African American Vernacular English (AAVE)—recently called African American Language (AAL) also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular (BEV), or Black Vernacular English (BVE)—is an African American variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of American English. Non-linguists sometimes call it Ebonics (a term that also has other meanings and strong connotations).
Its pronunciation is, in some respects, common to Southern American English, which is spoken by many African Americans and many non-African Americans in the United States. Several creolists, including William Stewart, John Dillard, and John Rickford, argue that AAVE shares so many characteristics with creole dialects spoken by black people in much of the world that AAVE itself is a creole, while others maintain that there are no significant parallels.
As with all linguistic forms, its usage is influenced by age, status, topic and setting. There are many literary uses of this variety of English, particularly in African-American literature.
Read more about African American Vernacular English: Overview, Origins, Distinctive Features, Lexical Features, Social Context, In Literature and Media, In Education
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“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
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—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)