African American Vernacular English

Today linguists agree that there are differences between black speech and white speech. But since there is no way in which one variety can be linguistically superior to another there is no way to a racist view here. The political and social climate is now such that this linguistic problem can be extensively studied and discussed. In fact, such a store of interesting data has been uncovered in the past several years that the study of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is now one of the major preoccupations of many American linguists. This term is generally used to refer to the non-standard English spoken by lower-class Blacks in the urban ghettoes of the northern USA and elsewhere. The term Black English, as AAVE was sometimes called, had the disadvantage that all Blacks speak this variety of English - which is not the case. The use of the term 'Vernacular' (народный, туземный) on the other hand, distinguishes those Blacks who do not speak Standard American English from those who do, as in:

A fifteen-year-old harlem boy: 'You know, like some people say ‘f you're good your spirit goin' t'heaven. ..'n' if you bad, your spirit goin' to hell. Well, bullshit! Your spirit goin' to hell anyway. I'll tell you why. 'Cause, you see, doesn' nobody really know that it's a God. An' when they be sayin' if you good, you goin' t'heaven, tha's bullshit, 'cause you ain't goin' to no heaven, 'cause it ain't no heaven for you to go to.' (From a survey of New York speech led by William Labov.)

In any case, although AAVE is now recognized in academic linguistic circles as a normal, valid and interesting variety of English, controversy still remains. While it is recognized that there are differences between AAVE and other varieties, there is disagreement as to the nature of these differences and, in particular, as to their origin. One view is that all features which are said to be characteristic of AAVE can also be found in the speech of Wites, although not necessarily in the same combination and proportion, and particularly in the white speech of the southern states of the USA. They have come to be interpreted as 'black English' because black people have emigrated from the south of Great Britain to the northern cities of the USA, so that what were originally geographical differences have now become, in the north, ethnic-group differences. Furthermore, it is also possible that racial segregation and the growth of ghettoes, which means that there has been only minimal contact between Blacks and Whites, have led to the independent development of English of the two groups - that the two varieties have generated their own distinct linguistic innovations (compare with Estuary English).

The other view claims that many characteristics of AAVE can be explained by supposing that the first American Blacks spoke some kind of Creole English. The term creole is applied to a pidgin language, which has become established as the native language of a speech community, and has therefore acquired all the functions and characteristics of a full natural language. At first, a simplified or otherwise modified form of the language of the dominant group Creole comes to be used for communication between the members of different groups. At this stage it is a lingua franca. When the lingua franca becomes the standard or the native language of a community, usually of a less dominant group, the language has become a Creole.

Let’s select some of the most frequently cited phonological features:

Many black speakers do not have non-prevocalic /r/ in cart or car. This feature can quite clearly be traced back to British dialects, and it is also, of course, a feature found in the speech of many American Whites. Many lower-class Blacks, however, also demonstrate loss of intervocalic /r/ (that is, /r/ between vowels) in words like Carol and Paris (Ca 'ol. Pa 'is), so that Paris and pass, parrot and pat may be homophonous (i.e., sound the same). This feature, though not nearly so commonly, can be heard in the speech of certain southern Whites (British readers will perhaps be familiar with this sort of pronunciation from Westerns: Howdy she'iff!), and there are also speakers of British RP who can be heard, for example, to say very and similar words with no /r/: ve'y nice. Some black speakers also show loss of /r/ after initial consonants, in certain cases, e.g. f’om = from, p'otect = protect.

Many black speakers often do not have /ө/, as in thing, or/∂/, as in that. In initial position they may be merged with /t/ and /d/ respectively, so that this becomes dis, for example. This feature is also found, to a certain extent, in the speech of white Americans, but not, it appears, nearly so frequently. It is worth noting that it is also a feature of Caribbean Creoles. In other positions, /ө/ and /∂/ may be merged with /f/ and /v/, so that pronunciations such as b'uvvuh [bΛvә] for 'brother', may occur. This feature is also well-known in London speech.

All English speakers, in their normal speech, simplify final consonant clusters in words like lost, west, desk, end or cold (where both consonants are either voiceless or voiced; where another consonant follows: los ' time, wes ' coast). Where a vowel follows, however, simplification does not occur: lost elephant, west end. In AAVE, on the other hand, simplification can take place in all environments, so that pronunciations like los ' elephant, wes' en' may occur. This means that, in AAVE, plurals of nouns ending in Standard English in -st, -sp and -sk are often formed on the pattern of class - classes rather than of clasp - clasps. For example, the plural of desk may be desses, the plural of test, tesses.

A number of other features are characteristic of AAVE pronunciation. They include the nasalization of vowels before nasal consonants and the subsequent loss of the consonant: run, rum, rung = [rΛ]; vocalization and loss of non-prevocalic [1d]: told may be pronounced identically with toe; and the devoicing of final /b/,/d/,/g/ (bud and but may be distinguished only by a slightly longer vowel of the former) and possible loss of final /d/: toad (жаба) may be pronounced identically with toe. All these features, with the possible exception of the last, can be found in various white varieties of English.

Grammatical differences are more central to the argument:

Many black speakers do not have -s in third-person singular present-tense forms, so that forms such as he go, it come, she like are usual. However, this is also a feature of certain British dialects (it is widespread in East Anglia), and occurs in the speech of many (particularly southern) white Americans. There are two possible interpretations of these figures. One interpretation is that both varieties are inherently variable with respect to -s, and that it is simply the proportions of -s usages that are different.

Many black speakers do not use the copula - the verb to be - in the present tense. This characteristic is central to the present controversy. In AAVE, as in Russian, Hungarian, Thai and many other languages including Creoles, the following type of sentence is grammatical: She real nice; They out there; He not American; If you good, you goin’ to heaven.

Linguists point out that AAVE deletes the copula only in those contexts where Standard English contracts it (i.e. is becomes 's or are becomes 're). It is therefore possible to conclude that the copula deletion may be a phonological innovation of AAVE which continues the older process of deletion, thus: he is > he's > he, they are > they're > they.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of AAVE is the so-called 'invariant be': the use of the form be as a finite verb form. For example: He usually be around; Sometime she be fighting; She be nice and happy. At first sight, this use of be appears to be not different from its occurrence in certain British dialects, where I be, he be, etc. correspond to Standard English l am, he is. There is, however, a crucial difference between AAVE and all other varieties of English. As the adverbs usually and sometimes in the above sentences show, invariant be is used in AAVE only to indicate a habitual aspect to refer to some event that is repeated and is not continuous. There is therefore a verbal contrast in AAVE, which is not possible in Standard English.

Habitual - non-habitual distinction is not unknown in British-Isles dialects, although where it does occur it does so in by no means exactly the same form. In the old-fashioned dialect of Dorset, for example. He beat his wife, meaning 'He beat her on one particular occasion in the past,' contrasts with He did beat his wife, meaning that he was in the habit of doing so.

AAVE and Standard English have in common a present perfect verb form, ` I have talked, and past perfect form, I had talked. But AAVE has, in addition, two further forms: I done talked, which has been called 'completive aspect', indicating that the action is completed; and I been talked, the 'remote aspect', indicating an event that occurred in the remote past.

Existential it occurs where Standard English has there. For example, It's a boy in my class name Joey; It ain't no heaven for you to go to; Doesn't nobody know that it's a God. This last sentence also illustrates negativized auxiliary preposition. In AAVE, if a sentence has a negative indefinite like nobody, nothing, then the negative auxiliary (doesn't, can't) can be placed at the beginning of the sentence: Can't nobody do nothing about it; Wasn't nothing wrong with that (with statement intonation).

In these varieties it would be possible for a fuller form to occur: We were eating - and we were drinking too

In many English Creoles it is more usual to omit only the auxiliary. Consider the following translations of the above example into Gullah, an English Creole spoken in an isolated part of the coastal American South, Jamaican Creole and Sranan (short for Sranan Tongo, lit., Suriname tongue), an English Creole spoken in Surinam:

Gullah Creole: We bin duh nyam - en ' we duh drink, too.

Jamaican Creole: We ben a nyam -an' we a drink, too.

Sranan Creole: We ben de nyang -en' we de dringie, too.

(In this example nyam and nyang = eat, bin is the past tense marker or auxiliary - note the parallel with AAVE I been talked - and duh, a and de are continuous aspect markers corresponding to English - ing forms.)

An Impartial linguist’s view is that, even if many of the features of AAVE can be found in various white dialects, AAVE itself functions today as a separate ethnic-group variety which identifies its speakers as being black rather than white. Many of the features of AAVE must be ascribed to the fact that the first Blacks in the United States spoke some kind of English Creole - the resemblances between AAVE and West Indian Creoles are at some points too striking to ignore. This, however, does not necessarily indicate that other features of AAVE may not be traceable directly to British dialects. In a few cases, for instance, archaisms lost in white speech may be preserved in AAVE. In other cases, the controversy about the origins of AAVE may be rather meaningless. Verb forms like he love, she do can probably be explained as the result of Creole background and British dialect influence, the one reinforcing the other. And it is worth remembering, too, that English Creoles themselves are historically also derived partly from British dialects.

More recently, echoes of the 'skewing' view have appeared in the work of American sociolinguists prominent in the study of AAVE. Some research appears to suggest that, even if AAVE is descended from an English-based Creole which has, over the centuries, come to resemble more and more closely the English spoken by other Americans, this process has now begun to swing into reverse. This 'divergence hypothesis' states that, because of lack of integration between black and white communities, particularly in urban areas, AAVE and white dialects of English are now once more beginning to grow apart. In other words, changes are taking place in white dialects, which are not occurring in AAVE, and vice versa. Quite naturally, this hypothesis has aroused considerable attention in the United States because, if true, it provides a dramatic reflection of the racially divided nature of the American society.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11