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D. American Black English
It goes by several names, all of them problematic: Black English, Black Vernacular, African
American English (AAE) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE), to mention a few. In the
mid-1990s the term Ebonics (a blend of “ebony” and “phonics”) lurched to sudden fame after the
Oakland Unified School Board passed a well-meaning but misguided resolution declaring Ebonics to
be the “predominantly primary” language of black children. Many of those children floundered in
school, where teachers scorned their accents and their speaking habits. But instead of focusing on
practical ways to improve the teaching or to boost inner-city kids’ chances in the classroom, the
creators of the Oakland resolution announced that Ebonics was no kind of English—not even, they
said, any kind of Indo-European language—but rather a “genetically based” member of the “West
and Niger-Congo African Language Systems.” If they wanted to make their cause look intellectually
ridiculous, they could hardly have made a better job of it.
In fact, the informal English spoken on occasion by most black Americans is closely related to the
dialect of southern whites. The lengthening of short vowels, a reliance on double negatives, some
systematic changes in verb forms—all these are qualities of white speech in states like Alabama and
South Carolina and of black speech across the United States. Given the cruelties of history, the
resemblance may appear ironic. But it should not be surprising, given that both dialects emerged
from the same principal source: the nonstandard English that belonged to the Scots, Welsh, Irish and
emigrants from rural England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were the colonists
who had the greatest contact with newly arrived African slaves, sometimes overseeing their labor,
sometimes working beside them in fields and plantations. These were the people whose voices most
strongly influenced the slaves as they embarked on the painful task of becoming English-speakers.
(Abley 146-147)
E. The Southern drawl
The phonological feature most associated with Southern English is the so-called “southern drawl.”
This is realized by the prolongation of certain vowel sounds and the “breaking of vowels and
diphthongs into triphthongs.” For example, “there” can be pronounced /ðajæ/ and “bad” /bæeɛd/.
Upgliding diphthongs occur in “pass,” “bath” and “after” to give the vowel sound /æɛ/ or /æy/.
Another distinctive characteristic of Southern English is the merging of the vowel sounds /I/ and /e/
as in the words “pin” and “pen.” This distinctive southern drawl excites prejudice in some people, as
illustrated in the following quotes. . . . The first demonstrates the speaker’s surprise that someone
who spoke with a southern drawl might be intelligent and the second. . . that a highly educated
person—a one-time President of the United States—could speak with a southern drawl:
“. . . Beneath that deceptive North Carolina drawl, there’s a crisp intelligence.”
“Governor Clinton, you attended Oxford University in England and Yale Law School in the Ivy