The Top 5 things the EXPERTS wish you knew about African American English/AAVE (Not what you think!) 

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.

"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.

I am Black and I totally failed the "Cookie Monster Test". The PhDs are right! AAL is a social thing!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

As a non-native English speaker, I always thought I was using slang. Thanks for the dose of knowledge ☺

I'm fairly sure that any non-native learner of English would immediately recognize AAE as a dialect. It is only Americans who are confused about this.

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.

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 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

This was a truly scintillating conversation as an Afro-Canadian who is fluent in but not a native speaker of AAE. Top notch content.

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.)

The Cookie Monster test is brilliant

I learned so much, thank you and your guests for shedding light on this topic.

Fascinating and enlightening. Thank you to you and your guests. Cheers.

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.

Please do a video about what the difference is between a language, dialect, accent, pidgin, creole, etc.

If one wanted to look at/study the grammar, phonology etc. of AAE, where to go? Anyone have tips for learning reasources or documentation?

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.

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?

Great video, Dr. Jones!

The sad part is not being able to convince my own Black family that AAE/AAVE is a codified language.

Thank you so much for this!! Thank you!!!

You should do language and phrase comparisons for AAVE and SAE like for example some linguists do comparing Scots English and London English.

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.

its not a thing....its a WHOLE thing.

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.

People think they can say weird things like "You be finna do" and they are speaking black but that actually doesn't make sense.

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..."

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)?

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.

I can easily understand spoken AAE, but I would never try to speak it. The same is true for "southern" and for rural Texan.

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.

Ain't always refers to the immediate present - fascinating!

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

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.

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.

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.

I find African influence on language so interesting, such as Creole and AAVE.

This is my first time hearing of AAL. What’s the difference between that and AAE?

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.

This was fascinating, thanks.

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.

When I was first come into the States, the most confusing time I had on English in New Orleans, Y2K

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! 😂

Not the picture of the Auntie.

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.

I don't suppose I can learn AAE on Duolingo. Any suggestions?

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?

I never really understood the AAE verb forms until after explicitly learning about them as an adult.

Would u ever talk to John McWhorter?

Thank you for making this video, educational indeed thanks again... Peace!

@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 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.

Is saying "every person does not do this thing" when they mean "not every person does this thing" an aspect of this?

You need to take the highs down in the audio from your call-in guests

Great video! I’m interested in why it’s not referred to as Black American English instead of African American.

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.)

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'.

Every language has waht we would call grammatical errors or double negatives but because we dont have an accent to make it "sound good" we are judged.

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.