mixing in elements of AAE might make your English less understandable (since it's further from the standard), that does *not* mean that AAE is "incorrect," and any linguist worth their salt will tell you that
Yeah. As a kid I always just thought of it as “well that’s how people talk in these areas, it doesn’t matter that it’s not formal English. Nobody speaks in formal English.” But I am a native English speaker. It’s more that I grew up in an area where people speak in a fairly wide variety of ways.
No, the my simply wouldn’t be oblivious to it due to English boy being their native tongue, and anybody who’s native language is English would know that this isn’t a dialect, but broken, sloppy English. Very silly comment 🤦🏻♂️
Racist entertainment like early Disney coming off fake AAE from minstrel shows continued through most of the 20th century. Its popular culture stock has always wrongly been tied to ignorance.
I'm not going to say that racism doesn't play a factor in stigma against AAL or AAVE as it obviously does; But I will add that from my own experience growing up in rural "white America", I distinctly get the impression that a bigger factor in the instinctive reaction rural white Americans have against AAVE is because those rural white Americans grew up being constantly told that their OWN vernacular was bad and wrong, and being constantly "corrected" by teachers, and it feels like a double standard to them to have it one way for white Americans and another way for black Americans. Again, I think this is just one factor in a multifactor issue.
Really? So those same rural speakers didn't make fun of the Black vernacular? I mean despite how they may have been ridiculed themselves. Did they not still feel that their own dialects were far superior to the ones used by black folk. Also, many rural Americans does speak with some influence from the AAVE.
I once worked at a place that heavily employed African American people that weren't 100% aware of what all the standard English forms for their idioms were, and I remember it caused a bit of confusion when one of them asked me where I "stayed". I answered with something that made no sense based on what I thought she was asking, and she had to paraphrastically come up with what she meant, because she didn't know that in standard English she would ask where I "lived". That's 100% a usage issue and not a grammar issue, and it's somewhat like the difference between a car's bonnet and hood, but instead of living an ocean apart, she was from an area less than 20 miles away.
I’m pretty sure she ALSO knew that you can ask that question with the word live. She just doesn’t typically speak that way. I ask people “where you stay at?” But I know that I’m asking them “where do you live?” And could employ that version of English if I wanted or needed to.
I was always under the impression that the name just sort of evolved over time going back to Ebonics. I didn't realize that AAE was more than just an updated name for AAVE
Love this video. I was looking for info about AAVE just last year and felt disheartened by the lack of video material. I feel enchanted to learn about this wonderful thing that I grew around.
The question about which I was the most interested and the most hopeful for its inclusion was actually the first one that was addressed! Thank you again for another wonderful video and thank you to all of the scholars who participated.
The remarks about how AAE exists and has rules, despite some people thinking it's just bad English, reminded me of something. There was a scandal a few years back when it turned out that the majority of Scots Wikipedia was created by a single teenager who didn't speak Scots and just used English with modified spelling and an odd Scots word thrown in every once in a while. This apparently led to many people having a completely distorted image of what Scots is like, and thinking that it's just English with weird spelling. (Disclaimer: I don't know much about Scots myself, but from what I gather, this seems to be rather far from the truth.)
Very interesting and pertinent point about the varieties of AAL and the existence of an African-American Standard English. As a Limey, I was put in mind of the way things work in our archipelago. In Scotland, for example, there's a continuum among Scots, Scottish vernacular English and the Scottish variety of Standard English, which has distinctly different vocabulary and phonology from that spoken in the South of this island. Something similar exists in Ireland, where Hiberno-English is "a thing", but so is Irish Standard English. (Both national pictures are of course further complicated by regional variation.) Historically, both Scottish English and (especially) Hiberno-English have been pathologised, and seen as errant and chaotic, in what seem like similar ways to AAE. And, while I don't know how much this has been studied, it seems to me that young MLE speakers in my native London are speaking something that's not the same as vernacular MLE, but not quite the same as my own older-white-guy London Standard English either, when I engage with them in formal contexts such as education.
AAL and all of its variants are a beautiful language, along with the accents. It’s an amazing example of language that is living and evolving. I wish more people would appreciate it at this level.
In my work in Germany I do counseling for an immigrant target group that is to a large extent from western African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria. Their English is often considered to be inferior to the English that is taught in school here. But it is a language of it's own, that, if people paid close attention, is quite ingenious. Like, when people differentiate between "I go station" and "I go go station", the latter meaning "I go to the station now" because for lack of the word now, people just use go twice. It's fascinating for me to learn more about this. Also, I really like to use parts of what would probably fall under AAVE because it has impacted a lot of popular culture. But as a white person I feel somewhat uneasy about using it without proper context knowledge. I don't think any of my clients would be offended, they're also obviously from a different background, but still. In terms of cultural appropriation, it can feel inappropriate - especially when done wrong on top of all things.
I got this video as a RU-vid recommendation, having seen a few others by languagejones. The terms AAL, AAE, and AAVE were used at the start of this video, but I think I got a general idea of what they mean, but only by inferring from context towards the end. I think I would have been helped by having that framework from the start.
AAVE was not my first language. I am African American and come from a very small family. My ancestors were brought from Africa to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania during the colonial period. At least one was from Trinidad and my grandfather was born in Barbados. My maternal great-grandparents, both born in 1877, were entertainers who lived mostly abroad, namely Paris, and toured Europe at the turn of the century, eventually returning to New York to retire. My siblings and I are the first generation in my family to be born in California. We started life in the early 1960s in Venice and Santa Monica. In the 1970s we moved to a predominantly Jewish neighborhood on L.A.’s west side. There was an adjacent neighborhood of mid-century apartment buildings, at the time in the early stages of “white flight”. This was when Black people were finally being permitted to leave L.A.’s East Side and were rapidly moving west. Our new school was filling with these Black kids, most of whom were born in the American South or had parents who were. It was during this period that I heard AAVE for the first time. My siblings and I were teased and made fun of for how we spoke. I was the only one who eventually began to mimic the new words, accents, expressions, and vocalizations I was hearing. My brother and sister did not. I, on the other hand, wanted to fit in with my new Black friends who welcomed me, as did their families, in a way that my peers in Santa Monica had not. Having Black friends and learning traditional Black culture was fascinating and eye-opening for me. Before this, I had what is known as a “California”, “Valley Girl”, or “surfer” accent. Prime examples of this would be Tony Dow, who played Wally on Leave it to Beaver and Maureen McCormick, who played Marsha Brady on the Brady Bunch. Both actors are from Southern California. This is how I and my siblings talked. Listening to them brings back strong memories of our mid-century version of California speak. Somehow, the speech of Black Angelinos from the period that I hear in film and TV sounds much less familiar to me. My mom went to predominantly white schools, primarily in Brooklyn and for a few years in a small enclave in upstate New York mostly populated by German immigrants. She had an accent much like that of a young Barbara Streisand. But she quickly adopted a California accent and was self-conscious about her “Brooklynese”. My grandmother had a New York Jewish accent a la George Burns which never went away. Growing up hearing the two of them also had an influence on my speech. I remember my mom using words like frankfurter, dungarees, and sneakers, that Californians did not. Both my mother and grandmother were educated, cultured, and very New York. Both played and read music. My grandmother gave piano lessons for close to 80 years and played piano and organ in church. My mom played piano and guitar and was a painter. She started off as a registered nurse and eventually became a hospital administrator. Anyway, I soon became well versed in AAE and AAVE. But learning it was definitely like learning a new language. I also, now, have a greater understanding of its origins in West Africa and Early Modern English. I learned that not only is AAVE full of strict rules, but Black American culture is as well, more so than white American culture, in my experience. I think it is mostly in response to racism, marginalization, discrimination, and the need to not only conform but attempt to gain acceptance by and admittance to larger, white, mainstream society. But that’s another story.
research into language varieties like AAVE and other dialects are so interesting and important, because they give real insight into how language develops in the present. The idea that "proper" English is some kind of set-in-stone enlightened version of the language that can never be altered lest it be "corrupted" has been and is being used as a tool for discrimination by colonising nations for ages, and is still being used as a way to dismiss people as being "less educated" if they express themselves in anything but the standard English. I'm a history/cultural studies student and not a linguist, but the interaction between the history of populations and the way they change the language around them is fascinating and honestly dialects in general deserve more respect. languages are so integral to human society and can tell us so much about the people they are used by.
A pidgin is when 2 languages are combined into a casual blending, usually shares a grammar system with one or the other. Think about what the slave/poor classes in a colony spoke after being brought into new languages. They are expexted to understand the dominant language but they still keep the slang & concepts from their native language, which causes the two to blend into something that mimics the dominant language. People use it to get by but they often still think in their native languages. A creole is what the children of pidgin speakers have. They are born to it as their native language. Its been passed down to the next generation with more complexity and normalization. Its started to develop its own slang and rules. The rest of those words (language, accent, dialect) are all the same things. The distinction is usually cultural-political, not linguistic.
I find all of this fascinating and would love to see more videos on the topic. I'm especially interested in seeing a deeper dive into the different registers with examples and I would also love to learn more beyond the "be" and "been" examples that I've already seen multiple times. Here's a feature I've noticed and haven't seen anyone else mentioning: devoicing. I've studied German and learned about devoicing and I remember immediately being reminded of AAE speech patterns I had encountered in my own life. I noticed it in phrases like "Got damn" (instead of "God damn") or "periot" instead of "period". I don't know the exact role devoicing plays in AAE, but just thought I would mention it since I found it interesting and think it might be an interesting topic for a video.
I don't just think it's a race thing. I think we should also look at it through a class lens. In England, we have something similar with regional accents. As a kid, I was taught to speak in RP, being told that a regional accent made me seem less intelligent. That qualities such as the glottal t made me sound lazy. All people have unconscious biases, an the way others talk is one of them.
you cant isolate racism from classism though. both systems work in tandem for the same goal, and they magnify each other. Its almost as if people have some greater discomfort touching the subject of race vs class, and seek to avoid it on purpose.
I watched a video from Eat Sleep Dream English, which is a british presenter presenting primarily British english to non native speakers. He had a video about the difference between American and British slang, and something I noticed repeatedly was that most of his American slang came from AAVE, particularly that from the 90’s. I think maybe he heard it all on Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I wish that people, british or American, had more appreciation of how much of our language today comes from African American roots. Did you know “tote” is a borrowing from an African language?
@@DanSmith-j8y in the scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. The goal is ALWAYS effective communication in any manner. My opinions are irrelevant.
yes true. There is no real difference between how we view language and how we view the group (we assume) who speaks it. Language cant be incorrect, because communication includes soooo much more info than our words alone. You dont need sound, grammar, or a shared definition to communicate effectively. You just need to meet the other person where they are, which is how we TEACH language to kids, primates, or dogs.
I'm also a white person who grew up in an AAE community; I very consciously avoid using it in mixed groups, as a rule, because I don't want to encourage cultural appropriation, but I can code-switch into it at the drop of a hat if I'm in the right group.
I grew up in heavily mixed Latino and Black neighborhoods all my life and went to a black high school. First girlfriends were all black. I totally get this.
You're not appropriating our language or culture when you grew up in the culture. It's not about your skin it's about where you came from. With that being said I understand why you choose not to when you are around strangers because of the backlash you may get from both sides.
I, too, find myself code-switching a bit when in the right company - mostly things learned from being around black classmates. A decent amount of AAVE has become mainstream as it is.
As a kid I was taught to speak "good English". Misuse or abuse of the language angers me. I was also taught that racism is wrong, even "evil". Then I lived a sheltered life with no Black people in it. Schizophrenia guaranteed.
100% (although we could probably make that exact string work -- "you (always) be finna do something stupid when he get you mad, so you should be glad she's always there to talk you down.")
I am an upper middle class, well educated white person. I was brought up in a small town with a considerable range of socioeconomic levels, although not much racial diversity. I have to catch myself, though, from stigmatizing people of whatever race who use non-standard grammar or have a strong accent, even the strongest examples of the accent I was brought up around ("Minnesota accent"). I.e. I don't think that such stigma is only racially based. One of my pet peeves is the use of "alls" instead of "all" (mostly because I associate it with a particular person who did this a lot). Maybe someone has done a study on this, but I suspect that there are rules about when this is done, and I suspect that at least one rule is that it goes at the beginning of a sentence when it is separated from the word "is" by one or more words. Ex: "Alls we have is..."
@@merrytunes8697I’ve heard it before. I grew up in an urban area. It’s not uncommon to hear this in old black and white movies. “How’s about we…” is also common. I never stopped to think about where it came from.
Well, im sorry to tell you but its GOT to be racial (or at the very least political/cultural stigma associated with race) because it sure as hell isnt due to any trait of the sounds/language itself. Language doesnt have inherent meaning, we give it meaning based on the culture we grew up with. In the US, that is a very racist culture that subjugated slaves from africa. sorry bud.
I used to feel weird about (specifically) the term "African-American Language" as opposed to "African-American English" or "African-American Vernacular English." It seemed to me like using the term AAL attempted to create an unnecessary distinction/separation from English. But after watching this video again, and really starting to understand that there's a certain level of mutual unintelligibility (or semi-mutual unintelligibility really, because let's be honest, black people in America dont have the option of not understanding "standard" English) due to cultural, geographical, and/or socio-economic distance, and combining that with the idea that languages BECOME languages in the first place (as opposed to dialects) at least in part due to unintelligibility, I start to wonder if maybe it SHOULD be considered its own language. Relatively new concept to me, but I'm sure it's not new to the linguists who study this, which is probably the reason for the term AAL in the first place. As long as we don't have to go back to using the word Ebonics...
Love your channel! It would be interesting if you could do a video and trace some of the features, such as the use of "no" as an emphasis marker back to their origins. As a 100% not AAE native speaker ... I have no problems understanding it as long as it stays out of the deep weeds of slang.
At the 10:37 mark you state “if you say double negatives are wrong, but you say French is sophisticated or that you love Russian Literature, then you are not being consistent.” Linguistically, is it possible for double negatives to be wrong or inappropriate in one language (as we were taught in grade school and HS school English) but correct or appropriate in another language (like French or Russian)?
Speaking as a linguist, its all the same thing. Nothing is wrong, its all just communication. Politics and stigma are what cause people to assume one way is correct/proper. English/language comes from dozens of other languages and influences, everything is constantly changing based on how its used. Consistency means accepting that everyone is doing their best to communicate and that correcting them (my way is proper and yours is bad. i wont listen until you say it right) only makes it HARDER to understand them with the language they already have.
It's funny thing that I, whose native tongue ids Finnish, seem to understand more dialects of English than many english speakers. For example when I worked internationally one french colleague of mine had hard time to get his point to an english guy. I had to translate. Same english guy didn't understand what an irish barkeeper shouted to us when we went to a bar in Ireland. To me the "shut the door" was as clear as any other way you might want to say it. On the other hand Finnish is a very hard language to learn. But know what? If you want to speak Finnish without fully knowing all grammatically correct tenses and inflections you will be understood by Finns as there are context that tells what you mean.
Really interesting thanks for making this video, I found it through r/linguistics. I'm in the UK and so don't know much about AAE or have much exposure though there are similar ethnicity based dialects here. One thing I have been curious about is the emergence of AAE terms and/or features into the wider English language sphere, due to its prevalence in popular culture. Personally I'm noticing things like "X be..." being used, even by myself.
There's definitely a video in the works on that topic. What's especially interesting to me is that those borrowings often obliterate the tense/aspect/mood distinctions in AAE, so they end up meaning something different.
@@languagejones6784 I noticed that on the video and it's definitely true. When I use and hear the construction it's always present tense, and it's always in that simple form i.e. no tense it negation. Looking forward to future videos on this, thankyou for taking the time to make them.
Dr. Jones: I appreciate your work. You make, concise, approachable, research-based videos. I consider you a trusted source in a swamp of pretenders. From a place of respect and appreciation, I have to raise an issue I have. You have a tendency to tout your credentials with a frequency that strikes me as sometimes intrusive. Of course, I don’t know your context, and perhaps you’re trying to preempt know-nothing critics. Maybe I’m just triggered by anyone mentioning their Ivy League credentials. My respect and appreciation for your work remains.
I thought this type of English was normal honestly half my life and I’m white im around this race more then my own and honestly I wouldn’t want it any different culture in my city is mostly African American and Hispanic this type of English is very common here you grow up in it it’s normal to you crazy I get alone with other races more then my own I guess it’s all about who you grow up around
I think you can loose your AAE. Being assimilated and being told you speak wrong your whole life will make you speak differently. But think I still can go back and forth when I’m with my family. But not as much as when I was a kid
Speaking differently in different households/situations is called Code Switching. Its really common. Language is learned so it makes a lot of sense that you would use whatever feels most comfortable or helps you get by. There can be a lot of negative pushback for AAE especially in the workplace or school. You probably had to learn to communicate well in both, but the people youre talking to only use/understand one or the other.
I believe Jive is a variety of AAVE? In any case, regarding Minnie Quartey Annan's comment at 10:44, the Jive scene from "Airport" obviously needs to be mentioned in this context. This scene is easy to find on RU-vid, as is an interview with Barbara Billingsley.
Jive was slang / street language. The movie “Airplane” premiered 43 years ago which highlights how no one uses Jive today. The dialect became popular in part of the blaxploitation movement in cinema. Those who spoke in Jive didn’t speak it as a primary language… it was a dialect amongst themselves or close knit group. The movie made it a parody. It’s not included widely because it occurred during a specific period of time.
I'm confused about "she ain't be doin' that " being incorrect. I hear people using that kind of phrase frequently. It might be a very local variation. I live on the central coast of California.
I am also from California and I have also heard that used. I think it might be a regional variation. The point still remains that there are rules because "She be ain't doin' that" would sound incorrect to me. But "she ain't be doin' that" would clearly mean to me that the subject has never done whatever that is referring to. The construction would also imply that the speaker is negating an accusation.
This is just making me want a video going over several of the unique features with use cases and actual clips of people using them in context (like Youglish does for standard English). ...of course, I also want to see that for Hiberno-English and how that plays out in Irish-American dialects, and one for Hawaiian Pidgin as well, if that's possible. The fuzzy edges between languages is endlessly intriguing. (I just had to think whether to use "is" or "are" there, and I think "is" because I'm referring to the whole set of fuzzy edges, rather than referring to them as discrete things with separate forms of interest. But I'm questioning my usage.)
The auto captions completely missed the point of the cookie monster thing... it said Cookie Monster was the one "who'd" be eating cookies. But no, again, he *be* eatin' cookies.
So would people write in AAE or just speak it? I’m wondering how it would work in business communications like emails, status reports, correspondence with customers, documentation, etc.
How does "Jive" fit into this? My English book definition of Jive could also describe AAE, so when is it Jive, when is it AAE, and what's the difference between the one and the other?
I have a question that may not be on topic, but I can’t identify where to ask it. It is about the rhetorical pattern of call and response. It seems very notable in this year’s political rallies. Is this a new thing ( in rallies) and if so, is it attributable to increased visibility of AA politicians? Or is this an old part of political rallies that I just missed. Were even Nixon and Kennedy using it and I just didn’t notice it? How about Regan or the Bushes? Did Clinton use it? I don’t even remember it from Obama’s time. I have to admit, it makes stump speeches much more entertaining and freeing. Kind of like a genteel way for an old lady to get rowdy, if you will. But when did it start?
I remember being in. Sixth grade and not being able to understand my black math teacher witch caused me to struggle trying to understand what he was trying to teach
What I just don't understand as an outsider is the point: "AAVE makes you different from mainstream society and if you feel excluded from mainstream society, or mainstream society doesn't want to give you a job, then why do you say mainstream society is ignorant or racist? You just try to fit in better" For me in Europe, where we have several languages and we also have English as our main language, everyone always tries to get so good that there is no longer any difference between to a native speaker.
As was mentioned here, but n great part that is down to the specific context of chattel slavery in the United States, and the circumstances of its abolition and subsequent treatment of black Americans. It's not directly replicated in Europe, although you can contrast the reception of white western Europeans or Scandinavians with the reception of Africans in Europe for a picture that isn't dissimilar.
I'll take this opportunity to plug "Language in Society," a picture book about language variation, centered on and narrated in AAE, written by my grad-school colleague, Dr. Nandi Sims. It even has a mini research activity for learning about language attitudes by asking people to read a short paragraph in parallel AAVE and Standard English versions and talk about how they imagine the writers. As for what I myself wish people knew: Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, though written in dialect, are not the minstrelsy that misused stereotypes of that dialect. Nor are they Disney's Song of the South that borrowed them while painting some sort of fond, voluntary postbellum servitude over top of the plantation system's cruelty. Harris was so careful as to transcribe different accents of Black speech with different spellings, and he published only stories he had two independent sources for. Uncle Remus is no Uncle Tom; he has a kind relationship with White children, but slave narratives recorded in the 1930s confirm that such a thing was common enough; and in any case it falls to his own credit, not to slavery's.
I'm really trying to wrap my head around that there was an actual legitimate name other Ebonics for how black folks talk. This is why black children should have the opportunity to attend HBCUs for at least black cultural education, because if you leave it to society they will make you feel stupid, uneducated, and improper for being you. We will even condemn ourselves and other black folks for it. My grandmother was a proud AA woman, but was always on me about speaking the King's English. I completely understood because she grew up in a time where assimilation was a necessity. I speak it at home with my sons and they are aware that the ability to code switch is also a necessity in most work environments. However, I don't condemn them for using it because I use it, their family uses it, their black friends use it, etc. When they hear me code switch on the phone, they think it's the funniest thing in the world. They be lightn me up! 😂
I found it interesting that you treat AAE almost as a new language and not just a dialect. I wonder if you would do the same with South-African black English. Some of the older speakers still swap gender in pronouns. They do the same for Afrikaans, and funnily if I chat with one like that I tend to do the same.
It would be interesting to compare other African diaspora forms of English. I'm much more familiar with BEV / LME etc. as I'm on the other side of the Atlantic
As a non-American I'd appreciate some more general intro or more examples than the one delivered with "ain't be". I'm rather interested in linguistics, but had difficulty in grasping what is being talked about, focusing on quite other regions.
So I find the case of Rachel Dolezal quite fascinating, especially because to me it looks like one person's personality issues being turned into a political debate caused by herself (basically she speaks for others who didn't ask her to). I recently watched the Netflix documentary about her and just found it sad. In any case, you show her three times in the video whenever you say that people can do AAVE wrong. Can you give some examples of her mistakes?
@4:21: To state that “every Black person doesn’t speak African-American Language” is grammatically incorrect. If “every Black person does NOT speak African-American Language”, then NO Black person DOES speak African-American Language. “Not every Black person speaks African-American Language” would be correct.
Are you not also a white word nerd? I am, and I also made a video about AAE, though I used the term AAVE, since that’s what the expert I worked with called it. Judging from many of the comments below, there is lots of ignorance and bigotry around this topic. Those of us who know that all languages are rich and valuable should stick together. We don’t get anywhere by dissing each other.
I am, hence my stare at the camera when I said it. But also, there's a saying in AAE Dr. Smith is fond of: "a hit dog'll holler." I've also heard "if the shoe don't fit, you ain't gotta wear it." Don't get sidetracked by defending yourself against things that aren't about you, and keep fighting the good fight!
I don't know AAL. Of course it's a language. Are there learner's grammars like for so many other languages? There should be if there aren't. Is there literature in AAL? Again, if it doesn't yet exist, it should and I presume at some point it will.
@@bgaesop yes! That’s referred to as “quantifier scope” and “negation scope” and it’s how you get sayings like “everything that glitters isn’t gold” or “all skin folk ain’t kin folk.”
@@languagejones6784 out of all the aspects of AAE that's the one part I really struggle with. Coming from a pure maths background my brain really struggles with what I see as a lack of precision and of inconsistency in logical modifiers and negation, which isn't a problem for things like the habitual be. How would one, in this dialect, unambiguously express the sentiment "every person does not do this thing"?
Question/observation: my African American ex-husband was a Canadian teacher and mostly spoke the locally "acceptable" english. But when he was with family from Philadelphia, he would speak what I once referred to as "home speak" (no disrespect intended). He was more animated, more at ease, more expressive. Is that a thing too? Or just restricted to specific individuals? (It was beautiful to observe.)
It is a thing. Our language is our identity and that is also our culture. So when we're "home" (and it doesn't have to be the physical location but a call or pop up with family), our language becomes the familiarity that may have been missing in our day-to-day. So when we're speaking to family, we're speaking to hearts, memories, traditions and love that brings joy unto us.
You wear contacts. I just noticed. Maybe six videos in. I also wear glasses but have never liked wearing contact lenses. I prefer the cleanliness of my shower to merely suspicious. I like your channel. I didn't know about AAE. Thank you. And if I am wrong about you wearing contacts, then it's for the Algorithm's utility. I'd love to hear what you think about what I would naively call 'Aboriginal Australian English'.
I’m pretty sure I (white person) learned all of these points in the 1980’s while studying under Bill Labov at U Penn. it’s kind of depressing that we still have to be trying to get the point across to people, 40 years later.
I just keep thinking of Paul Rudd in the end of Clueless Anyways. I lived on a rancheria from age 15 to 20 as a white girl and I picked up rez English (or whatever it would be called) kind of against my will I had had proper English hammered in pretty hard from my biological family, and my peers fucked with me a lot about sounding so white and nerdy All these years later I still find myself slipping into that rez cadence and slang if I'm talking to my Native friends I wonder how this way of speaking is viewed by linguists since it is a result of colonization
I'm not so sure I buy Dr Anan's point that prejudice is against the face-type and not the language. I'm in a difficult position insofar as my language is mid-Atlantic "newscaster", a kind of Received Pronunciation for America. For that reason, my form of English seems "standard" to me. Gotta be careful about that, since I've identified quite a few idiocies in our form of English. While I wouldn't call my position "prejudiced", it's definitely affected by speech -- regardless of face-type. There's a classic working-class accent found around New York (where I live) that's often called the Brooklyn accent. Its speakers are usually of European descent, and it registers on me during a conversation, while "newscaster" is transparent to me (that is, I register only content, and not presentation.) Now, I'm not stupid. I know there's more to trust and good citizenship than group affinity, but speech other than my own way sets off a marker in the negative direction for me. It's a small marker, but it's still there. I don't know that it's any different in degree from when I hear AAE. A black face registers on my system, but if the person in question is speaking college English, the matter of ancestry is almost imperceptible. To put it differently, I'm much more comfortable with Black people who sound like me and my gang, than I am with Europeans who speak with "deeze, dems, and doze". If I had to extricate myself from a difficult situation, I'd surely rather have the help of a Black person who speaks as I do, than a White one who's "not on the program". (Sorry, but that's just how I am. WE came here and learned to "do as the Romans", and I AM MOST AT HOME with others who have done the same.) I don't think I'm alone in this. Here are two specific examples for my own case: 1) My mother went to college (1945) and took speech classes, with both before- and after- recordings. Her sister didn't go to college. My mother taught the sound and usage to my father, who believed in the value of her higher education. My aunt's family always sounded a little ghetto to me (Jewish ghetto. My great-grandparents didn't speak English, though they lived in New York. They arrived as adults.) My cousins also [still] sound a little ghetto to me. We're not close. 2) I had a Black high school friend who was the son of immigrants. He, like most of the immigrants' kids I went to school with, spoke like Walter Cronkite. (Most of my second-generation classmates came from southern or eastern Europe. This fellow's folks were from the Caribbean, so they were probably, though not necessarily, Anglophones.) It's of secondary, but notable importance, that while most of the Black kids in my class self-isolated and took vocational classes, my friend took academic classes and had a White girlfriend. In other words, he chose not "be different", and he was, to the best of my knowledge, not treated differently. I always assumed -- without statistics to back things up -- that his status as "regular guy" came from his speech, and not his appearance. My sample of one is hardly good science, yet I suspect lots of others have similar perceptions. It's for these reasons that I don't think Dr Anan's observation is necessarily true. Visual input is important, for sure, but speech is the strongest determinant of my level of comfort with strangers. Curiously, if I consider not strangers -- but people I actually know and interact with -- then my comfort level depends ENTIRELY on action and content, and speech & appearance nearly disappear from my formula. In that case, the only thing I demand from speech is clarity and non-ambiguity; everything is up for grabs and immaterial to me.
I wish I knew more than factoids about AAE. One person seemed to be saying the same thing twice. And the whole, "if you can break a rule that means rules exist." thing made me feel that these people weren't being very serious about educating others.
Would've been great if you had shown some examples if various registers of AAE and told the difference betwern AAE and AAL instead of just repeating that AAL exists.
I love learning about AAE, but as a Canadian looking at the White/Black segregation down there, I can't help but feel sad that this simple difference of color has had such a profound effect that it has caused a divergence of dialect in a population who lives in the same space. I can't think of any other situation in history where people who live in the same country and interact with each other daily would keep themselves so separate that their dialects would split like that. Normally you see the opposite, where different dialects and even languages would merge with constant interaction.
It's under-acknowledged that the varieties of AAE and the varieties of English spoken by White Southerners had plenty of mutual influence, but it's true that on top of that foundation there is plenty of suspicion and hostility that have kept Whites and Blacks not only socially but even spatially separated. De jure segregation is dead, but its legacy in practice and circumstance has helped to maintain it de facto. (Of course, it was never wholly about skin color, either. Although human beings have invented plenty of forms of classism and coercion, chattel slavery -- enslavement that is heritable, lifelong by default, and fully without distinction from mere property -- is rare and unusually harsh. Those who established it in the Americas in the early modern period took rare and unusually strong steps to protect it. I don't think it's an accident that they imposed heritable slavery on people with a heritable, visible difference from themselves, or that they promoted exactly the stereotypes of Black sexuality and concepts of racial purity that maintained the usefulness of color as a marker of slavery (with a violent fear of cross-racial rape that would result in freeborn mixed-race children, and a lie that cross-racial rape that would result in mixed-race slave children was no rape at all). I know it's no accident that they cultivated division, fear, and hate toward them among other low-status people who weren't so easy to distinguish from the would-be nobility, or that they invented ideas about a race naturally suited to and happiest in slavery, who would only seek for things like self-determination or reward for their work if they were ill and dangerous. And so many other ideas about natural dispositions, intelligence, purity, and everything else, that made Black people seem less-than, that got Black people mistreated and ill-resourced, that resulted in the kinds of life circumstances that Whites could point to to endorse those ideas again. Long story short, chattel slavers got 339 years to install a self-perpetuating meme complex in America about Blacks, and we haven't even been winding it down for half that long yet.) There are benign forms of community language distinction too, even in Canada. I recall a study of IIRC Nova Scotian fishermen whose usage ranged between more standard and more dialectal English, depending whether they were getting things done with outsiders or affirming local belonging.
@@eritain Even today, it's pretty disturbing when you move here, to the US. Every official form asks about race, and there's mandatory workplace training that-in the guise of combatting it-reinforces the racialisation of, well, everything. Working in an environment where (I think) the majority are immigrants, it's quite noticeable how mandatory ‘sensitivity’ training makes everyone less comfortable and more defensive, and how it deflects understanding away from issues of wealth, class, culture and education to a one-size-fits-all racial analysis. It's truly loathsome, and pervades the entire political spectrum.