African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is one of the most researched and controversially discussed varieties by sociolinguists. In this paper the controversial origin debate of AAVE will be discussed on the basis of the sociohistorical context and, more importantly, linguistic patterns. Following a chronological order, the way in which AAVE and Southern White Vernaculars (SWV) developed with respect to each other after slavery was abolished will be outlined after.

In the following chapter, the socioeconomic impacts of the Great Migration and Urbanization on the African American community will be laid out, as this historic development is essential in understanding contemporary sociolinguistic developments. These will finally be discussed by looking at a number of studies that focused on linguistic innovations and changes that occurred during the 1980’s in different parts of the country.

While the focus of this paper lies on AAVE, the development of a number of white vernaculars spoken both in the North as well as in the South of the US will be outlined and compared to AAVE as well. Linguistic structural features will be compared, put into their sociohistorical context and will therefore serve as a basis to describe the overall dynamics between white and black vernaculars.

Excerpt

Table of Contents

1 Introduction ... 2

2 The Origins of AAVE ... 3

2.1 The Creolist Hypothesis ... 3

2.2 The Anglicist Approach ... 9

3 Linguistic and Sociohistorical Developments after the Civil War ... 12

3.1 Farm Tenancy and Linguistic Convergence ... 13

3.2 The Great Migration and Urbanization ... 18

4 Contemporary Structural Developments ... 20

4.1 The Divergence Hypothesis ... 21

4.1.1 Innovations and Developments in White Vernaculars ... 21

4.1.2 Innovations and Development in AAVE ... 29

4.1.3 Critique ... 35

4.2 Inter-Ethnic Contact Situations ... 37

4.2.1 Shift towards White Vernaculars ... 37

4.2.2 Social Mobility and Neighborhood Effects ... 40

5 Summary and Conclusion ... 43

6 Bibliography ... 46

7 Deutsche Zusammenfassung ... 50

1 Introduction

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is one of the most researched and

controversially discussed varieties by sociolinguists. Debates regarding its status often

degenerate into polemics, fueled by emotions. These emotions are understandable to a certain

degree, as there was a time, in which AAVE was regarded as a deficient dialect that is inferior

to Standard English (Bailey 2001: 51). Fortunately, today, this stance is no longer accepted

and linguists agree that AAVE is a language system with a concrete set of phonological,

morphosyntactic and lexical patterns (Green 2002: 1). Unfortunately though, the prior opinion

had made its way into the public sphere, where AAVE speakers are often met with

discrimination at work, as well as at school, up until today.

As AAVE is a nonstandard, stigmatized variety it is not used in official situations and

researchers have even suggested that AAVE structures have an impact on students'

performances at school. Especially with respect to reading and writing, African American

school children perform well below average, which studies have shown is partially due to

language transfers from AAVE (Patton-Terry & Connor 2010). As a result, a number of

linguists and educators insist on considering the children's vernacular use when teaching the

standard. This bidialectal approach is not accepted by everyone, in particular, not by many

AAVE speakers themselves, as mainstream English, spoken by the majority of the white

community, remains to be the key to success (Green 2002: 229). While on the one hand

AAVE is linked to ethnic identity and pride, in particular after the Ebonics movement, it lacks

overt prestige. Consequently, the relationships between white and black vernaculars are

marked by this conflict between ethnic identity and social acceptability. Therefore, this paper

will analyze how AAVE has developed over time with respect to its neighboring white

vernaculars. Are they assimilating to each other or are they becoming more different? Who

assimilates to whom, and why? If linguistic divergence occurs, what is the main factor driving

it?

In order to adequately research these questions the origins of AAVE are central, as they show,

whether or not the grammatical core is in fact English or African. The degree of substratum

influence, especially with regards to underlying grammatical structures, is essential, when

analyzing its current status and relationship to white vernaculars of English. Therefore, the

controversial origin debate will be discussed first on the basis of the sociohistorical context

and, more importantly, linguistic patterns. Following a chronological order, the way in which

AAVE and Southern White Vernaculars (SWV) developed with respect to each other after

slavery was abolished will be outlined after. In the following chapter, the socioeconomic

impacts of the Great Migration and Urbanization on the African American community will be

laid out, as this historic development is essential in understanding contemporary

sociolinguistic developments. These will finally be discussed by looking at a number of

studies that focused on linguistic innovations and changes that occurred during the 1980's in

different parts of the country. While the focus of this paper lies on AAVE, the development of

a number of white vernaculars spoken both in the North as well as in the South of the US will

be outlined and compared to AAVE as well. Linguistic structural features will be compared,

put into their sociohistorical context and will therefore serve as a basis to describe the overall

dynamics between white and black vernaculars.

2 The Origins of AAVE

To adequately compare and understand contemporary structural developments in AAVE, the

question must be asked, whether its grammatical core is in fact English. To answer this

question, the origin debate is to be settled. The origins of AAVE are disputed due to the lack

of reliable data from early times. Slave narratives, early recordings of former slaves and

varieties spoken in Nova Scotia and Samaná by African American who emigrated in the

nineteenth century have been used to reconstruct features of Early AAVE to differing degrees

of success. As of today, there are two main theories popular amongst sociolinguists as to how

modern AAVE came to be. On the one hand, it is assumed that AAVE started off, similar to

Gullah and English-based creoles found in the Caribbean, as a creole and has undergone

constant, extensive decreolization since then. Consequently, proponents of the creolist theory

claim that the grammatical basis of AAVE is fundamentally different to that of Standard

English. On the other hand, proponents of the Anglicist approach argue that AAVE originated

from learning early white vernaculars as a second language and is therefore to be considered a

dialect of English, with language change patterns and innovations similar to those of any other

vernacular. Both of these theories will be examined in further detail as the origin of AAVE is

closely linked to the sociohistorical context, in particular to its relation to white vernaculars,

and is essential in describing and explaining its modern-day status.

2.1 The Creolist Hypothesis

Since AAVE shares structural similarities with Jamaican Creole and Gullah, proponents of the

creolist hypothesis argue that AAVE descended from a creole similar to that of creoles found

in the Caribbean or in South Carolina and has undergone constant and extensive

decreolization, steadily assimilating to white vernaculars. The antecedent creole might have

either evolved independently or out of already fully established creoles that slaves from

Barbados and Jamaica brought with them.

In either case, the focus does not lie on the target language English, but rather on substratum

influences, as some even argue that AAVE "is structurally related to West African languages

and bears only superficial similarities to English" (Green 2002: 8). Morphosyntactic features

like the absence of the copula and the deletion of consonant clusters, features that AAVE

shares with Gullah and Jamaican English, are one of the main arguments in favor of the

creolist hypothesis (Bailey 2001: 54). In order to test this hypothesis, it is necessary to

consider the sociohistorical context of AAVE, its relation to white vernaculars of the time,

and its structural features. These factors need to be compared to fully formed creoles like

Gullah, in order to see if they share a common history.

SOCIOHISTORICALCONDITIONS

Gullah, together with Hawai'ian Creole, is the only English-lexified creole in the US. It is

currently spoken around the coast of South Carolina and in Georgia (Klein 2013:139). It

evolved from the speech of slaves taken from West Africa and the Caribbeans, mainly from

Barbados (Mufwene 2000: 241). Although slavery was officially banned in Georgia in 1734,

slavery proved to be too profitable so that the slave trade went on, resulting in blacks

outnumbering whites by a ratio of 100 or more in coastal South Carolina (Klein 2013: 140). In

Georgia, Africans made up almost 36% of the colonial population already by 1790 (Mufwene

2000: 243).

This unequal distribution in population made way for extensive substratum influences from

West and Central African languages, mainly from the Bantu and Mande language families

(Holloway & Vass 1993). Evidence for these substrate influences can be seen in names for

people and places and can even be found in Standard English, as "many Africanisms [...]

were first heard on plantations in the American South during the slavery era and reemerged in

the 1960s as an important part of black dialect before moving into white speech" (Holloway

& Vass 1993: xvii). Therefore in particular Gullah is full of Africanisms with more than 5,300

words identified, with the majority being of Bantu origin. While 30% of the enslaved people

brought to South Carolina were Mande speakers, many of them ended up working as house

workers passing on Mande culture to white Americans, which is still evident as for instance in

popular Uncle Remus stories (xix, xxiv). Bantus however mainly worked the fields, isolated

from mainstream white American culture, which made it possible for them to escape

acculturation and develop their own culture and language further (xxv). This was only

possible due to the high concentration of Africans with similar cultural backgrounds.

The high ratio of the black to white population did not only contribute to the flourishing of

Bantu culture and substratum influence but furthermore Gullah was able to form due to the

fact that new arrivals acquired English not from white English native speakers but from

fellow slaves. Plantation owners closely monitored this process and resorted to forceful

measures, as disobedience or reluctance to learn the language could result in withholding of

food (Klein 2013: 140). This hostile learning environment and the massive amount of people

with similar native tongues and cultures increased substratum influences and favored the

formation of a creole. Gullah was subsequently identified as a variety by the 1750s and is still

actively used today with even a translated version of the New Testament known as the

"Gullah Bible" (141).

Even though AAVE did not have the same sociohistorical conditions as Gullah, some

linguists propose that AAVE descended from a creole very similar to that of Gullah and

creoles found in the Caribbean today. Although whites outnumbered blacks in the majority of

colonies found in the US and the majority of plantations were rather small in size, this does

not exclude the possibility of blacks having had extensive contact with each other and

therefore giving way to creolization. After all, more than half of the enslaved Africans in the

mid-nineteenth century US lived on plantations with more than twenty slaves (Rickford 1998:

158). Furthermore, a considerable portion of the slaves brought to American colonies came

from the Caribbean, where creole English was spoken (157). Therefore it is possible for

established creoles to have been brought to the mainland US, where subsequently a creole

continua formed backwards "with the first generations of Africans acquiring something closer

to metropolitan English, and later generations acquiring successively "restructured" or

creolized varieties as they had less access to white norms and learned increasingly from each

other" (Rickford 1998: 156). To confirm this theory, AAVE shares a number of structural

similarities with Caribbean creoles and Bantu languages that point towards creole roots,

comparable to Gullah.

LINGUISTICEVIDENCE

As mentioned beforehand, lexical borrowing from Bantu languages did not only occur in

Gullah, but also in AAVE, eventually making its way into Standard American English This

was also the case with the words jazz, bug or cop (Holloway & Vass 1993: xvi). However,

lexical similarities do not provide key evidence for the creole origin hypothesis in the same

way as structural parallels in key aspects of grammar do, since creole grammar systems are

primarily based on the substratum language systems while vocabulary is mainly derived from

the target language. Therefore, some of the main structural features of AAVE that point

towards an antecedent creole variation are the absence of the copula and consonant cluster

deletion. AAVE, Gullah and Caribbean English-lexified creoles all share these structural

features (Bailey 2001: 54).

The most common copula verb in Standard English is the verb to be. It serves four copula

functions: (1) to connect a (pro)noun with a noun predicate, i.e. He is a man (2)

to connect a

(pro)noun with a qualifying word, e.g. He was lame (3)

to indicate a state of change, i.e. He

will be tall (4) to state existence in a place or time, He was in the house ten minutes ago

(Holm 1984: 297). In AAVE the copula verb is often deleted. Holm (1984) concluded that the

manner in which this occurs points towards the influence of West African languages in

particular of Yoruba and therefore towards a creole origin.

Rickford (1998) investigated the

absence of the copula in AAVE in further detail and came to the same conclusion as Holm

(1984), while adding that it has undergone a similar process of decreolization as Caribbean

creoles have as well.

The copula is one of the most studied creole features and data shows

that AAVE shares the same basic copula absence pattern with mesolectal creole varieties from

Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, and South Carolina (Rickford 1998: 173-177). The data

gathered from ex-slave recordings and from Jamaican and Barbadian creole speakers is

summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Copula absence following grammatical environment

__NP

__Locative

__Adjective

___V+-ing

__gon(na)/

__gwain

Ex-slave

recordings

12%

15%

29%

71%

100%

Jamaican

Creole (1991)

28%

59%

58%

93%

Barbadian

Creole

(1991)

52%

71%

89%

100%

Source: adapted from Bailey (1987: 35), Rickford (1996: 363; 1991c), all as quoted by Rickford

(1998: 165, 176)

As can be seen in Table 1, the basic copula absence pattern for AAVE is the following:

copula deletion is least frequent before a noun phrase, followed by locative predicates. The

occurrence of copula deletion before an adjective is high, even higher before a verb plus ing

inflection, and the highest before the future marker gon(na) (Rickford 1998: 175).

Since AAVE makes this distinction between nominal, adjectival, locative, and verbal

predicates, a distinction found neither in standard nor vernacular varieties of English, Holm

(1984: 297, 301) argues that the zero copula reflects a common African ancestor of both

AAVE and English-based creoles. As Yoruba makes similar semantic distinction in its copula

distribution, he concludes that this is a legacy of Yoruba-speakers who learned English. While

Standard English has only one possibility to express all four functions described previously,

most English-based creoles, in particular basilectal varieties, have "a number of words

appropriate to a number of distinct grammatical categories which the acrolect lumps together

as a single copula be in its various forms" (Holm 1984: 295). Yoruba has eight different types

of copulas, including zero copula before most adjectives, as they are considered a subclass of

verb. This matches with the preference of various creoles, including AAVE, to delete the

copula before adjectives as can be taken from Table 1. Yoruba, however, makes many more

distinctions than English-based creoles do, as for instance the distinction between natural and

acquired characteristics.

Even though Yoruba does have a preverbal marker of the

progressive, English-lexified creoles delete the copula before V+-ing even more frequently

than before adjectives (Holm 1984: 297; Table 1). Nevertheless, even though the two

grammar systems do not match perfectly, this is a clear sign for substratum influence on

modern-day AAVE (Rickford 1998: 186). During the creolization process some distinctions

and markers have been lost due to the rule of simplification. However, the fact that AAVE as

well as Caribbean creole speakers delete the copula frequently before an adjective yet rarely

before a noun phrase points to a similar process of decreolization.

Taking Gullah as an example, early recordings of Gullah showed the use of da as an

obligatory copula before predicate nominals and before unmarked verbs. However, da + V

decreolized to Ø + V-ing. On the other hand, the copula in da + NP was retained and

relexified to iz + NP. This decreolization process explains why copula absence is more

common before verb than noun phrases in mesolectal Gullah. Since AAVE shows the same

tendency, it is to be assumed that it has undergone a similar process of decreolization

(Rickford 1998: 173). Similarly, in Non-Settler Liberian English, a variation spoken by the

descendants of African-Americans who emigrated in the nineteenth century, the zero copula

was introduced as an intermediate stage between the basilectal copulas and the acrolectal

inflected be (177). After considering these decreolization processes and comparing these to

the speech of whites Rickford (1998: 189) concludes:

The very fact that copula absence is widespread both in AAVE and in

mesolectal creoles, but not in white Englishes outside of the American

South (where it can be argued that whites adopted the speech patterns

of blacks) strongly suggests that at least some of the predecessors of

modern AAVE arose from a restructuring process similar to that

which produced the English-based creoles.

Apart from the copula absence, Sutcliffe (2001) identified the occurrence of a number of other

creole-like items in the recordings of former slaves. Some of these items include the use of

genderless third person singular pronouns (he for she), serial verb-like collocations (quit fall),

absence of verbal past inflection markers (deletion of ed) and postnominal dem as an

associative plural marker (Sutcliffe 2001: 130-133). In particular, the "genderless third person

singular pronouns and dem associative plural markers are among the most typical or core

features that distinguish anglophone Atlantic creoles" (131).

Some of these creole features have been retained, as for instance postnominal dem or the

absence of the copula, while others have been lost, which is why Sutcliffe (2001) and other

linguists argue that AAVE falls on a creole continuum with Gullah functioning as the basilect

and Standard English as the acrolect. According to this stance, AAVE formed as a mesolect

variety in the nineteenth century outside of the Gullah area and has since then steadily

converged to Standard English.

SUMMARY

In sum, Gullah, a creole spoken in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, was able to form due

to the favorable sociohistorical conditions, since blacks strongly outnumbered whites and

were therefore in the position to build their own community, which gave rise to their own

language. Although the social setup in the rest of the American colonies did not favor the

formation of a creole at first glance, creolists argue that due to deep-rooted structural features

that cannot be traced back to white vernaculars, with the absence of the copula being the

single strongest piece of evidence, AAVE must have descended from a Gullah-like creole

itself. Furthermore, the decreolization process observed in Caribbean creoles and in Gullah

resembles AAVE patterns, pointing to a similar history of origin. However, since African

Americans located outside of the Gullah-speaking areas were largely outnumbered by whites,

these demographics speak strongly against the formation of a creole. Due to these unfavorable

conditions, some linguists have taken a different approach in explaining the origins of AAVE.

2.2 The Anglicist Approach

Poplack (2000) and Mufwene (2000) both argue against the creole origin hypothesis and

rather highlight the importance of English as the target language in the formation of AAVE.

Instead of having descended from a creole that is converging to the lexifier, proponents of the

Anglicist approach argue that enslaved African Americans acquired English regional dialects

from whites, especially from overseers, with interferences from substratum languages due to

imperfect second language learning. Nevertheless, the grammatical core is essentially

identical to white vernacular English and most differences are fairly recent developments as

opposed to remnants of an antecedent creole (Bailey 2001: 54).

SOCIOECONOMICSETUP

The main argument for this stance is the socioeconomic history of Early AAVE, which did

not favor the formation of a creole, as the black population was greatly outnumbered by

whites outside of Gullah-speaking areas. Instead, a new vernacular emerged by restructuring,

meaning that "materials and principles selected from extant systems are re-articulated into a

new system, in which they need not be integrated in the same ways as in the earlier one(s)"

(Mufwene 2000: 234). This, however, did not occur up onto the point of forming a fully-

fledged creole.

The hostile learning environment and the dense population of Africans with similar cultural

backgrounds led to the formation of Gullah, as Africans had the possibility to create their own

community, while maintaining and developing their own culture and language. Contact with

whites was most likely sporadic and kept to a minimum (Holloway & Vass: xxv). However,

the social setup for the rest of the US was quite different. Africans were scattered and

integrated within a European majority, so that communication with whites happened daily and

not just occasionally. Due to this close contact, Africans were more motivated to speak and

assimilate to the vernacular of their surroundings, since they did not have a strong community

of their own (Mufwene 2000: 235, 237).

Furthermore, Mufwene (2000: 242) argues, contrary to Rickford (1998), that it is highly

unlikely that AAVE formed out of already existing creoles brought to enslaved people from

the Caribbean, as "Virginia imported only one-tenth of its slaves, and South Carolina only

one-seventh (less than 15%) from the Caribbean in the eighteenth century". He therefore

emphasizes the substrate influences of African languages on the one hand; however, on the

other, he stresses the importance of neither neglecting nor downplaying the importance of

colonial English as the target language. AAVE derived from white English with only slight

differences due to second language imperfections. Many of the structural differences between

AAVE and white vernaculars found today are more likely to be recent developments of the

nineteenth and twentieth century due to racial segregation.

STRUCTURALSIMILARITIESWITHENGLISH

Due to these social circumstances that prevented the formation of a creole, the grammatical

core of AAVE is argued to have derived from earlier English models. Poplack (2000)

collected a number of linguistic essays that highlight the structural influence of English on

AAVE and argues against creolists in the book titled "The English History of African

American English".

Walker (2000: 38), for example, criticizes Holm's (1984) claim that the zero copula stems

from Yoruba, as "there is no one-to-one correspondence between copula categories in

Yoruba, EBC's [English-based creoles], and/or AAVE". Since environments that favor

contraction disfavor deletion of the copula he concludes that the zero copula is not a legacy of

African languages, but rather that it was an innovation in Early AAVE to reduce "prosodic

complexity in contexts where contraction is disfavored" (61). He further rejects the idea that

AAVE falls on a creole continuum, since the grammatical constraints that favor the deletion

of the copula have changed in a way that resembles neither Standard English nor any

basilectal creole variety but rather constitutes a unique, recent innovation (47).

This falls in line with Bailey and Maynor's (1985: 206) observation regarding the present

tense use of be in contemporary Texan AAVE. Since is is as common as are in plural and

second person singular environments in AAVE and substantial variation was found in the

plural and second singular marking of fifteenth century English, they conclude that "these

paradigmatic relations suggest the influence of the English superstratum rather than the

African substratum" (Bailey and Maynor 1985: 206). Due to this peculiar distribution of

conjugated verb forms, they argue that the general lack of subject-verb agreement in AAVE,

is due to the influence of older varieties of English. Consequently, both the copula as well as

the auxiliary use of be points towards an English as opposed to a creole origin.

In Early AAVE the plural s marker was rarely used, in particular if a numeral or any other

indicator for plurality was present or if the plural-s would result in a consonant cluster.

However, in modern AAVE, the plural s is far more common and has been interpreted by

creolists as a sign for decreolization. Poplack et al. (2000: 98) noted on the other hand that

zero plural used to be part of older English varieties and therefore is not undoubtedly a sign

for decreolization but possibly for linguistic retention. White vernaculars have omitted this

feature while AAVE retained it. After comparing Early AAVE with Nigerian Pidgin English

and English vernaculars spoken in the colonial US, Poplack et al. (2000: 99) concluded that

although Nigerian Pidgin English and Early AAVE share the same plural markers the

conditioning factors for their occurrence differ substantially. Animacy is the strongest

conditioning factor in the plural marking system of Nigerian Pidgin English. This semantic

constraint is a clear sign of substratal influence, as neither Standard (Nigerian) English nor

AAVE make this distinction, yet Igbo, the first language of the Nigerian Pidgin speakers

interviewed, does (97). On the other hand, Early AAVE showed to favor the zero plural

marker in order to avoid consonant clusters or redundancy, when the context is unambiguous

(99). Since the zero plural entity in older English varieties behaved in a similar manner and

the plural-marking patterns in Early AAVE "are consistent with those attested in the

development of contemporary English", the underlying grammatical structures in AAVE are

remnants of early white vernaculars and not the result of (de)creolization (98).

Another source of evidence for its English-based underlying grammar structure is the

negation pattern found in AAVE. De Bose (1994) states that the use of ain't in AAVE

functions as a universal preverbal negator, which is tense- and aspect-neutral and would attest

for the creole origin hypothesis. However, Howe & Walker (2000) argue that the opposite is

the case. The three sources of data they used for analyzing Early AAVE, African Nova

Scotian English, Samaná English and ex-slave recordings, all showed a clear preference of

didn't over ain't in past contexts (Howe & Walker 2000: 119). On the contrary, the

ain't/didn't variation found in present-day AAVE is a rather recent development as it is more

frequently used by younger generations and therefore lends support to the divergence

hypothesis, which will be discussed later in further detail (120). Furthermore, the types of

negative concord found in AAVE show more similarity to nonstandard white vernaculars than

to English-based creoles (132). Negative postposing, meaning "preverbal negation can be

omitted if the VP contains a negative word, as in I have nowhere to go" is found both in

AAVE and Standard English and is therefore of unambiguously English origin (132 f.).

However, negative postposing is generally absent in English-lexified creoles. Similarly,

negative inversion, meaning that the negative finite auxiliary switches positions with the

subject, as in "Won't nobody catch us", can be found in AAVE and SWV, however, not in

Caribbean creoles (134). On the basis of these findings, Howe and Walker (2000: 136) come

to following conclusion:

The key result of our comparison is the discovery that the negation

system of Early AAE displays no distinct or unambiguous creole

behavior. This discovery suggests that, at least as far as negation is

concerned, early African Americans simply learned and spoke the

colonial English they were exposed to, apparently without

approximation or creolization.

SUMMARY

In sum, proponents of the Anglicist approach argue that the grammatical core is essentially

English based and that deviations from Standard English are either fairly recent developments

or retentions from older varieties of English. The zero copula is said to have been a prosodic

innovation instead of a creole legacy. Similarly, plural marking and negation patterns of Early

AAVE match early English varieties, but not English-based creoles, and consequently attest

for an underlying English grammar system. Deviations that cannot be traced back to English

ancestors are said to be recent innovations and are more proof for the divergence than the

creole origin hypothesis.

However, neither side, creolist nor Anglicist, denies the impact that both English and

substrate languages had on modern-day AAVE. It is plausible that even though for the most

part African Americans would have tried to assimilate to white speech, some creole elements

and features from substratum languages emerged and became an integral part of AAVE

(Bailey 2001: 58). As Kautzsch (2002: 6) fittingly summarizes:

The overall picture that emerges is that it is very likely that in earlier

days AAE was much more heterogeneous than its relatively

homogenous appearance today would have us assume; and an

integrative approach that takes into account both sides is mot [sic!]

likely to deliver the most accurate assessment of the status and the

evolution of AAE.

3 Linguistic and Sociohistorical Developments after the Civil War

Although its origins are disputed, it can be noted that outside of the Gullah speaking areas,

AAVE was a very heterogeneous variety due to the many different influences that factored

into its formation (Kautzsch 2002: 6). In the nineteenth century and after the Civil War, which

ended slavery, it started to stabilize as a variety and assimilate to especially SWV, due to

close inter-ethnic contact. In the beginning of the twentieth century, this assimilation process

was reversed as African Americans started to leave the rural South for primarily northern

cities, resulting in the majority of the black population living in inner cities up to this day.

This period is known as the "Great Migration" and resulted in de facto segregation of the

black population, which has had both socioeconomic, as well as linguistic repercussions. In

order to understand how this development influenced linguistic features of AAVE and SWV,

first, the sociohistorical condition of each time period will be outlined in further detail,

followed by a diachronic comparison of phonological and morphosyntactic features found in

both varieties.

3.1 Farm Tenancy and Linguistic Convergence

Georgia officially banned slavery in 1734, but reinstated it shortly after due to its

profitableness (Klein 2013: 139). Similarly, the foreign slave trade was banned in the US in

1808, however, clandestine slave trade went on, resulting in a staggering number of 240,000

newly imported slaves between 1810 and 1860 (Bailey 2001: 63). Nevertheless, in the

beginning of the nineteenth century the majority of the slave population did not grow by new

arrivals but by birth. Although Gullah was already identifiable as a variety by 1750, it was not

until this stark increase of native speakers that both Gullah and AAVE started to stabilize

(Klein 2013: 141; Mufwene 2000: 246).

Another important sociohistorical factor that contributed not only to the homogeneity of

AAVE as an identifiable variety but also impacted its relation to white vernaculars was the

expansion of the cotton industry and farm tenancy. Together with the introduction of short-

staple cotton, the demand for cheap labor grew rapidly, especially within the interior South

(Mufwene 2000: 247). Therefore approximately one million slaves were relocated from the

East Coast to the cotton lands and were taken westwards from three different sources: 1) small

plantations from the Upper South 2) from large plantations in the Gullah-speaking region 3)

from the Caribbean and Africa. The majority of the relocated enslaved people came from

small plantations in the Upper South and spoke varieties of English close to the local white

vernaculars. As the vast majority of these relocated slaves spoke some form of English, either

as a creole or vernacular variety, it is to be expected that a distinct variety of English formed

with clear creole and African imprints (Bailey 2001: 60). Furthermore, as the majority of

people originated from regions where "relatively stable AAE vernaculars" had developed,

these varieties were brought to the new cotton plantations, where they stabilized further. This

assumption is also consistent with literary evidence of the time period (Mufwene 2000: 247).

The new cotton plantations were smaller than the former tobacco plantations and although

various forms of discrimination were in place, racial segregation was not implemented until

the end of the century. Due to these conditions, inter-ethnic contact between whites and

blacks occurred more frequently.

Not only the relocation onto smaller plantations but also the implementation of farm tenancy

would increase the contact that whites and blacks shared amongst each other. After the Civil

War, farm tenancy replaced slavery as a means of meeting the large labor demands of the

cotton industry (Bailey 2001: 64 f.). At first, the majority of tenants were African Americans,

but after 1880, Southern whites started to be drawn into tenancy as well after they were

unable to pay off their loans to northern banks. Since northern banks had the right to

determine the amount of farm land devoted to cotton, both the industry as well as tenancy

expanded, resulting in black and white workers living side by side on large cotton plantations.

Consequently, Bailey (2001: 66) summarizes:

The spread of tenancy to Whites and the spatial reorganization of the

plantation created new contexts for Black-White speech relationships

throughout the South, contexts which allowed for interaction among

African Americans and Whites that was probably more widespread

than before the Civil War and that took place among people who were

closer to being socioeconomic equals [...] Hence, we might expect

their vernaculars to have much in common and as indicated below,

they do share many features that emerged during the late 19

and

early 20

centuries.

As a consequence of this close contact between blacks and whites, who were "closer to being

socioeconomic equals" than ever before, SWV and AAVE share some phonological

similarities that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.

Table 2: Phonological Features of Contemporary AAVE and SWV

Loss of /r/ after consonants

(after // & in unstressed syllables)

throw [ou];

professor [pfs]

Front stressing of initial syllables

police [`poulis]

Glide reduction of:

/ai/ before voiced obstruents and finally

/i/ befor /l/

tied [t:d]

oil [l]

Merger of:

// & // before nasals

/r/ & /or/

pen [pn]

morning [monn]

Source: adapted from Bailey (2001: 75 f.) and Bailey & Thomas (1998: 89)

The features shown in Table 2 are phonological features that AAVE and SWV share up to this

day. Both the glide reductions of /ai/ and /i/, as well as the //-// and /r/-/or/ mergers

appeared rarely or not at all in recordings of AAVE and SWV prior to the last quarter of the

nineteenth century (Bailey & Thomas 1998: 90). Therefore, recent research suggests that

these features, either emerged or became widespread during the last quarter of the nineteenth

century and first quarter of the twentieth century, although it is not clear from which

vernacular they originated (Bailey 2001: 74; Bailey & Thomas 1998: 91). Some of these

phonological features that were clearly established by the middle of the nineteenth century in

both vernaculars have been retained only by AAVE. SWV lost these features either partially

or completely, so that they now only occur in old-fashioned speech.

Table 3: Phonological Features of AAVE and old-fashioned SWV

Metathesis of final /s/ + stop

ask [æks]

Vocalization of stressed syllabic /r/

bird [bd]

Vocalization of unstressed syllabic /r/

never [nv]

Vocalization of postvocalic /r/

four [fou], [fo]

Vocalization or loss of intersyllabic /r/

hurry [hi]

Source: adapted from Bailey (2001: 76)

Table 3 shows features that emerged during this period of close inter-ethnic contact, but are in

the process of being omitted, as today they are only part of older SWV speech. However, they

still appear in the speech of African Americans.

As can be seen in Table 3, r-lessness is a phonological feature of both vernaculars, yet it is

more common in AAVE than in contemporary SWV. R-lessness in SWV occurs more

frequently in old-fashioned, upper-class white speech than in contemporary working-class

speech (Feagin 1997: 125). Therefore, contrary to the North, non-rhoticity is seen as a

prestige marker in the South. Due to its prestigious status, r-lessness was explained to have

come as a result of the extended contact that the South had with the British. It was assumed

that the prestigious Standard British pronunciation of South-Western England was adopted by

the Southern upper-class (127). Feagin (1997: 130) however argues against this stance and

states that instead it is due to the influence of African Americans that it became a widespread

linguistic feature in the South. It is true that the South did share extensive contact with

England, sending their children off to English boarding schools and such. However, this

explanation fails to account for why r-lessness extended westwards in the South, while it did

not do so in New England and New York (127). Looking at the expansion of the Cotton

Kingdom and the geographical distribution of r-lessness, it shows clear ties to plantation

speech. AAVE was noted to have been r-less from an early stage on and it was commonly

perceived as a distinguishing factor for black speech. Therefore, r-lessness in the South is the

result of African American influence.

Another argument in favor of this notion is the evidence for substratum influence. This

phonological feature is not exclusive to AAVE, but rather very common in Gullah and other

creoles that stem from West African substrate languages. Since the major West-African

language groups favor coda-less syllable structure, eliminating tautosyllabic postvocalic "r"

became a prominent feature in these creole varieties (Feagin 1997: 129). Consequently, on the

basis of Uncle Remus stories and other literary evidence, it was shown that r-lessness was

also an integral part of AAVE and a distinguishing feature between black and white

vernaculars. House servants influenced the speech of the planation owners' children who took

over r-lessness, which later on spread westwards, together with the extension of the cotton

plantations (Feagin 1997: 126-128). Evidence for this is in the parents' fear of their children

being influenced by the speech of their servants, which is one of the reasons why sending off

their children to boarding schools in England was quite popular (126). Some confederates

even openly attributed their own pronunciation of "pooah" for poor or "mattuh" for matter to

African-American influence (126 f.). It is highly unlikely that whites of the time would admit

that African Americans had influenced their speech, if r-lessness could have come from the

more prestigious Standard British variety. Furthermore, this same phenomenon that black had

on white speech was not only noted in English, but in Brazilian Portuguese and Caribbean

Spanish, as well (130). Consequently, r-lessness was firmly established among the middle and

upper classes of the Deep South by 1860 due to the influence of AAVE (126).

However, even in the nineteenth century some differences in the development of phonological

features were reported. Known as the Southern Shift, white speech fronted a number of

vowels, while they remained back in AAVE. This change in vowel space affected mainly

SWV and is one of the main phonological differences between the vernaculars that gradually

expanded over time (Bailey 2001: 78-80). Nevertheless, the lengthening and glidening of

vowels, commonly referred to as the Southern Drawl, and the wider pitch range of SWV

compared to Northern dialects are additional examples of African American linguistic

influence (Feagin 1997). This shows that SWV and AAVE share a number of phonological

similarities, which emerged as a result of close inter-ethnic contact and reciprocal influence.

AAVE and SWV do not only share phonological features but also some morphosyntactic

similarities. For instance, AAVE and SWV share the same negative constructions (Howe &

Walker 2000). The use of ain't for negative be in all person/number environments is a

common feature both in AAVE as well as in SWV. It is interesting to note though that older

white speakers used ain't more frequently than younger generations, while the exact opposite

tendency was reported for African Americans (Maynor 1997). This shows once again that

AAVE and SWVE used to be more similar in the past than today. Ain't however is a verb

form which is found in many different varieties of English. There are however some negative

constructions that are found exclusively in AAVE and SWV. One of these constructions is

clause-external negative concord, i.e. I wasn't sure that nothing wasn't gonna come up at all

(Wolfram & Christian 1976: 113 as quoted in Howe& Walker 2000: 130).

This phenomenon

of negative concord to verbs outside the main clause was documented for both AAVE as well

as for Appalachian English. It is however part of neither Standard English nor English-.based

creoles (Howe & Walker 2000: 130). Negative inversion, often combined with negative

concord, i.e. Didn't nobody get hurt or nothin', is another feature that AAVE shares with

SWV, like Appalachian and Ozark English, but neither with English-based creoles nor

Standard English (Christian et al. 1988: 169 as quoted in Howe & Walker 2000: 135).

Although clause-external negative concord as well as negative inversion occurs relatively

seldom in both AAVE and SWVE, they are unique features that do not occur at all in any

other nearby variety. This shows that they are a product of linguistic assimilation due to

former close inter-ethnic contact and share the same history of origin.

To summarize, as a consequence of the expansion of the cotton industry in the interior South,

blacks were relocated onto smaller plantations westwards, where the majority spoke some

form of English. Furthermore, as more and more enslaved people were born on US-American

soil and were therefore native speakers of English, AAVE and Gullah stabilized as varieties in

the beginning of the nineteenth century. The speech of African Americans influenced SWV

from the start, especially in intimate contexts between house servants and children. However

the majority of linguistic similarities between SWV and AAVE emerged in the second half of

the nineteenth century, in which whites and blacks shared close contact with each other due to

the introduction of farm tenancy. After slavery was abolished, farm tenancy took over, which

created an environment, in which blacks and whites were able to interact more as

socioeconomic equals. Since racial segregation was not implemented until the end of the

century, this close inter-ethnic contact fostered a number of linguistic assimilations, mainly

phonetic. Vowel patterns and r-lessness are one of the main similarities that these varieties

share, many of which emerged or became widespread in this period of time. However, some

of these features that are still common in AAVE are only common in old-fashioned SWV.

These patterns show that AAVE and SWV once used to be more similar than they are today

and that since the beginning of the twentieth century these two varieties have been diverging

from each other. The main contributing factor to this development has been racial segregation.

3.2 The Great Migration and Urbanization

The Great Migration started in the beginning of the twentieth century, peaked shortly after

WWII and ended in the 1970s. It is one of the most significant demographic events in the

history of the United States. In this time period, a large portion of the African American

population of the South emigrated to northern cities, where highly segregated inner-city

neighborhoods formed. As had been explained previously, farm tenancy brought the white

and black community closer together. However, Jim Crow laws, racial violence and economic

disadvantages in the South led African Americans to leave their hometowns and settle in

northern cities. In the North, a different kind of institutionalized racism, especially in the form

of residential policies, manifested itself. This led to the majority of the black population living

in impoverished, inner-city neighborhoods, while the white population left the city and

formed middle-class suburbs in the outskirts. This development had a strong impact not only

on the socioeconomic conditions of the African American community, but also on the

structures of AAVE and its relationship to white vernaculars, due to limited inter-ethnic

contact.

The close contact between whites and blacks brought about by farm tenancy did not last very

long but rather new rigid forms of racial segregation provided the first socioeconomic context

for linguistic divergence after 200 years of common development (Mufwene 2000: 248).

After the Civil War the economic situation improved very little for blacks. Farm tenancy left

most African American farmers landless and gave them little opportunity to advance

economically (Tolnay 2003: 214). Jim Crow Laws were introduced in 1877, which restricted

African American's access to jobs and welfare entitlements, as well as segregated

neighborhoods and public facilities (Mufwene 2000: 248). Occupational segregation gave

African Americans little opportunity to pursue any other professions besides unskilled jobs

for men and domestic service for women (Tolnay 2003: 214). Apart from these economic

factors, a number of social factors, like inferior educational opportunities, personal freedom

restrictions, political disenfranchisement and racial violence, factored into African

American's decision to leave the South.

Out of these discriminatory circumstances, a first Black Exodus, in which 20,000 African

Americans moved to Kansas, arose in 1879 (Mufwene 2000: 250). It was not, however, until

after World War I, when the US imposed stricter immigration laws, that emigrating to the

north presented itself as a feasible alternative for African Americans (Tolnay 2003: 215). The

demand for cheap labor in the North was previously met by immigrants from southern and

eastern Europe, yet, due to the new immigration policy, American corporations needed an

alternative. Therefore, employers situated in and around large metropolitan areas of the North

started to hire black (and white) workers from the South. Most migrants moved from the rural

South to inner cities, forming large, predominantly black neighborhoods. Consequently, "by

1970, 47% of the African American population lived outside the South and 77% lived in

cities. In fact, in 1970, 34% of African Americans lived in just seven major urban areas

New York, Chicago, Detroit Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Baltimore"

(Bailey 2001: 66). Not only did the demographic situation change dramatically for the African

American community, but also for the cities themselves, as prior to this immigration wave

there had only been a small black community. In Chicago, for example, the city's black

population increased from 2.0% to 32.7% between 1910 and 1970 (U.S. Bureau of the Census

1913,1973 as quoted by Tolnay 2003: 221).

This geographical concentration of African Americans is not only due to the location of large

companies, but also due to social factors. On the one hand, African Americans were attracted

to areas, where a strong African American community had already been established. This in

turn would strengthen the community further and attract new migrants, so the process repeats

itself (Tolnay 2003: 217). On the other hand, since the black population grew so rapidly, the

white population reacted with a number of racist measures that would expand segregation and

limit social mobility for the black population (221).

In order to understand this hostile development in the relationships between the white and

black community better, it is noteworthy to briefly revisit Blalock's (1960) Power Threat

Hypothesis. This hypothesis states that when a racial minority is minuscule, the dominant

racial group does not act as a group and does not form elaborate ideological frameworks to

justify discriminatory behavior. This is because the minority group is not perceived as a threat

and racist discrimination is implemented in a subtle manner. However, once the racial

minority grows to a considerable size, "[o]rganizational effectiveness must be improved if the

power advantage is to be sustained" (Blalock 1960: 58).

This dividing dynamic is exactly what happened in northern cities as a response to the Great

Migration. Targeted violence, restrictive covenants, redlining, and racial steering limited the

residential options for African Americans and pushed them towards the least desirable

neighborhoods of the city, where primarily other blacks resided (Tolnay 2003: 219, 221).

Consequently, impoverished, inner-city neighborhoods are where the majority of the black

population ended up in. The white population however started to leave the city, accelerating

and establishing residential segregation further. After World War II, the Affordable Housing

Act gave white soldiers the possibility to move outside of the city and form predominantly

white suburbs (Tolnay 2003: 222). As African Americans did not have the same easy access

to affordable mortgages, the black community was confined to the economically deteriorating

inner city. Consequently, following the Great Migration, northern cities ended up being more

racially segregated than before, limiting inter-ethnic contact.

This de facto segregation persists up onto this day and has had drastic, negative consequences

on the socioeconomic situation of the black community, including educational, professional,

social and economic discrimination. Furthermore, Labov and Harris (1986) and other linguists

argue that due to this racial segregation and in line with the Power Threat Model white

vernaculars and AAVE are not assimilating but are rather moving away from each other. This

stance is commonly referred to as the divergence hypothesis and will be the main subject of

the next chapter. To understand the linguistic changes AAVE is undergoing currently, it is

however important to keep in mind the sociohistorical context.

4 Contemporary Structural Developments

Currently, the twenty largest metropolitan areas show a high concentration of the black

population. The U.S. Census of 2010 (Rastogi et al. 2011: 17) reports that "[t]he proportion of

the non-Hispanic Black alone population living inside the largest principal city surpassed 40

percent in all of the northeastern metro areas shown" and non-Hispanic blacks were more

likely than other races to live in metropolitan areas. This racial divide in housing, jobs and

education brought about a number of consequences both of economic, social as well as of

linguistic nature.

Following the creolist viewpoint, prior to the study of Labov and Harris (1986), it was

assumed that AAVE would undergo further decreolization and steadily assimilate to Standard

English. However, Labov and Harris (1986: 2) studied the English of black Philadelphians

and came to following conclusion:

The English spoken by black Philadelphians is quite distinct from that

of whites, and the differences appear to us to be increasing. There is a

close parallel between residential segregation and linguistic

segregation, and between residential language differences and

educational failure.

The question, whether or not AAVE was in fact becoming more and more different from

Standard English, was quickly picked up by the media and sparked a large debate amongst

linguists and educators alike (Wolfram & Thomas 2002: 29). Both the linguistic as well as the

social implications that this observation entails, were too immense to be ignored.

This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the divergence hypothesis. It states that contrary

to prior decreolization assumptions AAVE and Standard English are not becoming more

similar but that they are diverging from each other. To assess this stance, first developments

found in white vernaculars that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century will

be discussed and compared to AAVE. Then, recent linguistic innovations made by AAVE

speakers during the same time period will be examined. It is important to take into account the

linguistic evolution of both varieties to understand whereto they are headed and their relation

between each other. Since the divergence hypothesis is not generally accepted by all

sociolinguists of the field, counterarguments that critique the formerly mentioned studies will

be presented at the end.

However, both the social as well as the linguistic relationship between ethnic groups are more

complex and have been changing over the past decade. Recent census data shows that both

the suburbs as well as the inner cities are becoming more diverse. Hispanics have

outnumbered blacks in most American cities, while "[m]inorities represent 35 percent of

suburban residents, similar to their share of overall U.S. population" (Frey 2011: 1). Taking

into account this new positive development in race relations, the relationship between white

and black vernaculars in contact-situations will be analyzed lastly.

4.1 The Divergence Hypothesis

4.1.1InnovationsandDevelopmentsinWhiteVernaculars

Put simply, the divergence hypothesis states that white vernaculars are becoming more diverse

while black vernaculars are becoming structurally more and more similar to each other. This

in turn implies that AAVE is becoming a strong nation-wide variety that is deviating from

regional variation found in particular in white vernaculars. It furthermore presupposes that

white and black vernaculars were more similar during the nineteenth century due to the

working conditions that brought whites and blacks in closer contact to each other. As racial

segregation has increased since the end of the nineteenth century, so has linguistic divergence.

It is important to note here, that this hypothesis does not suppose that the overall political and

social condition was better for blacks before. Linguistic assimilation does not automatically

indicate social equality (Bailey & Maynor 1989: 15). Yet, it does reveal the consequences of

residential segregation on language systems.

White vernaculars underwent linguistic change, mainly phonological, that showed divergence

from neighboring white vernaculars. At the same time, local African Americans did not

participate in many of these changes, in particular in highly segregated cities in the North.

Consequently, it can be said that white vernaculars are diverging from AAVE, as well as from

each other. In the South, however, the situation is more complex, as SWV share a different

relationship with AAVE than Northern White Vernaculars (NWV) do. Therefore, linguistic

divergent tendencies in the North will be discussed first, followed by changes in the speech of

white Southerners.

PHILADELPHIANVOWELCHANGE

The original study that sparked this heated debate on whether or not AAVE is diverging from

Standard English was performed in Philadelphia during the 1980s by Labov (2014). Labov

(2014) found that starting from the mid-twentieth century, a vowel change occurred in the

speech of white Philadelphians, in which black Philadelphians did not partake. Some of the

characteristics investigated by Labov (2014: 529) were:

1. The backing of /ahr/ in car, part, etc.

2. The raising and fronting of /ae:/ in man, hand, etc.

3. The fronting of /uw/and /ow/ in too, moved, gog, and code.

4. The raising and fronting of /aw/ in house, down, etc. from [au] to to [e']

5. The raising and backing of /ay/ before voiceless consonants in fight, like, etc. from [ai]

to a back central nucleus

6. The raising of /ey/ in checked syllables in made, lake, etc., from [e

] to [e^

]

7. The lowering of the short vowels /i/, /e/, and /ae/.

On the basis of telephone surveys, Labov (2014: 531) found that the upper classes participated

in this sound change more than the lower classes did. This shows that in particular the more

recent innovations, characteristics 4-7, are overt prestige markers, as these changes were

mainly driven by the classes with the highest social prestige. Furthermore, Labov (2001: 266)

states as a general linguistic principle that "women show a lower rate of stigmatized variants

and a higher rate of prestige variants than men:" As women were more prone than men to

partake in this vowel change, this gives further proof that the variants in question are of overt

prestige (Labov 2014: 531).

Philadelphia underwent similar sound pattern changes in the past due to ethnic diversification.

Immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ukraine and Jews were the driving force behind sound

change in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which would make the Philadelphia

accent distinct from dialects of nearby cities like Boston and New York (Labov 2014: 534). In

the 1980s, the white community took these tendencies further. With the small exception of

Italians slightly lagging behind other ethnic groups in the fronting of /uw/ and /ow/, Labov

(2001: 258) showed that all white Philadelphians participated in the aforementioned vowel

change. This change occurred regardless of ethnicity but not regardless of race. Labov (2014)

explains this innovation due to the influx of the black population and the white community's

need to fortify its own racial identity.

The renewed emphasis on local identification is accompanied by a

strenuous reassertion of local rights and privileges by the ethnic

groups who hold them, and a continued resistance to the pressure

from black citizens of Philadelphia for their share of the jobs,

housing, and political priorities in the city. The division of the city into

two distinct communities by political educational and economic

barriers is mirrored by the increasing divergence of the white and

black dialects.

(Labov 2014: 534)

Once again, taking into account Blalock's (1960) Power Threat Model described earlier, with

the influx of a racial minority group, the dominant racial group resorts to measures that

reassert their social position. Power dynamics can be established through segregation not only

on a conscious, political level, but also on an unconscious, linguistic level.

To assess this bold statement it is noteworthy to look at who is the driving force behind the

change and what its motivation could be, when considering sociolinguistic reception. Labov

(2014) and Labov and Harris (1986: 18) showed that the social origins of these changes in the

local white Philadelphian community, as they are driven by the people with the highest

prestige, "serve as symbolic claims to local rights and privileges: to jobs, housing, special

ordinances and exceptions that form the background of local business and local social life".

Black Philadelphians did not participate in this innovative vowel change. This becomes

apparent in particular when looking at the diphthong /aw/, which younger, white

Philadelphians front. Black speakers do not front this diphthong, yet their pronunciation does

not resemble any of the older variables found in Philadelphia either. In contrast, the nucleus in

diphthongs in out, doubt, and south of Black speakers begins back of center, /:/, and moves

up towards the vowel /u:/. This pronunciation is unlike any white Philadelphian sound, old or

new (Labov and Harris 1986: 18).

This variable was further examined by Labov and Harris (1986) with respect to its racial

connotation. The phrase No doubt about it and I've got to get out of the house was used to see

if the alteration of the vowel /aw/ would influence the listener's assumption of the speaker's

race. The "white stimulus" was perceived as "sounding more white" by the majority of blacks

(60%), whites (83%) and Latinos (53%) (Labov 1986: 19). This observation further asserts

that the vowel change observed in the speech of white Philadelphians is an assertion of racial

identity.

SOUTHERNVOWELSHIFT

However, the situation in the South of the US is quite different. The South has undergone a

Southern Vowel Shift, with two main changes: 1) the Back Shift, in which the back vowels

are shifted towards the front and 2) the Front Shift, in which tense and lax front vowels

exchange phonological position "with the nuclei of the tense vowels becoming lower and

more central, while those of the lax vowels are rising and becoming more forward" (Feagin

1986: 83). Feagin (1986: 94) examined the speech of white Alabamans and concluded that the

shift started in rural areas and is being completed by younger members of the working class in

cities across the South. Fridland (2003) found that, contrary to assumptions made by Feagin

(1986: 91), African American Memphians have been affected by the Southern Vowel Shift,

although to slightly different degrees. Younger white speakers, women and middle class

Memphians show more signs of back vowel fronting, than older speakers do, while African

Americans show no fronting of /ow/ at all (Fridland 2003: 7, 19). Concerning the Front Shift,

however, speakers over 40, showed very similar language change patterns with only minor,

idiosyncratic differences (9-11). Similarly, younger speakers were affected by the front shift

as well. When comparing this parallel development to the divergent tendency in the North, the

question arises why language change appears to behave differently in the South.

One might assume that since blacks have historically been in the South longer, that they share

more contact with the white population and are therefore more likely to be influenced by

linguistic change. Yet, first of all, Memphis is a highly segregated city with especially a

highly segregated educational system similar to Philadelphia. Secondly, Fridland (2003: 19)

came to the surprising result that "the stronger the speaker's ties within the African American

community, the more the front shift appears to have affected his or her system". Stronger ties

to the white community, however, did not push linguistic change, in particular with regards to

the Back Shift (19). In other words, more contact amongst African Americans promoted

convergence to the vowel shift of SWV.

This counterintuitive development is due to the close history as well as to their similar

sociolinguistic status that SWV and AAVE share, as they are both non-standard, stigmatized

varieties. As has been mentioned previously, due to centuries of common history, AAVE and

SWV share many structural similarities. One of these features is for instance the merger of //

and //, in words like pen which are pronounced like pin. This feature is commonly associated

with black speech in the North. It is however racially neutral in the South (Edwards 1992). A

number of studies showed that African American vernaculars in northern cities either retained

or even adopted features of SWV and shows therefore a far more amiable relationship to

Southern white speakers (Anderson 2002; Edwards 1992).

In the South, including Memphis, the distinction between white and black vernaculars is made

by morphosyntactic and other phonological features, yet not by the aforementioned vowels

affected by the recent shift (Fridland 2003: 21). In Philadelphia, on the other hand, the

different vowels have a clear racial connotation (Labov 1986). Therefore, the vowel shift of

white Philadelphians serves to fortify racial identity, while the Southern vowel shift found in

Memphis enhances a local identity (Labov 2014; Fridland 2003).

Furthermore, both SWV as well as AAVE show no signs of overt prestige, while the vowel

change by the northern middle-class is closer to the prestigious standard variety used in

official settings (Fridland 2003: 22; Labov 2001). Therefore, the power dynamics are not as

uneven between SWV and AAVE as they are between NWV and AAVE. Consequently, this

situation creates more possibility for a regional identity to be formed on the basis of a shared

dialect. The Southern vowel shift therefore crosses over more freely through different classes

and ethnicities, since it addresses a different dimension of identity.

Wolfram & Thomas (2002) found a similar accommodation process in Hyde County. White

speakers started dropping distinct regional variants of the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ in favor of

the more general pronunciation found throughout the South, while retaining the regionally

marked fronted /o/. African Americans in Hyde County also started omitting the regional

variants, but converged to the nation-wide AAVE instead of general SWV pronunciation.

However, they retained the /o/ variant just like the white speakers did. Wolfram & Thomas

(2002: 123) explain this phenomenon with the lack of racial connotation of the /o/ variant.

This would once again fall in line with the observation that African Americans participate

more in linguistic changes that are not racially marked. This trend of incorporating SWV

phonological variants in AAVE speech can even be found in the North. Due to more equal

power dynamics and shared identity, Detroit AAVE speakers levelled to phonological

features unique to white Appalachian English (Anderson 2002). As this development is due

to recent inter-ethnic contact, it will be discussed in further detail under the chapter "Inter-

Ethnic Contact Situations".

RHOTICITY

African Americans and white Southerners both seem to be moving towards r-fullness,

although African Americans do so at a far slower rate and lesser extent than whites. This

movement towards rhoticity has started in SWV after World War II and is therefore a quite

recent development (Bailey & Thomas 1998). Nevertheless, it has been a quite drastic and

rapid development, as well, affecting the speech of all social classes. Also, it affects a large

number of lexical items, far more than the merger of // and // for instance does. Therefore,

this is a dramatic change in SWV, which fundamentally changes their phonology.

Table 4: Percentage of Constricted /r/ in all environments in AAVE and SWV in Texas

African Americans

Older

African Americans

Younger

Whites

Older

Whites

Younger

Source: adapted from Bailey & Thomas (1998: 91)

As can be seen in Table 4, younger white speakers have rapidly increased their use of

constricted /r/, pronouncing the /r/ five-times more often than their older counterparts (Bailey

& Thomas 1998: 91). This shows convergence to the more prestigious, North-American

Standard, which is generally rhotic. As Labov (2006) found, rhoticity is generally perceived

as a prestigious variant in the North. Although the opposite was the case in the South for a

long time, with extended contact between the North and the South the prestigious northern

variant spread (Feagin 1997).

R-lessness is a distinct feature of AAVE and younger African

Americans continue to be more r-less than older whites (Table 4). However, younger African

Americans in Texas show a slight increase in the vocalization of constricted /r/ and therefore

partially participate in the general sound change of the region. Considering the magnitude of

the change in SWV, it comes as no surprise that AAVE would be affected to some extent.

However, the effect is minimal.

Wolfram and Thomas (2002) even found the opposite to be the case, with AAVE speakers

moving increasingly towards non-rhoticity. In Hyde County, r-lessness was historically not

particularly wide spread compared to other SWV. In this region, whites are becoming more

and more rhotic as the rest of Southern whites, while African Americans are moving towards

r-lessness (Wolfram & Thomas 2002: 144). In this case, the two vernaculars are clearly

diverging from each other.

This reluctance or even rejection of participating in SWV's shift towards rhoticity can be

attributed to its close ties with racial identity. Since r-lessness is a variable that is generally

perceived as "black" and most likely even originated from African American speech, it comes

as no surprise that linguistic change affecting this variable could result in divergence between

black and white vernaculars (Feagin 1997). Bailey & Maynor (1989: 31) found that when

testing how the race of a person was perceived based on linguistic variables, a young white

boy was misidentified as black 42% of the time, the highest rate of misidentification, for

being partially r-less. In contrast to the //-// merger or the vowels affected by the Front Shift,

r-fullness bears a strong racial connotation. Considering the reluctance of AAVE speakers to

participate in the movement towards r-fullness, once again proves that changes that affect

linguistic variables that are closely linked to racial identity promote divergence between

AAVE and white vernaculars. However, if the innovation affects a variable that is racially

neutral, the structural development spreads across racial lines more freely, leading to

convergence.

MORPHOSYNTACTICCHANGES

In general, it seems that white vernaculars, both in the North as well as is in the South, have

not shown many morphosyntactic innovations within the past decades. In Hyde County

however, Wolfram & Thomas (2002) noted a trend among younger white speakers to

increasingly replace wasn't with weren't, i.e. I weren't there. Elderly whites in Hyde County

levelled to weren't only 34,6% of the time, compared to 77.3% of the younger speakers

(Wolfram & Thomas 2002: 74). As this variant is exclusive to the Hyde County dialect, it can

be said that with respect to this grammatical feature, regional variation is being amplified in

SWV.

This dramatic increase occurred, however, exclusively in the speech of the white population,

as the younger African Americans moved in the exact opposite direction, away from regional

diversification. While older white and black speakers used similar amounts of the weren't

variant, younger African Americans relinquished this regional variant. Instead, they

increasingly favored the nation-wide AAVE, and supra-regional SWV past tense marking

pattern of replacing were with was, i.e. We was here (Wolfram & Thomas 2002: 74, 76).

Bailey and Maynor (1985: 199 f.) found that is occurs in the plural and the second person

singular as often as are does and that are deletion occurs more frequently than is deletion in

the speech of Texan African Americans. Since the singular form is preferred in the present, it

is to be assumed that similar deletion and substitution rules hold true in the past as well. With

regards to the observations by Wolfram and Thomas (2002) in Hyde County, it can be seen

that African Americans are moving away from the local dialect and towards the general

AAVE form.

Therefore, two important observations can be made with respect to the weren't variant. First,

nonstandard phonological changes in SWV become part of AAVE more quickly than

nonstandard morphosyntactic changes do. Secondly, while white vernaculars are becoming

increasingly more diverse, emphasizing regional identities, African Americans are taking the

opposite direction. It seems that African Americans favor linguistic variants that are

connected to their racial over their regional identity.

SUMMARY

To sum up, most innovations and developments found in white vernaculars during the second

half of the twentieth century are mainly phonological. The Great Migration and the formation

of predominantly black neighborhoods in formerly predominantly white northern cities,

triggered the emergence of a vowel shift in the speech of (upper) middle-class white residents.

These new vowels in the North do not only fortify the local but also the racial identity.

Consequently, the African American population in these cities did not participate in these

vowel changes and therefore, the two vernaculars are diverging from each other. While white

vernaculars are becoming increasingly more diverse, AAVE speakers show a movement

towards a nation-wide uniform variety. However, when linguistic variants are not so strongly

connected to race, African Americans have shown to assimilate to the changes found in white

vernaculars, in particular when it comes to nonstandard phonological changes. Due to the

shared history and similar sociolinguistic status, this process can be observed in particular

with regards to SWV, even in northern cities, where SWV variants are preferred over

Northern White Vernaculars (NWV) variants.

4.1.2InnovationsandDevelopmentinAAVE

In contrast to white vernaculars, AAVE has shown a number of recent innovations in its

morphosyntactic structure, in particular with regards to new aspect markers. These

developments and innovations follow two tendencies. First of all, as they are unique to

AAVE, they generally do not occur in white vernaculars and fall therefore in line with the

divergence hypothesis. Secondly, while white vernaculars have shown to emphasize regional

variation, AAVE speakers relinquish regional dialect variants in favor of forming a stable

nation-wide AAVE variety. The urban varieties serve hereby as the model variety. The

different structural developments that have occurred in AAVE speech will be discussed one

by one, with regards to their evolution and impact on relations to neighboring (white)

vernaculars.

VERBALSINFLECTION

One of the most important innovations in AAVE grammar, which Labov (1987: 8) described

as "the most startling", is the reinterpretation of verbal s inflection to mark the historic

present. First off, research shows that AAVE lacks general underlying subject-verb

agreement. Therefore, verbal s inflection on the third person singular is a variable that

mainly serves the sociolinguistic purpose of indicating formality, especially when talking to

whites (Myhill and Harris 1986: 26).

However, apart from this stylistic function, Myhill and Harris (1986) found that verbal s was

assigned a new, narrative function. Verbal s inflection was reinterpreted by AAVE speakers

and is used to mark the historic present. This conclusion was made on the basis of data

gathered from five AAVE speakers, which was analyzed and compared with regards to the

occurrence of verbal s in narrative and nonnarrative contexts. Myhill and Harris (1986: 26)

defined a narrative clause "as one referring to a single past action which would conceivably

be rendered as a historic present in Standard English". On the basis of these interviews, they

found that 50% of all narrative clauses were marked with verbal s inflection, while only 4%

of nonnarrative clauses were.

Table 5: Percentage of use of /s/ (all five speakers)

he/she

NP singular

Total

Source: Myhill and Harris (1986: 27)

As can be seen in Table 5, in particular third person singular was marked. This goes against

the assumption that it might have been taken and retained from older varieties of English that

also used s inflection to mark the historic present. Yet, in the case of early white English it

was most iconic in the expression "I says". Since the AAVE speakers interviewed rarely

marked the verb say or the first person, it is unlikely to be a vestigial of older Standard

English (Myhill and Harris 1986: 30).

Another observation that speaks against the notion that this characteristic has been retained

from older varieties of English is the asymmetrical marking of conjoined verbs. The first verb

is inflected, while the following ones in the series are not, as can be seen for example in the

utterance: "An when I like was steppin' off, this guy RUNS behin' me, this white guy RUNS

behin' me an' BEND down, SAY: "Hold it!" (Myhill and Harris 1986: 28). This observation

was made in a number of verb series and would not only show that the occurrence of -s

inflection of the historic present is actually higher than the percentages of Table 4 indicate,

but that the systematic marking pattern falls outside of Standard English grammar rules.

Therefore, Myhill and Harris (1986: 30) conclude instead that "this function is an innovation

in BEV [Black English Vernacular] made possible by the presence of a marker which, to

speakers of this dialect, is clearly a verbal inflection but which has no clear function." Labov

(1987: 9) notes further that since this feature is neither found in the speech of people over 40,

nor was it recorded in his New York field study during the 1960s, that it must be a recent

innovation that marks divergence.

In sum, AAVE does not have general subject-verb agreement, however, verbal s inflection in

AAVE serves primarily two functions: the sociolinguistic function of formality on the one

hand, and the grammatical function of marking the historic present on the other. The first is

used in particular by speakers who are in close contact with speakers of the standard variety.

The latter, however, was noted amongst speakers with limited or varying degrees of inter-

ethnic contact. It did not serve any sociolinguistic function of accommodating one's speech to

the standard, but rather it showed that verbal s was used to mark narrative clauses and

therefore presents a unique innovation in contemporary, deep AAVE.

PASTTENSEMARKING

Another structural change that speaks in favor of the divergence hypothesis affected the past

tense marking system of AAVE. Past perfect took over functions previously assigned to

simple past.

Cukor-Avila (2001) conducted an 11 year-long field study, documenting and analyzing the

speech of residents in Springville, a small rural community in Texas. The residents

interviewed were born between 1894 and 1995, due to which an extensive analysis of

language change and the relationships between SWV and AAVE in this rural community was

possible. On the basis of this study, she found that SWV and AAVE were more similar in the

past than they are today. She concludes:

Of the 32 grammatical features [examined in this study], 26, or 81%,

are features that have been shared, at one time or another by both

AAVE and SWVE speakers in Springville. [...] Only six of the features

studied are unique to AAVE, at least two of which have emerged

within the past 50 years. This suggests that in the recent past (mid

nineteenth/early twentieth century), the grammars of AAVE and

SWVE were much more similar than they were different and that it is

only over the last few decades that change has caused an independent

development in the grammar of AAVE

Cukor-Avila (2001: 113)

Especially older varieties of AAVE and SWV share many structural features that are no

longer used in contemporary speech, including but not limited to the verb series for to, non-

habitual invariant be and a + verb + -ing. This is not surprising, as during the nineteenth

century farm tenancy and sharecropping led to close contact between blacks and whites in the

rural South, resulting in structural similarities between SWV and AAVE. Nevertheless,

starting with the Great Migration and increasing racial residential segregation the two

varieties started diverging from each other, also in the South. On the one hand, some features

that occur in old SWV have only been retained by AAVE, like singular copula absence and

zero third person singular s. On the other hand, new innovations in the speech of African

Americans are recent developments that have emerged primarily within the last century.

One of these recent innovations is the grammatical reinterpretation of had + past participle to

mean simple past. In Standard English had + past participle signals past perfect, i.e.

something precedes the aforementioned past event. Cukor-Avila (2001: 112), however, noted

the occurrence of this construction in discourse contexts that would normally presuppose

simple past, like single past events, listings and narrative evaluation. She takes her data in

particular from the interview with an African American female speaker who did not use this

feature as a child. However, as a teenager, her social networks changed and consequently

started identifying more with urban culture. As a result, she also began assimilating to the

urban vernacular, which explains the increase of innovative past marking in her speech

(Cukor-Avila 2001: 112 f.). It might be assumed that incorporating urban variants might just

be a fad amongst adolescents that adults will drop over time. However, with respect to this

new use of had + past, the assimilation to the urban variant did not disappear once speakers

had matured. As this feature stabilized over time and did not diminish with age, Cukor Avila

(2001: 111) argues that this new past marking system is a stable innovation in AAVE as

opposed to a temporary age-graded phenomenon.

40% of all events of innovative had + past participle recorded in the more recent interview

occurred in the context of a single event (Cukor-Avila 2001: 113). One example for this

unique verb construction is: I had wanted that shrimp fried rice they be havin'. As single past

events are unambiguously marked with simple past in Standard English, the high occurrence

of this new past marker in this context further emphasizes the notion that the underlying

structures of the past marking system in AAVE have undergone a fundamental change.

CHANGESINTHEASPECTSYSTEM

The divergence hypothesis resulted from mainly two independently conducted studies: (1) the

study by Labov and Harris (1986) concerning the vowel shift in Philadelphia, which has

already been discussed and (2) the study of Bailey and Maynor (1989) that observed a change

in AAVE's tense-aspect system.

Invariant be, meaning a non-conjugated form of the verb to be, occurs in the speech of all

AAVE speakers, ranging from early slave recordings up to contemporary time. However, a

change in frequency, and more importantly in grammatical function has been noted. In a

previous study, Bailey and Maynor (1985: 204) concluded that although there is some

evidence that point towards a habitual or iterative semantical core, "that evidence does not

prove, however, that be

[invariant be] contrasts systematically with other forms". After

analyzing younger speakers, however, they found that not only do they use invariant be more

often, compared to older speakers, but that they have also grammatically reinterpreted

invariant be to indicate a durative and habitual action. This new form has, therefore, been

coined "habitual be".

Bailey and Maynor (1989) interviewed and analyzed the speech of lower-class African

Americans in Texas from three different age groups: (1) teens and preteens (2) adults and (3)

former slaves. They found that the older speakers used invariant be only occasionally as a

variant of both auxiliary and copula be and before predicates, yet never before gonna (Bailey

& Maynor 1989: 13). For children and teens, however, they noted a strong preference of

invariant be in one particular grammatical context, namely before V + -ing. This indicates that

a deeper underlying structural change has occurred, that affects the semantic function of the

form. Upon further analysis, Bailey and Maynor (1989: 16) found that urban children marked

habitual phrases with invariant be 77% of the time. Older speakers preferred the zero copula

in this environment and used invariant be in only 6% of all habitual phrases.

They also found that this change started in urban environments, which goes hand in hand with

one of the divergence hypothesis' main claims, namely that linguistic divergence is a result of

de facto segregation in metropolitan areas. There seems to be a rural/urban dichotomy, in

which rural children slowly started making use of this new aspectual form, yet still not as

much as the urban children did (Bailey and Maynor 1989). Even amongst friends, they found

that the speaker from an urban area would make extensive use of habitual be, while her rural

friend preferred the conservative forms in the same environments, like zero copula or the

conjugated form (Bailey and Maynor 1989: 29). However, habitual be has been taken on by

African Americans in rural areas as well, where it is found quite commonly today.

This phenomenon in which linguistic innovations emerge in cities and spread towards rural

areas, where local variants are dropped in favor of the nation-wide variant, has been observed

in a number of cases. Another such structural change in the aspect system that had its start in

the city from where it then spread is quotative be like. Cukor-Avila (2002) observed that after

be like had established itself as the preferred quotation marker for adolescents and young

adults in Philadelphia, this verb series made its way to rural areas, where it is being adopted

by younger generations, as well. Older generations rarely use this variable though. In general,

the quotation system in Springville shows divergent tendencies of both black and white

vernaculars. Older white Texans did not make use of quotative go, i.e. An' I'm goin', "God! I

hope they [...]", while younger white speakers did so frequently (Cukor-Avila 2002: 8 f.).

Quotative go, however, was not recorded in the speech of African Americans in Springfield,

Texas, at all, regardless of age. Rather, younger generations of African Americans are taking

on the urban variant be like to mark direct speech, i.e. I was like, "What's your name?"

(Cukor-Avila 2002: 7). Wolfram and Schilling (2016: 380) confirm the rapid distribution of

quotative be like in AAVE, where it is rapidly replacing other possibilities to introduce a

quote like say. It can even be used to render thoughts or imagined quotes, as opposed to literal

quotes. This therefore shows that it has been a highly productive innovation that took over.

Another aspectual change that occurred in AAVE during the 80's was the grammatical

reinterpretation of be done. Formerly, be done in AAVE was used to mark future perfect and

substitute will have, as it is used in Standard English and other dialects. However, Baugh

overheard a conversation on the streets of Los Angeles, where an African American man said:

I'll be done killed that motherfucker if he tries [...] (Baugh 1983 as quoted in: Labov

2010:17). In this context, be done obviously does not refer to future perfect, as it would not

make sense. Rather it is meant as a direct consequence of the second action. Consequently,

this new resultative be done functions as a marker of mood, which indicates the high degree

of certainty that one action will result due to another (Labov 2010: 17).

Stressed stay is another new aspectual marker that recently emerged in the speech of African

Americans in New York and throughout the Northeast Coast (Spears 1999). Unstressed stay is

used as an auxiliary by older generations as well, although it follows a different function. One

example for this is: You gone stay hit from him? (Spears 1999: 14). This phrase can be

roughly translated to "Are you going to allow him to hit you and get away with it?". As can

be seen, its meaning and function are quite difficult to render, which is why Spears (1999: 14)

simply called it the "save-face" stay. Amongst younger generations, however a new auxiliary

version of stressed stay has been noted that functions as a frequentative, iterative habitual

aspect marker. The utterances He STAY flossing ("He's always dressed very well") and She

STAY pregnant. ("She is frequently pregnant") are just two examples of this new aspect

feature (14).

These findings in the aspect system are important for a number of reasons. First of all, they

indicate that urbanization indeed gave rise to linguistic innovations that are unique to AAVE,

as they originated in black urban vernaculars and do not occur in white speech. Consequently,

black and white vernaculars are diverging from each other. Secondly, the changes recorded by

Bailey and Maynor (1989) show divergent tendencies on a more deep-seated, structural level

compared to Labov and Harris' (1986) findings. This gave rise to more research that showed

further innovation in AAVE's unique aspect system (Cukor-Avila 2002; Spears 1999; Labov

2010). A change in the aspectual system shows that not merely the phonology and lexicon of

the two vernaculars are becoming more different from each other but their underlying

grammar systems, as well. As a number of studies have shown, AAVE structures affect the

performance of low-income African American children, in particular with regard to reading

and writing (Patton-Terry & Connor 2010; Green 2002). Therefore, these structural

divergences might further widen the gap between the language used at school and the

language used at home, which could possibly lead to further social disenfranchisement. This

divergent tendency shows on the one hand the current unequal social situation and on the

other possible future social consequences.

4.1.3Critique

Because of these grave social implications and accusations that Labov and Harris' (1986)

initial hypothesis imply, it sparked a lot of media attention and criticism from fellow linguists.

Some have criticized the divergence hypothesis, due to lack of evidence or flawed

methodology, while others even took it a step further, arguing in favor of the convergence

hypothesis, as a result of evidence that show the exact opposite direction.

One of these critics is Vaughn-Cooke (1987), who stated that Labov and Harris' (1986) as

well as Bailey and Maynor's findings (1989) were not fit for diachronic language analysis as

they missed the variable time depth. She states that in the case of Labov and Harris (1986), it

is a noteworthy synchronic language description, yet it does not adequately describe language

change as the age of the black informants is not taken into consideration and it does not

compare two different points in time. The findings of Labov and Harris (1986), however, are

based on the findings of Labov's (2014) previous study, in which he described phonological

changes in white vernaculars. This study extended from 1973 to 1977 and took the age of the

participants into consideration. It focused on the speech of white speakers because it

described language change occurring in white vernaculars, not in AAVE. Since the variables

analyzed did not occur in the speech of any African American noted, regardless of age, gender

and social class, one can say that Vaughn-Cooke's (1987) argument does not hold, since the

result is that they simply did not participate. One does not need to go back in time to analyze a

change that obviously did not occur.

With regards to Bailey and Maynor's (1989) study, both Vaughn-Cooke (1987) and Wolfram

(1987) argue that habitual be is an age-grading phenomenon rather than a linguistic

innovation. Vaughn-Cooke (1987) bases her critique on other studies that also found invariant

be to occur more frequently in the speech of younger generations but that drew different

conclusions. Three of these studies concluded that invariant be is an age-grading phenomenon

that solely occurs in the speech of adolescents and therefore does not suggest linguistic

divergence. "Bailey and Maynor's results cannot be used as evidence for the divergence

hypothesis until the age-grading issue is resolved" (Vaughn Cooke 1987: 20). Bailey and

Maynor (1989) responded to this claim directly. Since invariant be in the speech of (pre)teens

and children does not merely differ in frequency but follows a new set of grammatical and

semantic constraints, compared to older generations, it is unlikely that this is an age-grading

phenomenon, but rather an extension of the already elaborate aspect system of AAVE (Bailey

& Maynor 1989: 18).

Black adults do use invariant be, they just do not use it in the same

way that children do. For adults, it is simply an occasional variant of

both copula and auxiliary be; for children it is used primarily as an

auxiliary to signal durative/habitual action. It seems unlikely that age-

grading would result in the adult loss of a grammatical distinction

without the loss of the form which signaled the distinction

(Bailey & Maynor 1989: 18 f.)

They stress that their findings refer mainly to its grammatical function as opposed to mere

number of tokens. This argument also answers Wolfram's (1987: 44) doubts regarding Bailey

and Maynor's elicitation techniques, claiming that the questions asked about childhood games

and activities would generate present habitual responses in children, while adults would

answer in the past tense. This of course would distort the number of invariant be tokens and

the overall results. Bailey and Maynor (1989: 18) defended their data by stating that first of

all, adults did have ample opportunity to use the form, since a variety of questions were asked,

and secondly, more importantly, that their argument does not build on the frequency of

occurrence of invariant be but on its grammatical interpretation. Therefore, the number of

tokens elicited is secondary compared to their grammatical usage.

Wolfram (1987), furthermore, questions, whether or not the observations made by Myhill and

Harris (1986) regarding narrative s inflection are really a sign for divergence. He argues that

it is not a recent development but rather a recent discovery, made possible through more

advanced field procedures (Wolfram 1987: 43). Myhill and Harris (1986: 30) did not rule out

this possibility themselves, stating:

[I]t is possible that this usage is quite widespread, having gone

unobserved by linguists because in the social situation created by

most linguistic interviews, the /s/ inflection is likely to be used by the

interviewee as a consequence of the interviewer clearly being of a

different social class, thereby producing many linguistically

unsystematic tokens of this inflection. The social function of /s/ in this

situation obscures its linguistic function.

Labov (1987: 9), however, argues against this stance as "it is found uniformly among younger

core speakers of BEV, but not for anyone over forty, though they may show extreme

vernacular patterns in other respects. Furthermore, there is no trace of it among the blacks

studied in New York City in the 1960s, at any age". As was described before, one cannot rule

out the possibility of increased narrative s inflection documented due to improved field

methods, but the fact that it had never been recorded previously, hints towards divergence.

Surely, this feature would have occurred in studies where other deep vernacular variables

were recorded as well.

More compelling arguments against the divergence hypothesis can be found in research that

displays converging tendencies found in AAVE. Vaughn Cooke (1987: 22), for instance,

found that when comparing three different generations of speakers, younger generations

would increasingly pronounce unstressed initial syllables, in words like afraid, instead of

saying `fraid, or `lectric instead of electric. This resyllabification process was interpreted as a

sign for decreolization. A slight direction towards rhoticity was also noted by Bailey and

Thomas (1998) as was noted before, however, by far not too the same degree as in white

speakers. These converging tendencies however do not speak against the divergence

hypothesis per se, but they do show an overall more complex picture. Therefore, when

considering the relationships between AAVE and white vernaculars, different dimensions

must be taken into consideration. Regional, economic, historic, prosodic, but the probably

single most important factor in this analysis remains to be the degree of contact that whites

and blacks share. Therefore, structural developments that occur in contemporary inter-ethnic

contact situations will be analyzed finally.

4.2 Inter-Ethnic Contact Situations

4.2.1ShifttowardsWhiteVernaculars

Even in highly segregated cities like Detroit, contact situations between African Americans

and white Americans give way to linguistic change. African Americans are, however, more

likely to adapt to white vernaculars, even in the case of stigmatized varieties, than vice versa.

This tendency was, for example, noted in Detroit, where AAVE shows signs of language

contact with Appalachian Americans. Appalachian Americans are the only white community

to be found in Detroit, as the majority of white Detroiters lives in suburbs outside the city.

The monophtongization of /ai/ to /a:/ is common in both AAVE, as well as, SWV, however, it

generally does not occur before a voiceless obstruent. Most SWV and AAVE only reduce the

glide before a voiced consonant, like tide, but retain it in front of a voiceless consonant, like

tight (Bailey & Thomas 1998). In Texas and Appalachia, however, some regional varieties

have shown to reduce /ai/ in front of a voiceless consonant as well. Typically, this feature

bears a strong racial connotation. "In fact, in the South, raht and whaht are thought of as

Anglo American pronunciations while tahm and tahd are simply considered Southern"

(Wolfram& Schilling-Estes 1998: 180).

It is therefore particularly interesting that this "white, Southern" feature was noted in Detroit,

amongst African Americans, in particular amongst younger generations (Anderson 2002). As

many whites from the working-class South headed North and settled in the inner-city and the

already established white residents of Detroit are increasingly moving to the suburbs,

Southerners share more contact with blacks than Northerners do. Furthermore, many African

Americans interviewed even described their dialect and Detroit culture as "Southern",

indicating a shared identity between the two social groups (Anderson 2002: 89). It comes,

therefore, as no surprise that language contact would result in phonological assimilation. It is

not clear though, whether or not the monophtongization of /ai/ before voiceless obstruents is a

result of socially neutral simplification or of levelling, which eliminates stigmatized variants

(Anderson 2002: 95). What is clear, though, is that although this development converges to

SWV, it diverges from NWV, and consequently, from the standard. "The overall effect is that

Detroit AAE [African American English] aligns with a Southern vowel system for the /ai/

vowel variable, including that of the Detroit Southern White community, while indexing an

opposition with Northern Whites" (Anderson 2002: 95). This shows two important factors

when considering the relationship between AAVE and white vernaculars in contact situations.

First, African Americans are more prone to incorporate features from whites than vice versa.

Secondly, the level of intimacy and social equality between the two groups is essential to the

linguistic development.

Ash and Myhill (1986) conducted a study, which exemplified the direction of linguistic

change in contact situations and how this contributes to overall divergence. They compared

the occurrence of ten AAVE-marked variants to the speaker's level of inter-ethnic contact.

Phonological (e.g. monophtongization of /ai/), grammatical (e.g. zero copula) as well as

lexical (e.g. dude/guy) features of AAVE were used. The findings of the study are

summarized in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Average Percent of AAVE variants used

Source: adapted from Ash and Myhill (1986: 39)

Looking at the data visualized in Figure 1, there are a number of observations to be made.

First of all, it is shown that both African Americans as well as whites incorporate features of

the opposite vernacular. However, this assimilation process is highly asymmetrical and

typological. African Americans are far more likely to assimilate to whites than vice versa.

This holds especially true for grammatical features, as the two examples show in Figure 1, the

absence of the copula and possessive s. While whites who share close contact with African

Americans do show a tendency to incorporate lexical items and some phonological features in

their speech, they generally do not assimilate to AAVE grammar. Due to this discrepancy and

the overall shift towards the standard, another striking observation can be made, which is

visualized in Figure 1. Not only is there a wide gap between the speech of whites and blacks

with limited inter-ethnic contact, but also between blacks with limited contact and the rest,

including African Americans who have a lot of contact with whites (Ash & Myhill 1986: 40).

Blacks with limited inter-ethnic contact are therefore the most excluded group.

Consequently, Ash and Myhill (1986) showed that linguistic divergence is closely connected

to peer contact. Racial segregation not only entails linguistic divergence between the two

opposing ends, of those with the least contact to each other, but also within the group. They

fittingly conclude:

100

/a:/ for /ai/ a for an zero copula deletion of

possesive

24 lexical

items

Blacks with limited inter

ethnic contact

Blacks with considerable

interethnic contact

Whites with considerable

interethnic contact

Whites with limited inter

ethnic contact

We have found that blacks who move in white circles show a major

shift in their grammar in the direction of the white norm and a lesser

shift in their phonology and lexicon. This suggests that the factors of

central importance to this problem involve prestige and the need or

desire of speakers to maintain solidarity with the black community at

the same time that they command the political power to deal

effectively with the white community.

(Ash & Myhill 1986: 41)

4.2.2SocialMobilityandNeighborhoodEffects

Nevertheless, these studies showed the important role and impact of social networks when

analyzing the relationship between black and white speech. Similarly, Edwards' (1992) study

of AAVE spoken in a 95% black inner-city neighborhood of Detroit showed how much social

affiliation and isolation play a role in linguistic development and vernacular use, as well.

Social isolation turned out to be the most decisive factor in the speaker's use of the vernacular

compared to all other sociolinguistic factors, as for example gender.

As a general linguistic principle Labov (2001: 266) states: "For stable sociolinguistic

variables, women show a lower rate of stigmatized variants and a higher rate of prestige

variants than men." Generally, this holds true for AAVE as a stigmatized variety as well.

Rickford et al. (2015: 11819), for example, recorded that even amongst children boys used

more vernacular variants compared to their female peers.

Edwards (1992: 104), however, found that, contrary to his expectations, women were overall

more prone to use AAVE variants than men. Yet, this was only true for a certain age group.

Black men over 60 used the AAVE variants, in particular the vocalization of postvocalic r

and the monophtongization of /ai/, in words like crime [cra:m] (105). This shows that in

particular the last two variables are sex-graded and connected to masculinity. However, the

reason why young, single mothers used so many vernacular variants is due to their restricted

social mobility. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to find work outside of their

neighborhood and therefore come into contact with Standard English speakers (105). It can

therefore be said that the less social mobility a person enjoys, the more vernacular is used.

This observation goes hand in hand not only for Edwards' (1992) finding with respect to

gender, but also to age. Speakers over 60 were far more likely to use AAVE variables than

younger speakers were, leading to the assumption that this is either an age grading

phenomenon or that AAVE is in fact converging to Standard English. However, neither is the

case. Neither older speakers who showed a tendency towards Standard English nor younger

speakers who used more AAVE were criticized for their speech (Edwards 1992: 104).

Furthermore, while older generations were most likely to make use of the vernacular, the 26

to 39 year-olds consistently used more Standard English variants than the 18 to 25 year-olds

did (104). This antilinear development clearly speaks against an age-grading phenomenon.

Edwards (1992) therefore links this observation once again to the group's social mobility and

its contact to other speakers. While the youngest group were more likely to be at home and

therefore stand in closer contact with their parents and grandparents, the 26 to 39 year-olds

were most likely to have found jobs outside of the neighborhood and therefore expanded their

social network. Therefore, his findings do not stand in opposition to Labov's (1986)

assumption that AAVE is diverging from white vernaculars due to racial segregation,

however, they do show a broader, more complex picture.

In view of the strong association of [ay] monophtongization, [r]

deletion, and zero copula with the typical speech of blacks in lower

socioeconomic groups in northern cities, it is not surprising that these

speech behaviors are significantly correlated with local affiliations,

racial isolation, and sociocultural orientation. [...] [R]espondents in

this sample who rated themselves as being firmly rooted in the

neighborhood in terms of their regular social transactions and as

being comfortable with the neighborhood ethos are more likely to

choose vernacular variants of linguistic variables than those

respondents who lack these characteristics.

(Edwards 1992: 110)

On the one hand, he shows the racial connotation that certain linguistic features have, in

particular in the North, where white speakers do not share these features. As a result, he also

showed that people who are firmly rooted and strongly identify with this part of their identity

express this linguistically. However, he also showed that AAVE in itself is more

heterogeneous as the use differs both with regard to sex as with regard to age. Yet, this

divergent tendency lessens with stronger exposure to other vernaculars and Standard English.

Edwards' (1992) observation is a crucial one to understanding the relationships between

AAVE and white vernaculars. Not only do they differ regarding time and location, but also

with respect to age and gender. Nevertheless, the single most crucial factor in influencing how

these vernaculars behave towards each other remains to be peer contact across ethnic lines.

Rickford et al. (2015) analyzed the neighborhood effects on the use of AAVE in the speech of

low-income non-Hispanic African American children and teens. A large-scale mobility

project called MTO (Moving to Opportunity) gave a random group of minority families who

lived in project housing the possibility to move to a low-poverty census tract. The team of

linguists conducted interviews with non-Hispanic African American children and youth at the

onset of the program between 1994 and 1998. They then conducted another interview with the

same people 15 years later and analyzed how their use of AAVE changed. In comparison with

a control group, who did not move and did not change their use of AAVE, the MTO group

had dropped their use of AAVE variables by 3 percentage points (Rickford et al. 2015:

11820). Children whose parents stated that one of their main reasons to enroll in the program

is to flee "street culture" showed the highest rate of decline, namely 5.2 percentage points

(11819).

This study first of all shows that neighborhood effects do change the use of AAVE and that

extended contact with Standard English would diminish the use of the vernacular. However,

the effect is linked to the family's and peers' identity. It is first of all interesting to note, that

nearly half of the families eligible to move to a low-income neighborhood in the MTO

project, chose not to do so. Second of all, even though the children did assimilate to Standard

English, the effect is surprisingly small. Considering that the parent's ideology and

educational background played a large role in the MTO effect, as well, it goes on to show that

AAVE continues to have low overt but high covert prestige. Since there is a need for strong

racial solidarity amongst African Americans, due to sociohistorical and socioeconomic

factors, convergence to Standard English seems to take on slowly. Instead of giving up one's

vernacular, code-switching and a proficient demand of both vernaculars seems to be the

preferred option of many African Americans (Rickford et al. 2015). "It's very clear that adults

in the black community have a wider range of styles in which they can present themselves to

the outside world than do children aged six, seven, eight, nine, or ten" (Rickford 1987: 56).

Since the workplace requires a certain jargon as well as presentation, normally one that leans

toward white norms, it is clear why African Americans would choose to incorporate and learn

linguistic features found in surrounding white vernaculars. However, due to racial solidarity

and personal identity, AAVE is rarely, if ever, abandoned completely, once learned. This

bidialectal approach has also been adopted by schools, when teaching reading and writing to

African American students (Green 2002: 229).

In sum, contact situations between white and black communities give rise to linguistic

assimilation processes, reversing the effects of linguistic divergence. However, if only part of

the community stands in close contact with other ethnicities while the majority of the

community remains socially isolated, the effects of linguistic divergence are increased not

only between communities, but also within, excluding the marginalized even further. This is

because linguistic assimilation disfavors stigmatized variants and shows a general shift

towards white vernaculars with AAVE features being adopted by white speakers only

occasionally. Lexical AAVE items are also far more likely to be incorporated into white

vernaculars compared to grammatical features. When AAVE speakers are intensively exposed

to the standard, as was the case with MTO project, it has been shown that speakers do use

standard variants more than before. However, the effect is not particularly strong and speakers

do not lose their competency of AAVE. Rather, the preferred alternative for AAVE speakers

is to have a command of both varieties and code-switch according to the specific situation. It

is therefore unlikely that AAVE will be lost anytime soon as a variety, although it remains

stigmatized.

5 Summary and Conclusion

As a conclusion, it should be evident why this paper uses the plural to refer to the

relationships between AAVE and white vernaculars. Not only do they differ by time, but also

by region, social status and identity, resulting in various dynamics and ways of how two or

more varieties interact across racial lines.

This paper also showed that, although the origins of AAVE are disputed amongst linguists

and there is no consensus due to the lack of reliable data, it is unlikely that modern AAVE

stems from a fully-fledged antecedent creole. While the socioeconomic conditions in the

Caribbean and coastal South Carolina facilitated the formation of creoles, the social setup in

the rest of the US did not. Hence, during the era of slavery, English spoken by whites

dominated the speech of blacks, resulting in a grammatical core that is essentially English.

This becomes evident, for instance, in the negation and the plural marking pattern, which

show structural similarity to neither West African languages nor any English-based creole but

rather point towards older English varieties. However, this does not imply that there are no

traces of substratum influence to be found. The semantic constraints on the zero copula show,

for instance, similarities to Yoruba. However, blacks were largely outnumbered by whites in

most of the US, which did not allow for the formation of a fully developed creole. This is not

to say, however, that blacks did not influence the speech of whites at all during the era of

slavery. Non-rhoticity is an example of how African house servants had an impact on the

speech of white children, which in turn spread throughout the South.

This is one of the examples, of how this paper showed that the main determining factor for

linguistic con- or divergence is the degree of inter-ethnic contact and social mobility. After

the Civil War, slavery was replaced with farm tenancy, typically in the form of sharecropping.

This new arrangement made way for increased contact between blacks and whites on a more

socially equal basis than before. Consequently, the two vernaculars started converging and a

number of features emerged that AAVE and SWV share up to this day. Other features have

only been retained by AAVE, which nowadays only appear in old-fashioned SWV. However,

this shows that the two vernaculars had been previously more similar than they are today.

Linguistic divergence between AAVE and white vernaculars started after World War I and

the Great Migration. Jim Crow Laws, lynching, economic disenfranchisement and other forms

of racist discrimination created a hostile living environment for African Americans in the

South. After the new immigration policy following World War I, northern corporations

started hiring African Americans to replace cheap labor demands that had formerly been met

by southern and eastern Europeans. Consequently, the Great Migration, one of the biggest

demographic changes in the US occurred. Heaps of African Americans emigrated to the

North, where they settled in impoverished inner-cities. The white population, on the other,

hand fled to the suburbs. As a result, this newly formed residential racial segregation created

an environment for linguistic divergence.

Due to the lack of contact with other ethnicities, AAVE speakers show linguistic innovations

unique to African Americans. The verbal s was reinterpreted to mark the historic present,

while the past perfect adopted simple past functions. Most noteworthy though are the changes

in the aspect system of AAVE. Habitual be arose in the 1980's and has firmly established

itself as a feature to emphasize the habitualness or duration of an action in a way that Standard

English cannot. The unique aspect system of AAVE has been further expanded through

quotative be like, stressed stay and a number of other innovations. Not only do these features

not occur in the speech of white Americans, but they are also difficult to translate into

Standard English. Therefore, these developments show linguistic divergence between white

and black vernaculars on a deep seated grammatical level.

White vernaculars have shown to go their own way as well, emphasizing regional variation.

However, African Americans do not participate in these regional shifts, if the linguistic

features in question are racially connotative. This becomes evident both in the vowel shift in

northern cities as well as the movement towards rhoticity in the South. In both cases, the

changing variants are closely linked to racial identity and therefore do not affect AAVE.

However, if a racially neutral variable changes, African Americans of the region do

participate, as, for instance, was the case in the Southern vowel shift. Linguistically speaking,

African Americans prioritize their racial over their local identity.

However, the main cause for linguistic divergence remains to be racial segregation. In inter-

ethnic contact situations, two general observations can be made. First, African Americans are

far more likely to assimilate to whites than vice versa, leaving African Americans with little

inter-ethnic contact excluded. Secondly, as the MTO project showed, the neighborhood

affects the degree to which a speaker uses AAVE. However, most AAVE speakers in similar

situations do not abandon their vernacular but rather use code switching to abide to the

specific context.

In conclusion, AAVE stands in a complex relationship to Standard English, converging in

some and diverging in other respects. Racial identity and segregation are the two main factors

that decide the course. After the divergence hypothesis sparked so much controversy, most

research concerning this question was done during the eighties/early nineties, a time in which

de facto segregation was very prominent. As new census data shows, residential areas are

becoming more diverse, therefore more research would be needed to assess the linguistic

effects of this development. Furthermore, this paper only analyzed the relationships between

black and white vernaculars. In particular Hispanics live in close contact with African

Americans. It would therefore be interesting to analyze the influence of Latino English on

AAVE and vice versa. Anyhow, AAVE will remain a highly unique variety that stands in

ever-changing relationships to its neighboring varieties and will therefore keep attracting the

interest of linguists.

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7 Deutsche Zusammenfassung

Diese Arbeit zeigt die Verhältnisse und die strukturelle Entwicklung zwischen

Afroamerikanischem Englisch (AE) und den benachbarten weißen Dialekten auf. Es ist von

Verhältnissen im Plural die Rede, da ihr Bezug zueinander sowohl von Ort, Zeit als auch

sozioökonomischen Faktoren abhängt und variiert. Die Fragestellung bezüglich der

gegenseitigen Beeinflussung dieser Mundarten ist insofern von Bedeutung, da Studien gezeigt

haben, dass afroamerikanische Schulkinder schlechter im Lesen und im Schreiben

abschneiden und dies z. T. auf negative Interferenzen aus dem AE zurückzuführen sind

(Patton-Terry & Connor 2010). Daher untersucht diese Arbeit zuerst, ob die grammatische

Basis von AE englischer oder afrikanischer Natur ist und ob es sich im Laufe der Zeit dem

Standard als auch benachbarter Dialekte angenähert oder strukturell entfernt hat.

Um dies genauer zu betrachten, werden zuerst die Ursprünge des AE analysiert, da diese auf

keinen wissenschaftlichen Konsens treffen. Auf der einen Seite befinden sich die

Kreolist*innen, die behaupten, AE entstamme einer vorangehenden Kreolsprache und

unterliege seitdem ständiger Dekreolisierung. Diese Vorgängerkreolsprache sei karibischen

Kreolsprachen und Gullah, die einzige Englisch-basierte Kreolsprache, welche auf US-

amerikanischem Festland gesprochen wird, ähnlich, da sie eine ähnliche Geschichte

aufweisen. Demnach nähere sich AE den benachbarten weißen Mundarten immer mehr an,

der grammatische Kern entstamme jedoch afrikanischer Substratsprachen (Rickford 1998).

Auf der anderen Seite der Ursprungsdebatte befinden sich die Anglist*innen, die meinen die

sozioökonomischen Zustände hätten die Ausbildung einer Kreolsprache nicht zugelassen, da

abgesehen von den Gebieten, in denen Gullah gesprochen wird, die schwarze Bevölkerung

stets in der Minderheit lag. Daher erwarben die versklavten Afrikaner Englisch von Weißen

und versuchten somit sich deren Mundart bestmöglich anzunähern (Mufwene 2000). Die

strukturellen Unterschiede weisen somit nicht auf Kreolisierung sondern auf den Prozess des

Fremdsprachenerwerbs oder auf linguistische Innovationen, die relativ zeitnah eingesetzt

haben, hin. Nachdem beide Seiten näher beleuchtet wurden, belegen sowohl die

soziohistorischen Faktoren als auch die grammatischen Strukturen einen Grammatikkern mit

englischen Wurzeln. Insbesondere die Negations- als auch die Pluralbildung zeigen

Strukturen auf, die zwar in englischen Varietäten jedoch weder in Gullah noch karibischen

Kreolsprachen vorkommen (Howe & Walker 2000; Poplack et al. 2000). Somit unterstützen

die grammatischen Strukturen die Position der Anglist*innen. Auch wenn das Englische als

grammatische Basis dient, soll dies nicht bedeuten, dass der Einfluss von Substratsprachen

ausgeschlossen sei. Insbesondere die Abwesenheit des Kopulaverbs zeigt Einflüsse von

Yoruba und machte einen ähnlichen Dekreolisierungsprozess wie Gullah durch (Rickford

1998). Sogar einige Merkmale von Südstaatenenglisch weisen auf afrikanischen Ursprung

zurück. Ein Beispiel hierfür ist die charakteristische nicht-rhotische Aussprache, die sich mit

der Ausweitung der Plantagenlandschaft im Süden der USA verbreitet hat (Feagin 1997).

Nichtsdestotrotz aufgrund der demographischen und sozioökonomischen Umstände,

dominierten in der Zeit der Sklaverei die Mundarten der Weißen.

Nach Abschaffung der Sklaverei näherten sich beide Mundarten aufgrund vermehrten

Kontakts zwischen Schwarzen und Weißen einander an. Das System der Sklaverei wurde

durch Pachtverhältnisse abgelöst. Zuerst waren die meisten Pächter Afroamerikaner*innen

jedoch pachteten ebenfalls nach und nach mehr Weiße Land. Zudem arbeiteten weiße und

schwarze Leiharbeiter*innen zusammen auf neuen Großplantagen und traten somit vermehrt

in Kontakt zueinander (Bailey 2001). Dies hatte zur Folge, dass sich ihre Dialekte annäherten

und viele Merkmale, die charakteristisch sowohl für Südstaatenenglisch als auch für AE sind,

in dieser Zeit entstanden. Einige zeitgenössische Beispiele hierfür sind die Verschmelzung

von // und // vor Nasallauten oder die Reduzierung des Gleitlauts /ai/ zu /a:/ vor stimmhaften

Obstruenten (Cukor-Avila 2001). Andere Merkmale kommen heutzutage nur in AE und

altmodischem weißen Südstaatenenglisch vor, welches darauf hindeutet, dass diese zwei

Mundarten sich früher mehr ähnelten als sie es heute tun.

Dieser linguistische Assimilationsprozess kehrte sich gegen Ende des 19. und Anfang des 20.

Jahrhunderts um. Linguistische Divergenz war die Konsequenz verstärkter Rassentrennung,

die vor allem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts mit den Jim Crow Gesetzen in Kraft trat. Rassistische

Diskriminierung auf der einen Seite und neue wirtschaftliche Möglichkeiten auf der anderen

veranlasste viele Afroamerikaner dazu den Süden zu verlassen und sich in nördlichen Städten

niederzulassen (Tolnay 2003). Diese Migrationswelle, die Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts

begann, ihren Höhepunkt nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg erlebte und in den Siebzigern zu Ende

war, hatte einen der stärksten demographischen Wandel in der Geschichte der USA bewirkt.

Im Jahre 1970 lebten 47% der afroamerikanischen Bevölkerung außerhalb des Südens und

77% in Städten (Bailey 2001). Während die schwarze Bevölkerung in sozialbenachteiligten

Stadtvierteln unterkam, zog die weiße Bevölkerung zur selben Zeit an den Stadtrand und

gründeten Vororte (Tolnay 2003). Diese neue de facto Rassentrennung begrenzte den Kontakt

zwischen schwarz und weiß und folglich begannen die Mundarten sich voneinander

strukturell zu verändern.

Diese Divergenzhypothese, die hauptsächlich von Labov und Harris (1986) entfacht wurde,

löste eine große Kontroverse aus und wurde sowohl von Linguist*innen als auch von den

Medien aufgegriffen und diskutiert, da diese weitreichende linguistische als auch soziale

Konsequenzen implizierte. Diese Hypothese besagt, dass sich sowohl AE als auch weiße

Mundarten in unterschiedliche Richtungen entwickeln aufgrund begrenzten interethnischen

Kontakts, die aus rassengetrennter Urbanisierung hervorgeht. Dieser Standpunkt impliziert

hiermit, dass sich AE und benachbarte weiße Dialekte einst ähnlicher waren als sie heute sind,

allerdings bedeutet dies weder, dass heute mehr Afroamerikaner*innen AE sprechen, noch

dass früher die soziopolitische Lage für die afroamerikanische Bevölkerung besser gewesen

sei (Bailey und Maynor 1989).

Weiße Mundarten sowohl im Norden als auch im Süden der USA machten hauptsächlich

phonologische Veränderungen durch. Gerade die Studie von Labov und Harris (1986) hat

gezeigt, dass als Reaktion auf den Zuwachs der schwarzen Bevölkerung, die privilegierte,

weiße Schicht in Philadelphia die Aussprache einiger Vokale veränderte. Diese Vokale

wurden klar mit einer ethnischen Konnotation belegt und somit konstituiert diese

Veränderung linguistische Divergenz zwischen AE und der weißen Mundart. In Memphis

passierte ebenfalls eine Lautverschiebung der Vokale jedoch beeinflusste diese AE ebenfalls.

Die betroffenen Vokale im Süden waren jedoch im Gegensatz zu denen in Philadelphia

ethnisch gesehen neutral. Diese Beobachtung, dass sobald ein linguistisches Merkmal mit der

ethnischen Identität verknüpft ist sich die Mehrheit der Afroamerikaner*innen nicht an deren

Veränderung beteiligt, hat sich anhand mehrerer Beispiele bestätigt (Wolfram & Thomas

2002; Labov & Harris 1986; Bailey & Thomas 1998). Ist jedoch ein ethnisch-neutrales

Merkmal betroffen, nehmen sowohl Weiße als auch Schwarze an der regionalen Veränderung

teil und bewirken somit Konvergenz (Anderson 2002).

Während im 20. Jahrhundert weiße Mundarten hauptsächlich Lautverschiebungen

unternahmen, die regionale Unterschiede hervorhoben, bewegten sich Sprecher*innen des AE

in die entgegengesetzte Richtung. Regionale Unterschiede wurden aufgehoben, in dem

insbesondere jüngere Generationen ihre Sprache immer mehr den städtischen Vorbildern

anpassten, da dort die Mehrheit der afroamerikanischen Bevölkerung lebte, abgeschottet von

äußerem Einfluss (Cukor-Avila 2002; Wolfram & Thomas 2002). Somit konnten einige

linguistische Innovationen insbesondere mit Hinblick auf morphosyntaktische Veränderung

während der Achtziger verzeichnet werden, die in vorwiegend schwarzen Stadtvierteln

entstammen.

Ein Beispiel hierfür ist die grammatische Neuinterpretation des postverbalen s. Da AE

grundlegend keine Subjekt-Verb Kongruenz aufweist, wurde das inflektierte s grammatisch

neu interpretiert um die historische Gegenwart auszudrücken. AE ist bekannt für sein

einzigartiges Aspektsystem, welches nur schwer in englischer Standardsprache

wiedergegeben werden kann. Dieses wurde weiter ausgebaut und umstrukturiert. So verhielt

es sich mit der nicht-konjugierten Form des Verbs be, die die Funktion erhielt Gewohnheiten

und die Dauer einer Handlung zu bekräftigen. Dieser neuartige Gebrauch, der in den

Achtzigern entstand und sich verbreitete, wurde von Bailey und Maynor (1989) beobachtet

und war zusammen mit der Studie von Labov und Harris (1986) der Hauptanstoß der

Divergenzdebatte. Eine weitere Veränderung im Aspektsystem ist die Verwendung von be

like, um direkte Rede auszudrücken (Cukor-Avila 2002). Beide dieser Formen werden auch

häufig kombiniert und haben sich, entgegen mancher Vermutung, bis heute durchgesetzt.

Anschließend wurden zudem noch weitere Entwicklungen sowohl im Aspekt- als auch in der

Tempusbildung vermerkt (Cukor-Avila 2001; Spears 1999). Im Gegensatz zu den

phonologischen Veränderungen der weißen Dialekte, nimmt AE eine Ausweitung und

Umstrukturierung des grammatischen Kerns vor, wodurch die Konsequenzen, die sich aus

dieser Divergenz ergeben, tiefer greifen.

Diese strukturellen Veränderungen traten alle erst nach Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts auf und

zeigen somit eine klare Verbindung zu der großen Migrationswelle und der daraus

resultierenden Wohnsegregation. Allerdings erlebt die Wohnsituation amerikanischer

Stadtgebiete einen positiven Wandel, da sowohl die innerstädtischen Gebiete als auch die

Vororte gemischter werden. Somit machten ethnische Minderheiten 2010 etwa 35% der

Bevölkerung in mittelständischen Vororten aus, welches ungefähr deren Anteil an der

Gesamtbevölkerung entspricht (Frey 2011: 1). In Anbetracht dieser Entwicklung werden

zuletzt die linguistischen Dynamiken in Kontaktsituationen untersucht.

Grundlegend sind zwei Tendenzen in interethnischen Kontaktverhältnissen zu vermerken.

Erstens passen sich Afroamerikaner*innen viel bereitwilliger an weiße Mundarten an als

umgekehrt. Dies hat zur Folge, dass nicht nur ein großer Unterschied zwischen Weißen und

Schwarzen, die jeweils wenig Kontakt zu anderen Ethnien haben, sondern auch innerhalb der

schwarzen Gemeinschaft entsteht. Die generelle Richtung, die eingeschlagen wird, ist zum

weißen Standard hin, welches schlussendlich AE Sprecher*innen außen vor lässt. Zweitens

hat die Umgebung eindeutige Auswirkungen auf den Gebrauch von AE, jedoch tendieren die

meisten Afroamerikaner*innen zum code switching. Wie das MTO Projekt zeigte, in dem

eine große Anzahl Afro- und Hispanoamerikaner*innen aus benachteiligten Stadtvierteln in

mittelständische Nachbarschaften umgesiedelt worden sind, hat der Wohnortwechsel sich im

Gebrauch des AE ausgewirkt (Rickford et al. 2015). Kinder und Jugendliche benutzten

weniger AE Merkmale, jedoch hielt sich der Effekt in Grenzen. Dieses Projekt zeigte auch,

dass das Ausmaß dieses Effekts stark von der persönlichen und familiären Einstellung zur

afroamerikanischen Kultur abhängt. Somit, da das AE eng mit der eigenen ethnischen

Identität verknüpft ist, jedoch offizielle und formelle Situationen den Gebrauch des

Standardenglisches verlangen, entscheidet sich die Mehrheit der AE-Sprecher*innen dafür

ihre Sprache der konkreten Situation anzupassen. Somit wird AE weiterhin neben

Standardenglisch bestehen bleiben, da es andere soziolinguistische Funktionen erfüllt, und

somit werden sich beide Varietäten auch in Zukunft einander beeinflussen.

Frequently asked questions

What is African American Vernacular English (AAVE)?

AAVE is a nonstandard, stigmatized variety of English with a concrete set of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical patterns. It's one of the most researched and controversially discussed varieties by sociolinguists.

What are the main theories regarding the origins of AAVE?

There are two main theories: the Creolist Hypothesis and the Anglicist Approach. The Creolist Hypothesis suggests AAVE descended from a creole language, similar to Gullah, with African substratum influences. The Anglicist Approach argues AAVE originated from learning early white vernaculars as a second language.

What is the Creolist Hypothesis?

The Creolist Hypothesis posits that AAVE originated as a creole language and has undergone decreolization, steadily assimilating to white vernaculars. It emphasizes the influence of West African languages on AAVE's grammatical structure.

What is the Anglicist Approach?

The Anglicist Approach claims that AAVE originated from learning early white vernaculars as a second language and is therefore a dialect of English, with language change patterns similar to other vernaculars.

What is the significance of Gullah in the context of AAVE's origins?

Gullah is an English-lexified creole spoken in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. It serves as a reference point for the Creolist Hypothesis, suggesting AAVE may have similar creole roots.

What is the role of the "zero copula" in the AAVE origin debate?

The absence of the copula verb "to be" in certain contexts is a key feature in the origin debate. Creolists argue it reflects African substrate influence, while Anglicists suggest it's an innovation or retention of older English forms.

What sociohistorical conditions influenced the development of AAVE after the Civil War?

Farm tenancy and the Great Migration played significant roles. Farm tenancy led to increased inter-ethnic contact and linguistic convergence between AAVE and Southern White Vernaculars (SWV). The Great Migration and subsequent segregation led to linguistic divergence.

What is the "divergence hypothesis"?

The divergence hypothesis argues that AAVE and Standard English are not converging but rather diverging due to factors like racial segregation and socioeconomic disparities.

What are some phonological features shared between AAVE and SWV?

Shared features include the loss of /r/ after consonants, front stressing of initial syllables, glide reduction, and certain vowel mergers.

What factors contributed to the Great Migration?

Factors included Jim Crow laws, racial violence, economic disadvantages in the South, and the demand for cheap labor in the North.

How did the Great Migration impact the linguistic development of AAVE?

The Great Migration resulted in de facto segregation and limited inter-ethnic contact. This has been linked to the divergence of AAVE from white vernaculars and the standardization of AAVE features across different regions.

What is the significance of the "Southern Vowel Shift" in the context of AAVE and SWV?

The Southern Vowel Shift is a series of vowel changes in Southern white speech. While SWV shows a general shift of various vowels, in Memphis, African Americans has been affected by the Southern Vowel Shift although to slightly different degrees than whites. This indicates both varieties are adapting to the vowel changes but with AAVE resisting features that might be closely linked with racial identity.

What are some contemporary structural developments in AAVE?

Recent changes in the tense and aspect system of AAVE show that they have developed unique structures such as reinterpreting verbal -s inflection to mark the historic present, with 'be done' used as direct consequence to a verb, quotative *be like", and stressed "stay' as a frequentative/habitual feature.

What are the counterarguments to the divergence hypothesis?

Some critics suggest the findings are due to flawed methodology, variable time depth, and age-grading. Also, research has displayed converging tendencies, indicating the opposite of the hypothesized development.

How do inter-ethnic contact situations affect the relationship between AAVE and white vernaculars?

Inter-ethnic contact can lead to linguistic assimilation, reversing the effects of divergence. However, the extent of assimilation depends on factors like peer influence, perceived prestige, and group identity.

Does social mobility affect the use of AAVE?

Yes. Studies show that individuals with greater social mobility are likely to code-switch and incorporate standard variants into their speech. This effect often depends on the context, purpose, and type of group affiliation.

Key themes in the preview.

The preview emphasizes the relationship between language, social factors like segregation and mobility, the ongoing debate surrounding AAVE's origins and linguistic structure, and the shifting identities of blacks and whites.

Excerpt out of 55 pages - scroll top

Details

Title: The Historical Development of the Relationship between African American Vernacular English and White Vernaculars
College: Humboldt-University of Berlin
Grade: 1,0
Author: Melissa Yunker (Author)
Publication Year: 2016
Pages: 55
Catalog Number: V353218
ISBN (eBook): 9783668397903
ISBN (Book): 9783668397910
Language: English
Tags: linguistik linguistics aave african american creole racial segregation usa pidgin language south urban dialect vernacular divergence hypothesis
Product Safety: GRIN Publishing GmbH

Quote paper: Melissa Yunker (Author), 2016, The Historical Development of the Relationship between African American Vernacular English and White Vernaculars, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/353218

The Historical Development of the Relationship between African American Vernacular English and White Vernaculars

Excerpt

Frequently asked questions

What is African American Vernacular English (AAVE)?

What are the main theories regarding the origins of AAVE?

What is the Creolist Hypothesis?

What is the Anglicist Approach?

What is the significance of Gullah in the context of AAVE's origins?

What is the role of the "zero copula" in the AAVE origin debate?

What sociohistorical conditions influenced the development of AAVE after the Civil War?

What is the "divergence hypothesis"?

What are some phonological features shared between AAVE and SWV?

What factors contributed to the Great Migration?

How did the Great Migration impact the linguistic development of AAVE?

What is the significance of the "Southern Vowel Shift" in the context of AAVE and SWV?

What are some contemporary structural developments in AAVE?

What are the counterarguments to the divergence hypothesis?

How do inter-ethnic contact situations affect the relationship between AAVE and white vernaculars?

Does social mobility affect the use of AAVE?

Key themes in the preview.

Details