[QUOTE=shrimpman steve;379754]Now dats funny
What is the reason to speak like that?
Ebonics Notes and Discussion
John R. Rickford
December, 1996
(1) Some sample sentences in AAVE/Ebonics, with discussion of the ways in which they show the systematicity of AAVE:
AAVE: "She BIN had dat han'-made dress" (SE: She's had that hand-made dress for a long time, and still does.)
AAVE: "Befo' you know it, he be done aced de tesses." (SE Before you know it, he will have already aced the tests.)
AAVE: "Ah 'on know what homey be doin." (SE: I don't know what my friend is usually doing.)
AAVE: "Can't nobody tink de way he do." (SE: Nobody can think the way he does.)
AAVE: "I ast Ruf could she bring it ovah to Tom crib." (SE: I asked Ruth if/whether she could bring it over to Tom's place.)
Although AAVE does have some distinctive lexical items (e.g. homey and crib in the above examples), much of what people know from rap and hip hop and other popular Black culture is slang, young people's vocabulary--which is almost by definition subject to rapid change, and which in many cases crosses over or diffuses to other ethnic groups, becoming almost an icon of youth culture itself. The heart of AAVE, the part that is shared across most age groups (although they tend to be used most frequently by teenagers) and that link it most strongly to the language's origins in the creole speech of slavery (compare parallels with creole dialects in the Caribbean today or in Hawaii), is its phonology and grammar. These are the parts that tend to be less often diffused to other groups, and that are the most lasting and the most regular. The single biggest mistake people make about AAVE is dismissing it as careless, or lazy speech, where anything goes. As with all spoken languages, AAVE is extremely regular, rule-governed, and systematic.
WRT the grammar: Note in the above examples the tense-aspect markers "BIN" (a stressed form, marking the inception of the action or state at a subjectively defined remote point in time), "be done" (a future or in this case a conditional perfect, a future in the hypothetical past), and invariant habitual "be" (a form which has clear parallels with and possible derivations from creole "does be"--as used up to today in the Gullah off the coast of south Carolina and Georgia, or in Barbados, Trinidad, and Guyana). It is the complex tense-aspect system of AAVE which distinguishes it most strikingly from SE, and which led Nobel prize winning journalist Toni Morrison to remark (in an interview in The New Republic on March 21, 1981) that:
