Incidentally, you’ll note that some in this argument don’t have to preface their statements with “In my opinion”. That’s because they’re not trying to pass off their own aesthetic/moral/etc. judgements as fact; they’re dealing with the real, empirical, scientific McCoy, the cold, brute facts of the ways in which sounds come out of the mouths of the people on this spinning rock, and, on another level, the natural and straightforward systems by which to organize and understand these patterns of behavior. Perhaps the mere fact that you even view the assertions on which you are being taken to task as matters which are up to opinion reveals a misguided perspective. [Alright, I’m being inordinately uncharitable in harping on you over these few words, but, really, your tone is begging to be read this way.]
I think the point is that there really is no “opinion” about whether or not something is a dialect once it’s been studied and diagrammed. Either it has a consistent internal logic and rules which vary some but are mutually intelligible with the surrounding speech, or it ain’t. If it isn’t consistent or logical, it’s slang or idiom, and if it isn’t intelligible, it’s a different language. AAVE is consistent and logical and it’s mutually intelligible (with some slowed speech and perhaps some explanations) with speakers of SAE.
“Dialect” is a specific technical term within a profession and AAVE meets the rubric of that term. You might just as well say that, in your opinion, stop signs aren’t red because your interpretation of red is the color of a raspberry, not an apple.
Or do you have a specific cite for a recent mainstream linguist who argues that AAVE isn’t a dialect? I’m not asking to be snotty, I really want to know; maybe there is more debate over the issue than I’m aware of.
From what I read and learned linguistics is a social science with a variety of opinions - and does not have the determinism of physical sciences - therefore my ask for a cite, is not asking for wikipedia article, but asking for academic views which would persuade me.
My mind can be changed here - with evidence from an academic perspective.
I searched the following terms in google:
AAVE dialect linguistics debate
Both sides are presented.
I don’t see that. All the links on the first page of the search support AAVE or AAE (which I now see has supplanted AAVE as the preferred nomenclature, so at least I learned something tonight) as at least a dialect, and perhaps even a unique language. Can you present me with a specific cite that you feel supports your claim that it is not seen as a dialect by modern mainstream linguists?
For example, lexi, one of the things you suggest marks AAE as “a slang” is the use of “I be…” This is not slang at all, but a verb tense that we don’t have in SAE. It’s logical and consistent, and “He working,” is an entirely different sentence from “He be working,” and any speaker of AAE knows the distinction. As charted in the wiki article, “He working,” means that the subject, he, is not consistently employed but is indeed working at the moment. “He be working,” means he has a consistent job and is at this moment working at it.
If people used this verb tense inconsistently, then it would indeed be anything from an error to slang. But it’s not used inconsistently. It’s as much a valid verb tense as past, present or future.
The wikipedia article “Dialect” seems (on a fairly cursory glance) to be decent place to start. (Unfortunately, no citations of linguists that I noticed.)
-FrL-
Here is something from a Linguistics course about American dialects.
-FrL-
Do you have access to JSTOR and/or other archives of academic journals?
-FrL-
Just a minor, thoroughly pedantic note, but I wouldn’t call that a tense (I’d say both of those examples are in the present tense), but rather an aspect. [Of course, in the folk-linguistic sense of “tense” as just “form of a verb”, it certainly qualifies]
Piddling point, though. I agree with you on everything that matters.
ETA: Er, all of that was to WhyNot.
Thank you much. It’s been more than 15 years since my last linguistics course and I don’t use this stuff everyday! It was part of my speech-pathology phase that didn’t last more than two semesters of hard science. :smack:
nitpick: I believe what you’ve described is a verb aspect, not a verb tense.
I was directing you to the references at the bottom of the Wikipedia article not for the sake of having you look at Wikipedia, but because they served as a list of non-Wikipedia sources of academic views on the matter. If you really want to keep your hands clean of Wikipedia, though, then I imagine you could take a look at almost any of the papers listed here. (But that’s not entirely sporting of me. Let me see if I can pick some specific, freely available relevant papers by linguists.)
I be being corrected! 
Don’t hurt me. I be a suburban white girl. I don’t speak AAE for squat.
What I said was not a critique of your definition of ‘dialect.’ I was not arguing. To repeat: I have no idea what your definition of ‘dialect’ actually is. I can’t possibly argue with you, since I don’t know what you mean by the word.
The quote that led me to doubt the most whether or not AAVE or AAE was a dialect in truth or only because of the social and political issues in the US was this:
Although the linguists are studying the semantic nature of AAE, the impression is that the words language and dialect have more political and social meaning, and perhaps given the issues in the US, the label of dialect was given.
In looking back and thinking out loud in the vernacular of my own family - and looking at many of the articles about AAE I see an intense linguistic similarity, if we don’t count the slang - the “aspect” of “I be” is common in “rural speak”, and there is slang belonging to rural people as well, especially among the Germanic descendants.
Would you consider my “rural folk” to have a dialect, or would this be too small of a difference from Standard for you to even consider?
What do you think of similar pronunciations between the rural prairie people who are descendants of eastern europeans and Germanic people and speakers of AAE?
Have there ever been comparative studies between rural vernaculars and AAE which have noticed the similarities? (I saw a cultural linguistic paper online which traced AAE to the southern rural vernacular which I want to read more of later)
The study of AAE came about as part of the civil rights movement, it’s true. Through this study, AAE was shown to be a systematic dialect, just as standard English is a systematic dialect. This debate of deficit vs. difference gave rise to sociolinguistics. The line between dialect and language is fuzzy, as are the lines between dialects. The current debate in AAE is whether it’s one unified dialect or multiple dialects. And one of the greatest debates in sociolinguistics is about the genesis of AAE, whether it arose from a creole or from white dialects. Yes, there are a lot of debates in linguistics about dialects and definitions and such, but I do not know one linguist who would say AAE is not a dialect. Linguistics is a science, and as scientists, linguists have determined AAE is a dialect.
The ‘be’ used in AAE is different from all other dialects I have heard of. It does not just translate to ‘is’, but has a habitual aspect. ‘My ears be itching’ means my ears habitually itch, not ‘My ears are itching,’ as it does in other dialects.
I probably would consider it a dialect. Why wouldn’t I? It’s mutually intelligible to standard English, but different enough to be noticeable.
Well, I haven’t studied it, so I don’t know what I would say. I’ve never heard of a connection between Germanic-inspired dialects of English and AAE, though a lot of work has been done with the relationship between Irish English and AAE.
There have been a lot lot lot of studies trying to figure out the relationship between AAE and white rural dialects, particularly in the Southern US.
I may be misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you think that AAE is being called a dialect in a misdirected PC way, and that white varieties are not getting the same respect. Nothing could be further from the truth. White dialects had long been studied in linguistics and considered legitimate dialects. In the sixties, like I said above, sociolinguistics was born of the effort to show that AAE was just as regular as white dialects.
Do you have access to a university library? These books might be helpful:
The Development of African American English
African American English: A Linguistic Introduction
African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications
John Rickford of Stanford, has done a lot of work on AAE, and has some of his writings on the topic linked on his website, though most of that is on the Oakland Ebonics controversy.
I’m sorry if this has been not completely coherent; I’m posting while sleepy. To summarize:
No (good) linguist is going to say AAE is not a dialect.
No (good) linguist is going to say AAE is a dialect just to be PC, and then say some comparable white dialect is not a dialect.
The aspect markers of AAE may sound the same as some white dialects, but there are many differences in the semantics.
No dialect is made up of wholly unique variables, but rather share many variables but have a unique way of putting them together or put them together to different extents.
Everyone speaks a dialect, often many, and a standard variety is still a dialect.
There is much debate about the definitions and boundaries of language/dialect/variety, but this is not an excuse to call an (admittedly uninformed) opinion just as legitimate.
AAE differs from other dialects by more than slang; no dialect is defined wholly by slang.
I think that’s it. Hopefully that clears up more things than it muddles. Please let me know what I can clarify. I’m afraid this might be confusing, particularly the parts about debates within the linguistics community.
And I also want to repost this link, which has more links about AAE by scholars:
http://www.linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics/
And I can, if you really want, send you PDFs of academic articles on AAE if you can’t access them through the web.
liberty3701, if it’s not too much of a digression, could you explain briefly what “just slang” means in a linguistic context? What makes something “slang”? Is it that it’s short lived, compared to other “real” words? Is it that only some speakers of a dialect will use those words, and not all of them? (For example, I don’t use “pwned”, but my son and his friends do - is that slang because it’s not a universal vocabulary word even though we speak the same dialect?)
How long or widespread does something have to be to stop being “slang” and be just another word? Seems like “cool” (in the approving sense) has been around for nearly a century in continuous use - is it not-slang yet?
Having a three year old whose use and understanding of “traditional English” is constantly changing and improving, I think I understand some of the natural prejudice against the AAE dialect: many of the irregularities typified by AAE (in my own admittedly-limited experience) are exactly the same kind of “mistakes” my daughter makes while learning traditional English. I’m talking about things like errors in tense, errors in single vs. plural (“We is…”), wrong pronouns (e.g. he vs. him), double-negatives, missing or incorrect forms of the verb “to be,” etc.
That can give the impression, right or wrong, that AAE is very similar to how an inexperienced preschooler would speak. It’s no wonder, then, that middle- and upper-class white Americans think AAE sounds particularly uneducated.
I understand that there are sociolinguistic nuances, and I’m not saying that AAE speakers are as uneducated as toddlers. I don’t intend any judgments, and I’m sure the reality of AAE’s evolution is more complex. I’m just offering an explanation for the poor reputation of AAE and its speakers.
-P