Member-only story
The Connection Between Black English and Memes
How African American Vernacular English made it to the internet
If you are an African American who grew up in integrated spaces, you may have had the not-so-pleasant experience of others calling African American Vernacular English (AAVE) “bad grammar” or “talking ghetto.” For some, speaking with the habitual “be” (“they be…”) or not conjugating a verb (“He crazy”) is associated with negative stigmas like being unprofessional or having poor communication skills. But contrary to mainstream understanding, this way of speaking has its own rules and syntax structures and comes from a particular experience of Black folk in America.
AAVE has a long history — largely rooted in the earliest generations of enslaved Africans that arrived on America’s shores. Black English was birthed from people who were forced to learn a second language (English) almost exclusively through oral means and without formal instruction (since it was illegal to teach a slave how to read). This experience produced a vernacular that reconciled both the differences between English and the different African mother tongues.
This dialect has been passed on from generation to generation and is an important part of African American culture. Writer Alice Walker says that when you consider the amount of time Black people have been in America, they have spoken Black “folk” English longer than they have even been able to speak standard English. Many AAVE speakers employ it only in specific contexts — as scholar André Brock writes in Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, there are many AAVE speakers who “cannot or will not use these forms at work or in certain social settings.” Brock was referring to the common experience of linguistic “code-switching,” where Black people use more standard English when speaking to non-Black audiences but revert back to AAVE when they are in Black communal spaces.
But one key truth that explanations, critiques, and defenses of AAVE often leave out is that Black English was developed by a group and is meant to be spoken by that group. There are certain parts of AAVE that are, in fact, not concerned with and are not meant to be understood by non-Black speakers.
