English, African-American Vernacular

https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/05092-6 Get rights and content

African-American English (AAE) is a range of ethnically distinctive varieties of North American English, including regional and social dialects, Standard AAE, and Sea Island Creole English (Gullah). The best known variety, African-American vernacular English (AAVE), is associated with urban culture, working-class and younger speakers, and informal contexts, but it has been stigmatized and misrepresented. Characteristic modes of indirect discourse and uncensored speech reflect speaking rules imposed during slavery. Syntactic research on verb phrase, negation, nominal inflection, and pronoun selection demonstrates distinctive grammatical features, linked to Caribbean creoles but also converging with other American English dialects. Many phonological features are shared with Southern White vernacular English, but AAVE speakers do not participate in mainstream American chain shifts.

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Peter L Patrick is a native speaker of American English (born in lower Manhattan) and a near-native speaker of Jamaican Patwa (from age 5). He studied Chinese and medieval history at the University of Georgia (B.A. 1982), studied linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under Gillian Sankoff and William Labov (Ph.D. 1992), and conducted a sociolinguistic survey of Kingston, Jamaica, for his doctoral thesis. He has taught sociolinguistics at Georgetown University and the University of Essex and applied sociolinguistics to nonacademic problems via forensic testimony in the USA and UK and studies of clinical communication in Jamaica. He publishes in the areas of language variation and change, sociolinguistic methods, pidgin and creole studies, urban dialectology, and languages of the African diaspora. He has a special interest in the language, culture, and life of Jamaica and the English-speaking Caribbean, and maintains websites on Jamaican Creole and language and human rights, along with a large online bibliography of African American English.

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