African American English Essay

The African American Vernacular English, its route, its features, and the racism

African American Vernacular English in Society For many years, Negro people have been considered as inferior to the whites. Unfortunately this prejudice and racism concern different aspects, always seeing their peculiarities as deficiencies and not simply different characteristics. Beginning with the color of their skin and their somatic features until arriving to suspect of their mental ability, even their way of speaking has become one of the reasons to discriminate against them. As the African-American professor John Baugh points out according to its own experience, African-American children get used to being discriminated yet at school, where teachers do

Some educators living in this city decided to use AAVE as the official language of their students of African descent; since they claimed Ebonics as a language “in its own right” and not a dialect of English. The situation became sharp since government officials and politicians of every level rejected Ebonics and wanted to banish it. Despite some attempts to revise the educator's decision, all the legislative efforts failed and Oakland stopped using Ebonics as an official language. After this chaos, every comedian and editorial cartoonists would make fun of it. It became an excuse for intolerant people to be racist and even some African American would mock Ebonics. (Baugh, 2000:

On the one hand, some do not recognize AAVE’s existence but tend to describe it most of all as a colorful slang or an English dialect. On the other hand instead, some believe that AAVE is a separate language from Standard English. Beyond this opposition, many linguists and scholars wonder themselves whether AAVE is to be considered as a creole or as a variety of a language separate from the North American varieties of English. (Mufwene, 2001: