African American Vernacular English Argumentative Analysis

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is often being stigmatized negatively, especially in the workplace, speaking AAVE alleviates one’s chance in finding a job (Green 223). The reasons why people see AAVE as inferior are discussed as follows.

From the linguistic field, people regard AAVE as different from the Standard English. According to Green, the American believe that speakers of AAVE cannot speak mainstream English and so they need to use AAVE instead (221). They also believe that AAVE is an incorrect use of Standard English which contains a lot of grammatical and phonological mistakes (Green 221). For instance, speakers of AAVE spell the word “ask” to “ax” and many Americans see this pronunciation as an English mistake (Green 222).

According to Kirkpatrick, AAVE has its own lexical items and phonological features as the mainstream English (64). A well-known example is the non-use of consonant cluster in final position (Kirkpatrick 64). However, as Green suggests, most scholars do not thoroughly outline the rules of AAVE (222). The American do not have much opportunity to learn more about the language. Thus, it gives a misconception to the American that AAVE is a wrong English instead of a variety of