African American Vernacular English (AAVE),

known colloquially as Ebonics, also called Black English, Black Vernacular or Black English Vernacular, is a dialect and ethnolect of American English. Similar in certain pronunciational respects to common southern U.S. English, the dialect is spoken by many African Americans in the United States. AAVE shares many characteristics with various pidgin and creole English dialects spoken by blacks worldwide. AAVE also has grammatical origins in, and pronunciational characteristics in common with, various West African languages. The term Ebonics, which is a portmanteau of ebony and phonics, has been suggested as an alternative name for this dialect. However, that name is not widely used in linguistic literature, although it enjoys considerable common use as a result of the controversy surrounding it (see below). Robert L. Williams, a linguistics professor at Washington University, created the term Ebonics in 1973, then detailed it in his 1975 book, Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks. The term was not widely known until the late 1990s, when it became a controversial topic in the United States, mainly over its linguistic status.

AAVE has its deepest roots in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade, but also has features of English spoken in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries. Distinctive patterns of language usage among African slaves and, later, African Americans arose out of the need for multilingual populations of African captives to communicate among themselves, and with their captors. During the Middle Passage, these captives, many of them already multi-lingual speakers of dialects of Wolof, Twi, Hausa, Yoruba, Dogon, Akan, Kimbundu, Bambara and other languages, developed pidgins — simplified mixtures of two or more languages. Over time in the Americas, some of these pidgins became fully developed creole languages. Significant numbers of African Americans still speak some of these creole languages, notably Gullah on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

As a language is used by isolated and diverging groups of people, the language itself becomes isolated and divergent and splits off into various dialects. Pronunciational aspects of AAVE are based in large part on the Southern American English variety, an influence that no doubt was reciprocal as the dialects diverged. The traits of AAVE that separate it from standard English include grammatical structures traceable to West African languages; changes in pronunciation along definable patterns, many of which are found in Creole and pidgin dialects of other populations of West African descent (but which also emerge in English pidgin dialects uninfluenced by West African languages, such as Newfoundland English); distinctive slang; and differences in the use of tenses. AAVE also has a substantial vocabulary little understood among speakers of other dialects of English, but has contributed several words with African origins now in common use in SAE: "gumbo", "goober", "yam", "banjo", "bogus" — and even some slang (which should NOT be confused with AAVE since the latter has developed over several centuries with consistent grammatical patterns, while slang represents mainly short-lived fads in colloquial speech) expressions, such as "hip" and "hep cat". It should be noted that in areas of close socialization between speakers of AAVE and other groups, many speakers of AAVE are NOT black.

AAVE's departure from Southern American English was a natural consequence of cultural differences between blacks and whites. sociologists, linguists and psychologists, however, believe divergent development of this kind is often passive subversion. Language becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and pride. In the case of African Americans, AAVE has survived and thrived through the centuries also as a result of various degress of isolation from Southern American English and Standard American English--through both self-segregation and marginalization from mainstream society.

Most speakers of AAVE are bidialectical since they use Standard American English (SAE) to varying degrees as well as AAVE. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with the rise in socioeconomic status, although speakers of AAVE typically readily understand SAE at all socioeconomic levels. Most African Americans, regardless of socioeconomic status, educational background, or geographic region, use some form of AAVE to various degress in informal and intra-ethnic communication. This process of selective language usage, based on social context, is called code switching. Some phrases in AAVE have entered popular American culture, and these may be employed contextually by speakers belonging to diverse ethnic groups.

AAVE is often erroneously perceived by members of mainstream American society to indicate inferior intelligence or low educational attainment. Furthermore, as with many other creole dialects, AAVE sometimes has been called "lazy" or "bad" English by those who do not understand the process of creolization. A similar perception exists with regard to SAE in Britain and other English-speaking nations. Such appraisals also may be due in part to AAVE's substitution of aspect for tense in some cases and certain grammatical and phonological reductions. Some challenge whether AAVE should be considered a dialect at all. However, among linguists there is no such controversy, since AAVE, like all dialects, shows consistent internal logic and structure.

In the late 1990s, the formal recognition of AAVE as a distinct dialect and its proposed use as an educational tool, as Ebonics, to help African American students become more fluent in SAE became a controversial subject in the United States.