A couple thousand years ago, the Ancient Greeks decided that all the languages besides Ancient
Greek sounded like “barbarbarbar,” so they started calling the people who spoke
them “barbarians.” Or, at least, that’s the popular story about where the word comes
from, there’s actually similar words in Latin in Sanskrit, so the word probably goes
all the way back to PIE, but the point is the Greeks really did refer to everyone who
didn’t speak Greek as “barbaros,” and they really did think of them as barbarians.
After all, from their perspective Ancient Greek just sounded right, and all the other
languages sounded weird and wrong, and if they couldn’t see that then it must be because
they’re stupid, smelly uncivilized barbarians. You’d think that after all this time we
would have figured out that people who speak differently then you do aren’t doing it
just ‘cause they’re dumb, that whatever people are raised with winds up sounding correct
to them and that no one’s language or dialect is inherently better or worse than anyone
else’s, but no. Two and a half thousand years later we are still struggling with this
basic concept, and in my own country there’s one way of speaking in particular that people
could really stand to actually learn a little about. I mean, there are loads of different
ways people speak in the US, but there’s one that people don’t usually even think
of as a legitimate accent or dialect, instead instead they just call it “slang” at best
or “broken English” at worst. What I am referring to has been called many different
things over the years, but the standard term among linguists, and what I’ll be using
for the rest of the video, is “African American Vernacular English,” or “AAVE.”
No matter where you live in the US, whether it’s the West Coast or the East Coast or
Chicago or the Deep South, black people often have a way of speaking that’s very different
from . . . white . . . people. hm. um, black people have a different way of speaking from
white people? Now you can’t see the white one. Black people have a different way of
speaking from white, Eh, you still can’t really see them. Black people have uh…?
That just looks weird. Uh . . . Imma be honest, I have no idea how I should illustrate this.
OK, you know what? I give up. From now on, black people and AAVE are purple while white
people and General American English are pink. By the way, “General American English”
is a dialect of English which is very close to what I’m speaking right now, it’s the
one that people tend to use most in professional settings in the US.
Something I want to clarify is that not all black people speak AAVE. In fact, it’s actually
incredibly common for black people to speak both AAVE and General American English, making
them, well, they’re not bilingual since AAVE isn’t a separate language, but, is
bi-dialectal a word? Oh cool, it is!
So yeah, not only that but it AAVE varies a fair amount from region to region and even
from person to person, but, at the same time, a black person from Los Angeles will frequently
sound way more similar to a black person from Chicago or New York than to a white person
from LA. Why is this? Well, there are two main theories about where AAVE comes from.
The older of the two theories is that AAVE diverged from early modern English just like
American and British English. Whenever different groups of people stop talking to each other,
they inevitably start speaking differently. Sometimes they don’t talk because they’re
two far away from each other, which is how the different dialects of Latin became more
and more different until we wound up with French and Spanish and the rest. But it can
just as easily happen for other reasons, just so long as people are talking to other people
in their group way more than everyone else, and even though the Slaves who were brought
over from Africa would have had to learn English at first, they would have definitely been
talking with each other much more than with white people, a situation which continued
even after slavery ended all the way up until . . . well, it’s still kinda that way actually.
Over time, this could have easily lead to the divergence of AAVE and General American
English. AAVE was concentrated in the Southern US for most of it’s history, since up until
the 20th century that’s where almost all black people lived, but during an event called
the Great migration from around 1910 to 1970 millions of African Americans started moving
to the North, and they took their dialect with them.
The other theory about where AAVE comes from says that it didn’t just diverge from General
American English over time, but that it started out very different from the English that white
people spoke. When the African Slaves who were brought to the US got there, they wouldn’t
have spoken English at first, initially they would have spoken Umbundu or Beti or Yoruba
or Edo or Hausa or Izon or Ful or Igbo or, um, wow there are a lot of language in this
region. Anyway, the theory says that these languages mixed together with English when
they got to the US, creating a sort of hybrid language that, over many generations, became
more and more influenced by and similar too the English that white people spoke.
Both theories are probably true to an extent. AAVE is mostly English, but it also clearly
has at least some influence from African languages. In fact, there are a few words that General
American has picked up from AAVE that originate in Africa, like bogus, hip and cool. Exactly
how much influence came from which source at AAVE’s birth is still an ongoing debate
in linguistics. Now I’ve spent the majority of the video
so far talking about AAVE but I have yet to actually talk about what it sounds like or
what makes it different from General American English. You’ve probably actually heard
it before, but a lot of people just assume that it’s just a series of mistakes and
miss-pronunciations when it’s actually just as rule-based and internally consistent as
General American. Phonologically, a couple big differences are
that in AAVE the TH “th” and “th” sounds changed to “t,” “f” “d”
or “v” depending on the context, and also consonant clusters that have a stop sound
as their second sound are often simplified, with the stop sound being dropped. So, “both
of us think that they we’ll find the desk there” would become something along the
lines of “bouf of us tink dat we’ll fin duh des der.” There are other differences
depending on the region, but those two are among the most widespread and I think the
most noticeable. But what people tend to notice way more then
differences in pronunciation in AAVE are it’s differences in grammar. AAVE will often sound
like it’s just dropping words all the time, but it does so in a very consistent pattern.
In General American English we have a habit of contracting words, for instance making
“she is the one” into “she’s the one.” But there are some circumstances where we
can’t contract things, like we can’t make “I don’t think she is” into “I don’t
think she’s.” Well, as a general rule of thumb, wherever General American can contract,
AAVE can delete. “she is the one” becomes “she duh one,” but “I don’t think
she is” can’t become “I don tink she.” Another difference people tend to pick up
on is the fact that AAVE treats double negatives differently. In General American “I don’t
have none” means that you do have some, but in AAVE it would mean that you don’t
have any. In AAVE, multiple negatives reinforce each other, while in General American they
cancel each other out. I think it’s worth noting that all of the
things I’ve talked about so far in AAVE aren’t unique to AAVE. Dropping linking
verbs happens all the time in languages besides English, like 我饿 means “I am hungry”
in Chinese but there are only two words, it literally translates to “I hungry,” and
the first part of the Muslim declaration of faith, “la ilaha illa allah” word-for-word
translates to “no god but God” but means “there is no god but god.” As for the
double negative thing, multiple negatives reinforcing each other actually used to be
the norm in English. Shakespeare and Chaucer would regularly say things like “Nor never
none shall mistress be of it, save I alone” or “He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde"
. . . um, well, it means something like “he never yet had no vileness said.” Unless
you’re willing to say that everyone who speaks Chinese or Arabic as well as Shakespeare
and Chaucer are all doing it wrong, it doesn’t make any sense to say that AAVE is wrong either.
But, I’ve saved my favorite part for last. Most of what I’ve talked about so far has
been about how AAVE simplifies things, reducing the number of possible sounds, shortening
consonant clusters, dropping words. But the AAVE tense system is arguably much more complicated
than that of General American English. When speakers of AAVE say things like “he be
workin” people who don’t speak AAVE often assume that this means the same thing as “he
is workin” and they’re just not conjugating the verb. But “he be workin” is actually
a usage of what’s called the “habitual be,” and it actually means something along
the lines of “he works sometimes” or “he is in the habit of working” or “he has
a job,” it’s a bit hard to translate, actually. So “he be workin” could actually
easily be true even if the person you’re talking about happens to be at home right
now. It’s an entire tense that just doesn’t exist in other dialects of English! This is
probably my favorite example of how people are very quick to just write off others as
doing it wrong, but when we actually listen to each other and take a closer look at what
we’re saying we find that what looked at first like a simple error is actually just
another tool people use to express themselves, one we might not even have.
Linguistics often doesn’t have much in the way of practical application. It can feel
a little like philosophy at times, interesting but not immediately relevant to much. But
the biggest practical lesson we can learn from linguistics is that everybody’s speech
is just as rich and complicated and logical as our own, even if it doesn’t look that
way at first, and that when some people’s speech is labeled correct while others’
are labeled incorrect, it’s usually just because the people who speak “correctly”
also happen to be the ones making the rules. So when you hear someone say something that
sounds wrong to you, before you correct them, maybe take a moment to ask yourself if, instead
of a mistake, it might just be a different way of getting your ideas across that you’d
never heard of before. In my experience, the world starts to look a lot more interesting
that way. Catch you guys in my next video!
