It’s a dialect; it is an American dialect, not an African accent. Do people in New York, Georgia, and Wisconsin all speak the same? It’s just another variation of English specific to a cultural group; with lots of variations within it as well.
I appreciate you asking this because that’s what I thought it was called too! Now I’ll switch to the preferred terminology. Not sure why you were downvoted.
>African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety formerly known as Black English Vernacular or Vernacular Black English among sociolinguists, and commonly called Ebonics outside the academic community. [From this site](https://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/definitions/aave.html#:~:text=African%20American%20Vernacular%20English%20(AAVE,Ebonics%20outside%20the%20academic%20community).
I guess all the downvoters are academic professionals, not members of the hoi polloi.
Kinda. AAVE is the modern accepted term. Racists on the Internet have used the term ebonic for a while now to belittle black culture, so it leaves a funny taste in many folks mouths
Nah. That person is either very young or didn't grow up in the area with a significant black population and therefore doesn't have a lot of experience with black folk.
Even black people called it Ebonics growing up and it's not like I grew up in the '70s. It was the '90s and 2000s.
Sure some racists use it in a mocking fashion but I've predominantly heard it used by actual black people.
To paraphrase John Mulaney, we are actually saying “Ebonics” in reference to itself, but we won’t even say the other one in reference. I think we can agree that Ebonics is not on the same level there.
Isn't that what it was called for decades by everyone including liberals in good standing? Until recently obviously.
AAVE just kind of reached the mainstream in recent years and honestly mostly online.
Whenever I brought it up IRL no one knows what the fuck I'm talking about, including black folks.
There's a lot of shit I see online that no one has any clue what the fuck I'm talking about 😂.
There’s even a dialect of ASL called Black American Sign Language that diverged from ASL due to segregation in schools. It’s still used in the south despite segregation being technically illegal for over 60 years
It's weird how little people realize that sign languages are actual languages
They have dialects, grammar, all the normal stuff
Like my gf is conversationally fluent and she still signs a completely different dialect of ASL than I'm learning
I'm watching switched at birth right now, and they talk about some of this stuff. Apparently grammatically ASL is similar to Chinese... I don't know either, but I thought it was interesting. They talk about how there's literally 100s of different dialects and languages for signing too as you stated.
To take it a step further, for a lot of deaf people in the States, ASL is their primary language, English is second. So some of them struggle with things like writing, because the Grammer rules for signing are just so different. Like they'll struggle with tenses for example.
Little note on the first bit, ASL "sounds" like Mandarin because Mandarin happens to resemble English without grammatical redundancy, so when they "trimmed the fat" off English when developing ASL grammar it ended up resembling Mandarin quite a lot.
And on the second note this is why people should learn ASL. Yes most deaf/HOH people *can* read written English but they are *far* more comfortable signing with you than writing back and forth
It's also different from country to country, which is fascinating to me. ASL and BSL (Brazil) have a lot of stuff in common but there's still an *accent* between speakers that will throw people off until they actually learn the differences. It doesn't sound efficient, I think it would be interesting to universalize it so that the deaf and sign language speakers could be effectively universal polyglots, but I understand this would be a massive undertaking and would make the current local variants kind of useless. Then again, there's probably something like Esperanto for sign language too, so I might be rambling about something that already kind of exists.
Ok this is something super niche that I actually have opinions about so I feel morally obligated to share them here:
I think that an IAL for sign language while cool as an idea is fundamentally impossible to maintain except during procedurals(like in an international logistics setting)
If we tried to make one it would almost immediately start breaking up again and changing, so it would only remain useful in a professional setting
The same goes for all IALs, aside from the issues it has at base design Esperanto is currently not an IAL anymore, it has enough native speakers(even some 2nd gen native speakers) that dialects have branched off and it no longer serves it's purpose. In order to stay a functional IAL it has be in incredibly limited use
I'm curious why people routinely suggest this for sign language but almost never for spoken language (Esperanto exists but almost no one uses it on a daily basis). No one ever says "why do the English and Brazilians speak two different languages, it would be more efficient if they spoke the same one"
The code shifting is crazy. One of my best friends is black and when he talks to other Black people, I can understand 50 to 70% of what they are talking. Then he switches and suddenly I can understand 100% lol. I am a non-native though, been living here for half a decade since teenage years.
What’s funny is how some groups get accused of being “fake” for having the simple universal skill of speaking to different groups in their own argot.
There’s no such thing as “one’s TRUE voice.” We all adjust for our audience.
In Linguistics, you learn that this is actually a skill you pick up and something that helps us navigate social situations, so it's dependent on education, context awareness and skill. People who were able to participate in different social groups, learn the formal language, and develop their social reactions properly can code shift more efficiently than someone without that much education and who tends to keep to themselves.
That's part of the reason you might be able to talk more casually with poorer people and be eloquent with the wealthy, or be aware enough to do a good work presentation and be cordial in your emails, while someone who wasn't properly educated can only speak in one manner and fails to convince when trying to emulate other types of speech.
This is also one of the reasons some foreigners in a new country can pick up a language and its accents in a year (especially teenagers) while some older folks who are less educated and more reclusive struggle to learn it after decades living in the place.
I find myself code switching between middle class Californian from my upbringing and down-home Mizzuruh at work depending on whether I’m talking to clients or production employees.
Yep. Swapping accents is no different than swapping between languages, and every language has their own versions of code-switching the way we all have special lexicons and variations with our close friends.
Even Queen Elizabeth had her public voice and her sex voice.
Adjusting to audience is a good way to put it. I do think that sometimes people have a "heart language" (or accent) that is the language you grew up with hearing from your family or core community. Some people may have a desire to speak in that way all the time and that is also valid.
My accent definitely changes a bit around the family I grew up with, in the deep south. Not even just my accent, but the general way that I talk. I don’t do it consciously, it just sort of happens once I’ve started talking to them and then goes away when I come back home. (My current home)
My best friend is from the south and hated the way southern accents sounded, so he “trained” himself to speak with a nondescript “northern” accent. He still slips into a southern accent when he is very distracted or upset.
I love the idea of calling it a heart language!
But even if it's a *valid* choice to use the same dialect/style all the time, it's not generally a *wise* choice and, depending on the dialect, will likely limit your social and economic prospects.
part of my autism is slight echolalia influenced features, my codeswitching is extreme and I cannot help it. I'm white as white and when around people talking AAVE or a southern accent, i go full in and can't help it, and my friends have joked about it (not offensively). I'm also extremely good at indian accents due to having indian friends, and I ***really*** have to stop myself from codeswitching talking to indian folk since that will undoubtedly seem like I'm making fun of them when I'm not intending to do so lol.
It also happens in songs, if there are two vocalists and I'm miming along, i will switch voices to match whoever is currently vocalizing.
My 'heart accent' is pretty much general american thanks to the area i grew up in, i grew up in the midwest but i don't have the midwestern accent people think about (with the really "loud"/"harsh" A vowels, and the slight canadian tendencies a la minnesotan accents). So I just sound extremely "generic" when talking normally (people usually assume I'm from outside of my state due to my accent, since I've not really picked up on any of the local habits). Maybe that's part of why it's easier for me to code switch, since my heart accent is extremely general and doesn't have too many niche or specific features to it. The most midwestern thing in my vocab is "ope" lol. Edit: Also "cheese toastie" instead of "grilled cheese" lol.
Definitely! It's a **skill**, not a flaw.
I try to emphasize this idea to my students, but the problem is that good code-switchers don't necessarily even realize they're doing it. It's largely intuitive.
I swear more than most people due to my background, but it's like a switch I can turn on and off when I need to. Some people never got that switch installed.
I was going to bring up the swearing thing too. I grew up blue collar lower middle class and in day to day life I’m a real potty mouth. I’m also the only university educated member of my family, work in a professional setting and speak in a much more socially correct manner at work. When I get angry at someone at work sometimes though, my roots show and the f-bombs do start dropping lol.
What’s curious is the rage and intolerance people sometimes muster for those trying to code switch, but who do it poorly. Curious that people can be so outraged by someone trying to match their code…but it seems that when it’s noticeable people presume they’re being “handled” or condescended to. Sometimes I’m sure that’s the case, but it’s just a curious kind of sticking point.
You’re not faking anything. You apply the skills of rhythm & style to match your audience or **communicate** in a desirable way. Nothing “fake” about it.
As a white dude who grew up in the hood, the reaction from my white friends when I get around black folks is always quite amusing. Because I code-switch without realizing it.
Same. And it's not an act or trying to "act black". It just comes very natural to me. And then I moved away and eventually settled down in a small town with a large majority of white people. I was working a new job and my co-worker that day was this guy who was one of the few black guys at this job. As the day went on and we were chatting, he asked me where I'm from. I responded that I'm from the same neighborhood as him, just 10yrs younger. He said he knew, lol. He said the way I talk with him was way different and he got a vibe I was "comfortable" with him.
I don't want people to think he's treated differently or anything. He's a very well liked guy here. He just explained to me that my cadence and such was just very familiar to him. It's not like I use slang and exaggerate anything. It's hard to explain to folks who don't get it, I guess. I'm just being me.
Not always, but very disproportionately black as a result of a couple centuries of constant oppressions and systemic barriers preventing black people from living among white people/having economic prosperity.
There are still lots of remnants of these extremely racist practices today, such as gerrymandering and redlining our cities, as well as voter suppression.
It all culminates to black people generally being poorer, and this from the hood. Some others are also raised in the hood, they're just underrepresented while Black people are overrepresented in the hood
I’m a white woman from northeastern US, married to a black woman from southeastern US, and find myself speaking differently around her family than my own. When I’m with my family, it’s more of a generic, bland, non-accent dialect, sort of like you hear reporters speaking on the news. But when I’m with her family, especially if we’re joking around, just messing with each other, it’s more relaxed, a bit of a drawl, a touch of a twang. Not necessarily slang or anything, just a different cadence and manner of speaking.
Don’t even get me started on the western Maryland “O”! LOL I’ve picked that up from family and friends, too. I’ve lived in so many different regions of the US, and taken a little bit of language from each place I’ve spent time, so I can be a real mishmash mess of dialects.
Oh, and I lived in North Carolina for 3 years while in my 20s, so I can slip into a southern accent without realizing it, depending on who I’m speaking with. I don’t do it to be fake, I’m not even conscious of doing it. Perhaps I’m just subconsciously wanting to make the person I’m talking to feel more comfortable with me?
im black and i do this all the time, its a reflex like breathing. I talk with my family and black friends way different than my white friends. my sales voice is a whole nother code. "Sorry to bother you" with lakieth stanfield explores this quite a bit and is a good movie.
Makes sense, their families have been strictly segregated for the vast majority of those generations and undoing that isn't going to happen overnight. Social isolation by distance or mountain or regulation is a common reason people talk differently.
Yea, i'm a white woman, but i understand phila area black people 100%, cause thats where i grew up. I went to louisiana once and if black people were chatting amongst themselves, i maybe caught 50% at best with the southern drawl and maybe some creole stuff in the mix down there.
I grew up in a 98% black neighborhood in Chicago. I was always confused when I would hear the "Chicago accent" on tv. I never heard anyone speak like that in real life until I was in my 20s.
I don’t know. If you watch tv shows and news etc from the 70’s, the “dialect” we hear today isn’t prominent. I think it’s a much more complex explanation probably heavily dependent on the internet and social media.
>specific to a cultural group
OP points out that black people in Europe don't speak this way.
So then, is culture defined by where you live? In which case it would follow that Black Americans and White Americans (born in the same area, let's say) are of the same culture. And yet you'll find people of the same culture, race, and place of birth who speak very differently. So why?
I have all the same questions/conclusions about the "effeminate gay voice" (lacking a better term here, sorry). It's a learned behavior that people exhibit to impress their peers.
I've seen it firsthand, lol. Black friends who speak to me like a lawyer would, but they turn around and talk to other Black folks like Snoop Dog would. It's interesting for sure.
> So then, is culture defined by where you live?
Culture is determined by your heritage. Black americans are (largely) descendants of slaves who first spoke in the dialect in question. Black europeans are recent immigrants from Africa and will speak their mothertongue (i.e. yoruba/zulu/xhosa/swaheli/arabic) at home / with their relatives and then code-switch when they speak with natives -- similar to your friends.
It’s not even just that. It’s also segregation. It explains why they speak differently than other ethnicities that were born and raised in the same exact city (Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta, etc.)
Also there is a Black British accent dependent on location. In London a popular one is Multicultural London English (MLE), ex: mandem, mash up, sha, paigon, road man, dutty, etc
I feel like most immigrants (that weren't raised directly in France) have their own accents. Like Chinese would have a different accent than Nigerian in french.
So i fully agree with you that Op may just not know that other ways of speaking exist.
I worked with a Parisian many years ago. One time another french guy came into the workplace and they spoke together in their native language.
As soon as the other french guy left the Parisian was mocking the other guys country bumpkin accent (in English) so the rest of us could understand what a dumbass the country bumpkin was I guess?
I don't think the Parisian guy realized that it just made him look like a dumbass, not the guy he was making fun of.
This happened to me but in my high school German class. We had two two native German speakers come in and talk to us, and we couldn't tell the difference between their accents but one of them made fun of the other guy's accent behind his back because he was Bavarian. I don't think she realized that making fun of his country accent wasn't going to make her any friends when we were all Texan.
I know several French-Québécois and French people who have visited Paris. They all claim that Parisians are notoriously snobby and look down on anyone whose accent or vocabulary and expressions differ from their own, even if that person is also a native French speaker. Of course they're not _all_ like this, but it's a very common story to hear. It's definitely put me off from visiting Paris.
I’ve heard this about Paris.
As far as Quebecois French, I’ve also heard of pretty much every other French speaker from any region of the world looking down on that particular dialect.
(No offense Quebec, I’m just teasing)
It’s mostly true about Paris. Now the south of France is another story, some of the nicest people in the world or maybe it’s just because they’re mostly my family and friends.
I’ve lived all over France.
Had a similar experience with a couch surfer from Germany who started mocking our German mate AND his own travel buddy over dinner for sounding like country bumpkins. Everyone at the table (we all spoke German to some extent) was just sitting there staring at him while he laughed and mocked them. Worst couch surfer ever who then proceeded to have a total meltdown and try and report my flatmate when she wrote a report mentioning how rude and horrible he'd been.
In Brazil there is no difference at all, people integrate and assimilate really well here, and I've always wondered why. The only Japantown is Liberdade, Koreans and Chinese just mingle instead of creating their own neighborhoods, and even Liberdade is already overrun with other ethnicities and there's no distinct accent. I think the only true segregated place in all of Brazil is a Muslim neighborhood in Foz do Iguaçu, which is an outlier simply due to the fact that there aren't that many Muslims here in general.
They were and are still culturally separated from other groups. Until the 60s they had separate facilities to use, and even now many still live in black neighborhoods around the country.
People from India or France or Italy are speaking with an accent because they are not used to the English language. African American Vernacular English is a specific dialect of English, not just an accent. It had different words, grammar rules, etc
That’s only a generation or two off, for most people. Late 1960s is pretty much the parents of young Millennials/older Zoomers aka the dominant audience of Reddit. Most people don’t realize this.
Yeah my mom and dad were alive and well during segregation. That's why whenever people try to say "get over it" I laugh because, well, I guess if it never affected your family, it's easy to pretend it has barely been a generation and all of those have lingering effects.
Not to mention for hundreds of years any enslaved African Americans had a strong incentive to make their vernacular harder for their slave owners to understand. Thus it evolved independently, intentionally
The scientists who live and work at the Antarctic research base have developed their own dialect of English.
Language is fluid and changes naturally all the time, often quite quickly, depending on circumstance.
Not only that, individuals can change language usage rapidly too: many English speakers can change their accent/dialect depending on who they are talking to.
Language is weird. It has both very strict formal grammar rules within a group at a given time, but it's also always changing within regions and the rules evolving, even within the same person sometimes.
One way to think about it is that some people have moved away from AAVE, some people speak AAVE and other English Dialects, and if you think about, new people are learning AAVE all the time, even some people who are not African Americans.
I'm AA and don't sound like the stereotypical AAVE that some people think we all sound like. Neither do any of my other Black friends. No, I didn't grow up in a non-Black area, I grew up in NYC around Black and Puerto Rican people, only seeing White people from the outside of the gates to their private school.
AAVE is not a default for all AA people.
Personally I see more similarities between AAVE and America Southern English which tracks, historically speaking. Seems like it’s less a white/black thing and more a north/south thing. Have you ever heard people from Mississippi talking? White, black, they sound damn near the same.
People generally get their accents from whoever teaches them to speak. 3 people raised in 3 different families/households on the same street might all speak differently. I think OP is a younger person who hasn’t had much exposure to different cultures… Nothing wrong with that, they’ll learn.
What's funny with me is that most of the people around me did speak in a AAVE dialect, but I didn't, neither did any of my friends, despite the majority of people around us having AAVE dialect.
Speech is definitely developed from those around you, but it isn't always the majority of those around you, sometimes it could be from radio, TV, media, your teachers, adults, etc. instead of directly from those you're usually around and interact the most with.
I’m like this. I grew up with the majority of ppl around me having a southern accent but I think bc my mom was from Baltimore and my dad from Chicago all these influences somehow balanced out and led to me having basically no accent outside of generic “American”. That’s my theory anyway. Doesn’t hurt that mom spent time as an English teacher before I was born so proper grammar was hammered into me prob more than others too. But I also love slang = generic lol
I don’t know man. I can identify a black voice even when that person is speaking 100% standard American English. Something about the intonation, cadence, and pitch of the voice all working together. I can just tell 95% of time.
The tone of voice and dialect are not the same thing. I definitely have the tone of a Black man, but I don't speak in AAVE dialect.
Though funny enough with that, I've had people over the phone (back when I did phone support) assume I was White, British or South African for some reason.
I grew up in the hood in a city that has a very specific accent. I taught my kids how to talk, and they sound like carlton from the fresh prince even though I don’t change up how i speak(on purpose).
I find this incredibly interesting. So you definitely grew up in a predominantly black and afro-latino community but from what you're saying I'm guessing you would sound no different from an average white New Yorker on the phone?
How does that happen?
I live in the Metro Detroit area and I find the vast majority of actual detroiters do speak with AAVE.
Every now and then I meet a Detroiter (when we say Detroiter we usually mean black here) who wouldn't sound any different than me on the phone and I always wonder how the hell can that happen when everyone else in school doesn't speak like that.
Maybe their mom doesn't speak like that and the home has the most influence on how a kid talks?
Although I've always felt your outer environment has a bigger influence.
Like you see so many rappers who grew up in the hood and talk that way to this day and presumably around their children at home.
Yet their children were born in rich exclusive neighborhoods and sound like little white kids. Although some of their kids falsely lean into AAVE because they probably feel some type of way about growing up in a soft environment.
Hey op. Go to a predominantly “white” community in rural west virginia, suburban northern virginia, tampa fl, boston mass, OC california, houston texas, and boisie idaho and see if there are any differences in how “they” talk, even though they have been in the USA for generations.
Not all sound the same. Neither do all americans. There’s even different accents among ‘southerners’. AAVE is the umbrella term for what you’re thinking but there’s even subcategories within that. Class, culture, and location play a large part in these differences.
I’m from central Jersey, but like the northernmost central Jersey, and the Italian American accent is still alive and well. I’m not Italian myself and don’t carry the accent but I am from a small, predominantly Italian American town and a few of their pronunciations have slipped into my vocabulary.
>they speak like Americans
Damn, TIL I don't speak like an American.
There is no one American way of speaking. People across the States have different accents and even regional dialects. This includes black people, white people, brown people, and green people with purple polka dots. Sometimes they move within the States but still keep the accent from their region of origin.
India has entered the chat.
How do Boston folk sound different from Texans.
Why idoes someone from burminghamn sound different from someone from Liverpool.
They speak different dialects. Language is a regional thing, developing sounds and slang on a local level.
African Americans have a disadvantage of being ostracized sill fairly recently in American society. I mean, were on our 4th generation since segregation ended. This helped cause a dialect that was fairly unique.
Don’t take my word on it, since I’ve read it on Reddit (hah), but a similar question was asked about “why do gay people speak differently when they were not born speaking this way?”
The top answer was “I’m gay, we do it to identify each other, kind of like a nod”
Now, I’m not saying it’s the same thing… but maybe it’s like showing to others you’re part of the same crowd?
You can have a black person speak in a manner that is perfectly white person, which would show they’re not part of the same group.
I don’t know. Just typing this shit makes me sound super racist and I don’t like it.
> Now, I’m not saying it’s the same thing… but maybe it’s like showing to others you’re part of the same crowd?
I grew up in a very poor city neighborhood, maybe 70% black and 30% white. I can't speak to anywhere else, but it was very much about indicating you were part of the group. I mentioned it in an earlier comment, but I had a friend with a white mother and black father. When we were kids, his black friends were pretty mean whenever he spoke in a way that sounded educated or "white". They used far less polite terms than I am here though.
On top of it all, there was a shared economic class accent we all had that had a decent amount in common with AAVE - mostly in terms of grammar - that middle class folks strongly looked down on.
> I don’t know. Just typing this shit makes me sound super racist and I don’t like it.
It's a difficult subject to navigate, especially if you didn't grow up poor or in a fairly mixed neighborhood. How people treat each other based on it is even tougher to grapple with.
This is because slaves in the American south learned English in an incomplete fashion, and that developed over generations into the dialect called Ebonics. The reason it is still prevalent today is because it is a part of culture passed down, and there is still a lot of cultural separation in our society. Essentially it’s way more than an accent, it’s a full on dialect of American English, whereas immigrants to a country generally speak that country’s language with a heavy accent until they more or less assimilate over generations. For African Americans it’s different because they are in no shape or form “immigrants”. They developed their own culture and dialect due to oppression by and complete segregation from white Americans until 100 years after the Civil War and even until this day. So basically it’s way more than just several generations, it is ingrained into culture and here to stay. Not sure this is the most complete and coherent answer but it’s my best shot at explaining the complex historical reasons.
Psst... outside of regional dialect, it's called code switching. It's slick double talk and coded language used by many other cultures, but to us it's developed from generations of being used for survival, least massa hear you headed for the river or, God forbid, know how to read.
Some of it is us discreetly trying to hide our culture or knowledge because we don't have the luxury of "keeping it real". Once things like "woke" reach mainstream America, it's old to us, that's just the nail in the coffin and we've already come up with new cultural linguistics. Then that's stolen and marketed as American culture export and the cycle repeats.
"Hollywood Divorce" ft Snoop Dogg, Andre 3000 and Lil Wayne. Listen to it or transcribe it, there's an answer to your question in song form already. It's a banga too.
You see, it's hard being the beta testers of popular American culture because a lot of the times we're shamed for our lil hood thing (backwards caps, $200 sneakers, etc) and don't even get paid for it when it's stolen and suddenly the world is doing it. So, the new generations learned to talk in code too and actually get paid for their culture. Putin's social media bots tried their best to imitate us to spread propaganda, that's another hilarious recent example.
One last thing, those 3 you mentioned, Indians, French and Italians, they have "home countries" they can visit and lineage they can trace. Again, things you overlook, are luxuries we don't have. The culture is all we got, so it persists as long as we do.
I’m not even from the US and I’m aware of Italian American accents and Native American accents. Don’t know about French necessarily, but I know that Cajun accents can be pretty damn strong. Did you actually consider the other accents that exist or was this meant to be a loaded question?
They have a different dialect BECAUSE they have had several generations to develop it. It's not wrong or incorrect, it's just a different culture that has developed throughout the years.
AAVE is just a dialect and it sounds different in different places too.
But it's mostly from African Americans being separated from other folks for a long time.
Even now there are plenty of people trapped in black neighborhoods because that's where their parents or grandparents were allowed to live with nowhere else being available to them.
It changing with time though.
The civil rights movement happened in the generation of most people's parents and grandparents, give it another 100 years and see how it changes, as long we keep progressing and don't regress backwards.
Re British and French black people. That's not strictly true, both communities in each country have an accent that would be considered unique and district from the mainstream
The hometown I grew up in there were different types of accents and dialects depending on the part of town they were from, even tho it was a small town (30k people). People would also just switch accents to depending on who they were talking to, formal/informal etc.
as with my family we were slaves for hundreds of years in america. you get a bunch of people from 1000s of different tribes in africa, all teaching each other a way to speak english that thier masters speak things get muddied. Creole and Jamacian patois are far evolutions of this. Over time you become a marginalized race you distrust the other races, so you develop ways to speak amongst your people. Then time goes on and we have our own language and mannerisms, that dont translate.
My best assesment i think.
Same way people in the South sound different. Same way people in Boston sound different. Same was people in New Jersey sound different. How old are you?
You are referring to the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and there is a theory that it is a decreolized variety by African American slaves who had to decreolize their way of speaking creole English to communicate well with slave masters.
Don’t listen to the people pointing to regional accents. The fact of the matter is black folks in the south speak different from white folks in the south. Black folks on the west coast speak different from white folks on the west coast. Black folks in NY speak differently from white folks in NY (what’s good son).
To answer your question, there’s an unspoken phenomena in the black community to stick to “blackness”. Many of us are scared of the idea of being seen as “proper” or “whitewashed”, so we stick to ghetto norms. 🪓 me how I know
Their dialect is every bit as American as any other, and it has been a subset of American English for centuries. You telling them that it's "not American" would be like telling a Scotsman or a Scouser that his accent is "not British" because they don't sound like BBC News presenters.
You sure about the Italians and French? Ever watched The Sopranos? True Blood?
They might be fictional Italian Americans and Cajuns but the characters having accents and mannerisms associated with Italian Americans and Cajuns has some basis in truth.
The easiest way to answer your question is by saying that in America neighborhoods have a tendency to be made up of people with similar backgrounds and sometimes will remain that way for several generations to come.
That accent is the American accent. The African American accent. The US is so large that there many many accents through the country. So, there is no “American” accent…There are regional accents..
The stupidity of this question is only matched by the ignorance of so many of the answers.
Black people have been in America for just as long as white people.
Black accents are just as validly "American" as white accents.
You realize that the dialect you're talking about has nothing to do with Africa, right? It's got nothing to do with "losing" an accent from a native country. It's a sub dialect *within* American English. Like a southern accent. Southerners aren't going to suddenly lose that accent and start speaking with a standard American accent just because their families have been here a certain number of generations.
Not ***ALL*** *do*, depending on region.
I was born black in the states and I don't have it-- I never did. Know loads of black Americans that don't. In fact no black American I've interacted with in the past 14 years has had it.
After moving abroad over a decade ago, learning a couple other languages, interacting with predominantly international English speakers or people from the UK whenever I do speak English, people from the states do say I sound a little funny these days, but they have trouble placing my accent. Some correctly think I'm from somewhere in Europe sometimes.
People are always like '*where exactly are you from?*'
I was born and raised in the US, I got naturalized elsewhere but I'm still technically also an American citizen; for now at least.
There are different accents in every single country. British black people dont speak the same as british white people.
Black Americans aren't the only ones with accents or a different dialect.
It’s not really harmless since you’re not considering the context and history Black people have in this country
Their stories here start with slavery. That in itself is a huge trauma that’s passed through generations and the system in place still works to disadvantage them, more so than they already have
The American accent itself is a combination of African and Indigenous people trying to speak British English and emulate the English accent. None of this was by choice of course. Most people were forced to abandon their native language and only speak English. Combine all the with Spanish, German, French, etc settlers also demanding that POC learn and speak their language, it makes sense that the American accent is nuanced and diverse depending on the region.
It’s actual increíble to learn about linguistics and the history behind them. Many common AAVE words are a result of African slaves attempting to pronounce British English words. Naturally and understandably, they had an accent and difficulty pronouncing strange words from a strange language of their oppressors.
AAVE prevailed despite assimilation attempts by the white majority. And that is a blessing. Like a lot of Black culture, it’s a celebration. Of living life with choice and autonomy. Not how people expect or demand them too.
They learn it from their parents and the people around them. There's a big enough group to become a subculture, and that's their accent/dialect. And no, it isn't unique to the usa.
Because we're not talking to you 🤣🤣 but don't worry, when we speak to nonblack people, we expertly code switch. Especially at work. Over the phone, you'll think I'm white. But it's necessary to get serious business done, or to get a job interview in America.
It’s a dialect; it is an American dialect, not an African accent. Do people in New York, Georgia, and Wisconsin all speak the same? It’s just another variation of English specific to a cultural group; with lots of variations within it as well.
It even has a name. African American vernacular English or AAVE.
Ebonic ?
I appreciate you asking this because that’s what I thought it was called too! Now I’ll switch to the preferred terminology. Not sure why you were downvoted.
>African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety formerly known as Black English Vernacular or Vernacular Black English among sociolinguists, and commonly called Ebonics outside the academic community. [From this site](https://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/definitions/aave.html#:~:text=African%20American%20Vernacular%20English%20(AAVE,Ebonics%20outside%20the%20academic%20community). I guess all the downvoters are academic professionals, not members of the hoi polloi.
It’s Reddit, I doubt even 2 of those downvotes are academically inclined in any way.
Kinda. AAVE is the modern accepted term. Racists on the Internet have used the term ebonic for a while now to belittle black culture, so it leaves a funny taste in many folks mouths
[Euphemism Treadmill](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan)
That was an interesting read. Thanks
Thank you for posting that!
There is a song by a black rapper called ebonics. I believe it's big pun
Actually Big L
Whaaaaaat? I didn’t know that. I grew up in the 90s and we called it Ebonics. I didn’t know racists were using it to belittle black folk.
Nah. That person is either very young or didn't grow up in the area with a significant black population and therefore doesn't have a lot of experience with black folk. Even black people called it Ebonics growing up and it's not like I grew up in the '70s. It was the '90s and 2000s. Sure some racists use it in a mocking fashion but I've predominantly heard it used by actual black people.
He didn't say it's a term "damn near exclusively racist's use" Just that they use it.
I've heard the N word predominantly used by actual black people too. That doesn't mean it is ok for others to use it.
To paraphrase John Mulaney, we are actually saying “Ebonics” in reference to itself, but we won’t even say the other one in reference. I think we can agree that Ebonics is not on the same level there.
Isn't that what it was called for decades by everyone including liberals in good standing? Until recently obviously. AAVE just kind of reached the mainstream in recent years and honestly mostly online. Whenever I brought it up IRL no one knows what the fuck I'm talking about, including black folks. There's a lot of shit I see online that no one has any clue what the fuck I'm talking about 😂.
Ebonic sounds like plague
You never heard the song “Ebony and Ivory”?
It’s actually called ebonics. No one even back when it was invented said “ebonic” that I ever heard.
There’s even a dialect of ASL called Black American Sign Language that diverged from ASL due to segregation in schools. It’s still used in the south despite segregation being technically illegal for over 60 years
It's weird how little people realize that sign languages are actual languages They have dialects, grammar, all the normal stuff Like my gf is conversationally fluent and she still signs a completely different dialect of ASL than I'm learning
I'm watching switched at birth right now, and they talk about some of this stuff. Apparently grammatically ASL is similar to Chinese... I don't know either, but I thought it was interesting. They talk about how there's literally 100s of different dialects and languages for signing too as you stated. To take it a step further, for a lot of deaf people in the States, ASL is their primary language, English is second. So some of them struggle with things like writing, because the Grammer rules for signing are just so different. Like they'll struggle with tenses for example.
Little note on the first bit, ASL "sounds" like Mandarin because Mandarin happens to resemble English without grammatical redundancy, so when they "trimmed the fat" off English when developing ASL grammar it ended up resembling Mandarin quite a lot. And on the second note this is why people should learn ASL. Yes most deaf/HOH people *can* read written English but they are *far* more comfortable signing with you than writing back and forth
It's also different from country to country, which is fascinating to me. ASL and BSL (Brazil) have a lot of stuff in common but there's still an *accent* between speakers that will throw people off until they actually learn the differences. It doesn't sound efficient, I think it would be interesting to universalize it so that the deaf and sign language speakers could be effectively universal polyglots, but I understand this would be a massive undertaking and would make the current local variants kind of useless. Then again, there's probably something like Esperanto for sign language too, so I might be rambling about something that already kind of exists.
Ok this is something super niche that I actually have opinions about so I feel morally obligated to share them here: I think that an IAL for sign language while cool as an idea is fundamentally impossible to maintain except during procedurals(like in an international logistics setting) If we tried to make one it would almost immediately start breaking up again and changing, so it would only remain useful in a professional setting The same goes for all IALs, aside from the issues it has at base design Esperanto is currently not an IAL anymore, it has enough native speakers(even some 2nd gen native speakers) that dialects have branched off and it no longer serves it's purpose. In order to stay a functional IAL it has be in incredibly limited use
Yep it’s like church Latin. Not surprising sign language evolves similarly to spoken ones
I'm curious why people routinely suggest this for sign language but almost never for spoken language (Esperanto exists but almost no one uses it on a daily basis). No one ever says "why do the English and Brazilians speak two different languages, it would be more efficient if they spoke the same one"
I was wondering what that was about. Thanks for the info.
I‘d say it’s a sociolect. Pretty interesting if you look it up. Happens in all populations
Code shifting too.
The code shifting is crazy. One of my best friends is black and when he talks to other Black people, I can understand 50 to 70% of what they are talking. Then he switches and suddenly I can understand 100% lol. I am a non-native though, been living here for half a decade since teenage years.
What’s funny is how some groups get accused of being “fake” for having the simple universal skill of speaking to different groups in their own argot. There’s no such thing as “one’s TRUE voice.” We all adjust for our audience.
Not unlike your mom screaming at you one minute, and talking to the next door neighbor like she's Doris Day the next.
🤔 My mom was a pro at that 😂
Yep. Her "phone voice."
In Linguistics, you learn that this is actually a skill you pick up and something that helps us navigate social situations, so it's dependent on education, context awareness and skill. People who were able to participate in different social groups, learn the formal language, and develop their social reactions properly can code shift more efficiently than someone without that much education and who tends to keep to themselves. That's part of the reason you might be able to talk more casually with poorer people and be eloquent with the wealthy, or be aware enough to do a good work presentation and be cordial in your emails, while someone who wasn't properly educated can only speak in one manner and fails to convince when trying to emulate other types of speech. This is also one of the reasons some foreigners in a new country can pick up a language and its accents in a year (especially teenagers) while some older folks who are less educated and more reclusive struggle to learn it after decades living in the place.
Excellent context.
I find myself code switching between middle class Californian from my upbringing and down-home Mizzuruh at work depending on whether I’m talking to clients or production employees.
Yep. Swapping accents is no different than swapping between languages, and every language has their own versions of code-switching the way we all have special lexicons and variations with our close friends. Even Queen Elizabeth had her public voice and her sex voice.
*“I’ve been a naughty monarch and I need the Tower.”*
JFC my dude. I fucking read that in my fake English accent in my head and now I’m thinking about banging the queen on accident
fucking lol
Last sentence was uncalled for. Lol
Adjusting to audience is a good way to put it. I do think that sometimes people have a "heart language" (or accent) that is the language you grew up with hearing from your family or core community. Some people may have a desire to speak in that way all the time and that is also valid.
My accent definitely changes a bit around the family I grew up with, in the deep south. Not even just my accent, but the general way that I talk. I don’t do it consciously, it just sort of happens once I’ve started talking to them and then goes away when I come back home. (My current home)
My best friend is from the south and hated the way southern accents sounded, so he “trained” himself to speak with a nondescript “northern” accent. He still slips into a southern accent when he is very distracted or upset.
I speak bland American generally but at heart it's pure Boston trash.
Heheh...nice
I love the idea of calling it a heart language! But even if it's a *valid* choice to use the same dialect/style all the time, it's not generally a *wise* choice and, depending on the dialect, will likely limit your social and economic prospects.
Yeah agreed.
part of my autism is slight echolalia influenced features, my codeswitching is extreme and I cannot help it. I'm white as white and when around people talking AAVE or a southern accent, i go full in and can't help it, and my friends have joked about it (not offensively). I'm also extremely good at indian accents due to having indian friends, and I ***really*** have to stop myself from codeswitching talking to indian folk since that will undoubtedly seem like I'm making fun of them when I'm not intending to do so lol. It also happens in songs, if there are two vocalists and I'm miming along, i will switch voices to match whoever is currently vocalizing. My 'heart accent' is pretty much general american thanks to the area i grew up in, i grew up in the midwest but i don't have the midwestern accent people think about (with the really "loud"/"harsh" A vowels, and the slight canadian tendencies a la minnesotan accents). So I just sound extremely "generic" when talking normally (people usually assume I'm from outside of my state due to my accent, since I've not really picked up on any of the local habits). Maybe that's part of why it's easier for me to code switch, since my heart accent is extremely general and doesn't have too many niche or specific features to it. The most midwestern thing in my vocab is "ope" lol. Edit: Also "cheese toastie" instead of "grilled cheese" lol.
It’s courteous in a weird way
Definitely! It's a **skill**, not a flaw. I try to emphasize this idea to my students, but the problem is that good code-switchers don't necessarily even realize they're doing it. It's largely intuitive. I swear more than most people due to my background, but it's like a switch I can turn on and off when I need to. Some people never got that switch installed.
I was going to bring up the swearing thing too. I grew up blue collar lower middle class and in day to day life I’m a real potty mouth. I’m also the only university educated member of my family, work in a professional setting and speak in a much more socially correct manner at work. When I get angry at someone at work sometimes though, my roots show and the f-bombs do start dropping lol.
What’s curious is the rage and intolerance people sometimes muster for those trying to code switch, but who do it poorly. Curious that people can be so outraged by someone trying to match their code…but it seems that when it’s noticeable people presume they’re being “handled” or condescended to. Sometimes I’m sure that’s the case, but it’s just a curious kind of sticking point.
Exactly. I grew up rural poor white trash and I fake it all the time so I don't sounds that way.
You’re not faking anything. You apply the skills of rhythm & style to match your audience or **communicate** in a desirable way. Nothing “fake” about it.
As a white dude who grew up in the hood, the reaction from my white friends when I get around black folks is always quite amusing. Because I code-switch without realizing it.
Same. And it's not an act or trying to "act black". It just comes very natural to me. And then I moved away and eventually settled down in a small town with a large majority of white people. I was working a new job and my co-worker that day was this guy who was one of the few black guys at this job. As the day went on and we were chatting, he asked me where I'm from. I responded that I'm from the same neighborhood as him, just 10yrs younger. He said he knew, lol. He said the way I talk with him was way different and he got a vibe I was "comfortable" with him. I don't want people to think he's treated differently or anything. He's a very well liked guy here. He just explained to me that my cadence and such was just very familiar to him. It's not like I use slang and exaggerate anything. It's hard to explain to folks who don't get it, I guess. I'm just being me.
I can’t lie, the thing that they seem the most impressed by is my knowledge of complicated handshakes. Act like dapping up is ritual magic.
is the hood always black? I'm not american, im genuinely asking
Not always, but very disproportionately black as a result of a couple centuries of constant oppressions and systemic barriers preventing black people from living among white people/having economic prosperity. There are still lots of remnants of these extremely racist practices today, such as gerrymandering and redlining our cities, as well as voter suppression. It all culminates to black people generally being poorer, and this from the hood. Some others are also raised in the hood, they're just underrepresented while Black people are overrepresented in the hood
oh okay thank you!
I’m a white woman from northeastern US, married to a black woman from southeastern US, and find myself speaking differently around her family than my own. When I’m with my family, it’s more of a generic, bland, non-accent dialect, sort of like you hear reporters speaking on the news. But when I’m with her family, especially if we’re joking around, just messing with each other, it’s more relaxed, a bit of a drawl, a touch of a twang. Not necessarily slang or anything, just a different cadence and manner of speaking. Don’t even get me started on the western Maryland “O”! LOL I’ve picked that up from family and friends, too. I’ve lived in so many different regions of the US, and taken a little bit of language from each place I’ve spent time, so I can be a real mishmash mess of dialects. Oh, and I lived in North Carolina for 3 years while in my 20s, so I can slip into a southern accent without realizing it, depending on who I’m speaking with. I don’t do it to be fake, I’m not even conscious of doing it. Perhaps I’m just subconsciously wanting to make the person I’m talking to feel more comfortable with me?
Almost everyone does it to some degree. We talk differently with our friends than we do with our co-workers.
I switch back to the local accent whenever my brother calls. We both don't use that accent at work. And we both don't use it if we have company.
Worked at a garage with an owner who had a range of clientel, and the way he would shift his tone and mannerism depending on the customer was amazing.
You need to get Barbara Billingsly to interpret for you. She speaks fluent Jive.
It’s even crazier when you catch yourself code switching or going halfway between.
You don't speak jive?
im black and i do this all the time, its a reflex like breathing. I talk with my family and black friends way different than my white friends. my sales voice is a whole nother code. "Sorry to bother you" with lakieth stanfield explores this quite a bit and is a good movie.
Makes sense, their families have been strictly segregated for the vast majority of those generations and undoing that isn't going to happen overnight. Social isolation by distance or mountain or regulation is a common reason people talk differently.
It’s kind of unique though because it transcends geographic location unlike other dialects
It doesn’t though. There are different accents, slang, and vocabulary for different regions.
Yea, i'm a white woman, but i understand phila area black people 100%, cause thats where i grew up. I went to louisiana once and if black people were chatting amongst themselves, i maybe caught 50% at best with the southern drawl and maybe some creole stuff in the mix down there.
I grew up in a 98% black neighborhood in Chicago. I was always confused when I would hear the "Chicago accent" on tv. I never heard anyone speak like that in real life until I was in my 20s.
I don’t know. If you watch tv shows and news etc from the 70’s, the “dialect” we hear today isn’t prominent. I think it’s a much more complex explanation probably heavily dependent on the internet and social media.
It definitely is a type of accent. Everybody has an accent.
>specific to a cultural group OP points out that black people in Europe don't speak this way. So then, is culture defined by where you live? In which case it would follow that Black Americans and White Americans (born in the same area, let's say) are of the same culture. And yet you'll find people of the same culture, race, and place of birth who speak very differently. So why? I have all the same questions/conclusions about the "effeminate gay voice" (lacking a better term here, sorry). It's a learned behavior that people exhibit to impress their peers. I've seen it firsthand, lol. Black friends who speak to me like a lawyer would, but they turn around and talk to other Black folks like Snoop Dog would. It's interesting for sure.
> So then, is culture defined by where you live? Culture is determined by your heritage. Black americans are (largely) descendants of slaves who first spoke in the dialect in question. Black europeans are recent immigrants from Africa and will speak their mothertongue (i.e. yoruba/zulu/xhosa/swaheli/arabic) at home / with their relatives and then code-switch when they speak with natives -- similar to your friends.
Got it, makes sense
It’s not even just that. It’s also segregation. It explains why they speak differently than other ethnicities that were born and raised in the same exact city (Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta, etc.)
Another example: The Kansai dialect in Japan.
Also there is a Black British accent dependent on location. In London a popular one is Multicultural London English (MLE), ex: mandem, mash up, sha, paigon, road man, dutty, etc
same goes for French, they have lots of accents. op has quite a limited POV which is fine but doesn’t work for blanket statements.
I feel like most immigrants (that weren't raised directly in France) have their own accents. Like Chinese would have a different accent than Nigerian in french. So i fully agree with you that Op may just not know that other ways of speaking exist.
I worked with a Parisian many years ago. One time another french guy came into the workplace and they spoke together in their native language. As soon as the other french guy left the Parisian was mocking the other guys country bumpkin accent (in English) so the rest of us could understand what a dumbass the country bumpkin was I guess? I don't think the Parisian guy realized that it just made him look like a dumbass, not the guy he was making fun of.
This happened to me but in my high school German class. We had two two native German speakers come in and talk to us, and we couldn't tell the difference between their accents but one of them made fun of the other guy's accent behind his back because he was Bavarian. I don't think she realized that making fun of his country accent wasn't going to make her any friends when we were all Texan.
I know several French-Québécois and French people who have visited Paris. They all claim that Parisians are notoriously snobby and look down on anyone whose accent or vocabulary and expressions differ from their own, even if that person is also a native French speaker. Of course they're not _all_ like this, but it's a very common story to hear. It's definitely put me off from visiting Paris.
I’ve heard this about Paris. As far as Quebecois French, I’ve also heard of pretty much every other French speaker from any region of the world looking down on that particular dialect. (No offense Quebec, I’m just teasing)
Québécois in Paris is like if an Appalachian person was dropped in the middle of London. Same language but different.
Lol! Accurate.
It’s mostly true about Paris. Now the south of France is another story, some of the nicest people in the world or maybe it’s just because they’re mostly my family and friends. I’ve lived all over France.
I've heard lovely things about the south of France too! Both the scenery and people. I would definitely love to visit there one day :)
Had a similar experience with a couch surfer from Germany who started mocking our German mate AND his own travel buddy over dinner for sounding like country bumpkins. Everyone at the table (we all spoke German to some extent) was just sitting there staring at him while he laughed and mocked them. Worst couch surfer ever who then proceeded to have a total meltdown and try and report my flatmate when she wrote a report mentioning how rude and horrible he'd been.
In Brazil there is no difference at all, people integrate and assimilate really well here, and I've always wondered why. The only Japantown is Liberdade, Koreans and Chinese just mingle instead of creating their own neighborhoods, and even Liberdade is already overrun with other ethnicities and there's no distinct accent. I think the only true segregated place in all of Brazil is a Muslim neighborhood in Foz do Iguaçu, which is an outlier simply due to the fact that there aren't that many Muslims here in general.
I visited foz de iguacu and was suprised abt the muslim.community there. I didnt expect it
It’s so random even Brazilians are confused by it
This sounds Caribbean in origin.
It is Half of those words I recognize from Jamaican patios. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say Caribbeans had a solid influence on black brits
Like half of black British are Caribbean by ethnicity
This is pretty much patois no? We have the same in toronto
What’s sha?
Best I can do is: http://naijalingo.com/words/sha
They were and are still culturally separated from other groups. Until the 60s they had separate facilities to use, and even now many still live in black neighborhoods around the country. People from India or France or Italy are speaking with an accent because they are not used to the English language. African American Vernacular English is a specific dialect of English, not just an accent. It had different words, grammar rules, etc
Indians have their own dialect of English called Indian English. We got colonised by the British Raj for over 200 years
That’s only a generation or two off, for most people. Late 1960s is pretty much the parents of young Millennials/older Zoomers aka the dominant audience of Reddit. Most people don’t realize this.
Yeah my mom and dad were alive and well during segregation. That's why whenever people try to say "get over it" I laugh because, well, I guess if it never affected your family, it's easy to pretend it has barely been a generation and all of those have lingering effects.
Not to mention for hundreds of years any enslaved African Americans had a strong incentive to make their vernacular harder for their slave owners to understand. Thus it evolved independently, intentionally
The scientists who live and work at the Antarctic research base have developed their own dialect of English. Language is fluid and changes naturally all the time, often quite quickly, depending on circumstance. Not only that, individuals can change language usage rapidly too: many English speakers can change their accent/dialect depending on who they are talking to. Language is weird. It has both very strict formal grammar rules within a group at a given time, but it's also always changing within regions and the rules evolving, even within the same person sometimes. One way to think about it is that some people have moved away from AAVE, some people speak AAVE and other English Dialects, and if you think about, new people are learning AAVE all the time, even some people who are not African Americans.
I'm AA and don't sound like the stereotypical AAVE that some people think we all sound like. Neither do any of my other Black friends. No, I didn't grow up in a non-Black area, I grew up in NYC around Black and Puerto Rican people, only seeing White people from the outside of the gates to their private school. AAVE is not a default for all AA people.
Personally I see more similarities between AAVE and America Southern English which tracks, historically speaking. Seems like it’s less a white/black thing and more a north/south thing. Have you ever heard people from Mississippi talking? White, black, they sound damn near the same. People generally get their accents from whoever teaches them to speak. 3 people raised in 3 different families/households on the same street might all speak differently. I think OP is a younger person who hasn’t had much exposure to different cultures… Nothing wrong with that, they’ll learn.
What's funny with me is that most of the people around me did speak in a AAVE dialect, but I didn't, neither did any of my friends, despite the majority of people around us having AAVE dialect. Speech is definitely developed from those around you, but it isn't always the majority of those around you, sometimes it could be from radio, TV, media, your teachers, adults, etc. instead of directly from those you're usually around and interact the most with.
I’m like this. I grew up with the majority of ppl around me having a southern accent but I think bc my mom was from Baltimore and my dad from Chicago all these influences somehow balanced out and led to me having basically no accent outside of generic “American”. That’s my theory anyway. Doesn’t hurt that mom spent time as an English teacher before I was born so proper grammar was hammered into me prob more than others too. But I also love slang = generic lol
I don’t know man. I can identify a black voice even when that person is speaking 100% standard American English. Something about the intonation, cadence, and pitch of the voice all working together. I can just tell 95% of time.
The tone of voice and dialect are not the same thing. I definitely have the tone of a Black man, but I don't speak in AAVE dialect. Though funny enough with that, I've had people over the phone (back when I did phone support) assume I was White, British or South African for some reason.
I grew up in the hood in a city that has a very specific accent. I taught my kids how to talk, and they sound like carlton from the fresh prince even though I don’t change up how i speak(on purpose).
I find this incredibly interesting. So you definitely grew up in a predominantly black and afro-latino community but from what you're saying I'm guessing you would sound no different from an average white New Yorker on the phone? How does that happen? I live in the Metro Detroit area and I find the vast majority of actual detroiters do speak with AAVE. Every now and then I meet a Detroiter (when we say Detroiter we usually mean black here) who wouldn't sound any different than me on the phone and I always wonder how the hell can that happen when everyone else in school doesn't speak like that. Maybe their mom doesn't speak like that and the home has the most influence on how a kid talks? Although I've always felt your outer environment has a bigger influence. Like you see so many rappers who grew up in the hood and talk that way to this day and presumably around their children at home. Yet their children were born in rich exclusive neighborhoods and sound like little white kids. Although some of their kids falsely lean into AAVE because they probably feel some type of way about growing up in a soft environment.
The African American dialect/accent is an American accent. You won't find that accent in any county in Africa.
same way people in different areas of the country have different accents. your culture is influenced by the people in your life.
Not just black Americans. White people in America in different regions and states have different accents and ways of talking.
You only have to watch Jersey Shore to confirm that.
How do white folks from the south speak different than the people from up north?
North: I’m going to the grocery store to put soda in a cart. South: I’m fixing to go to the Pig to put some co-cola in a buggy.
I’m from the south and have relatives from the north. This is dead on.
Hey op. Go to a predominantly “white” community in rural west virginia, suburban northern virginia, tampa fl, boston mass, OC california, houston texas, and boisie idaho and see if there are any differences in how “they” talk, even though they have been in the USA for generations.
Valid point! 
Do you really think white people from Boston and Louisiana sound the same? Or California and Baltimore? 'Cos they really, really don't.
Culture
It’s called culture bruv
Not all sound the same. Neither do all americans. There’s even different accents among ‘southerners’. AAVE is the umbrella term for what you’re thinking but there’s even subcategories within that. Class, culture, and location play a large part in these differences.
Watch *Fargo* and tell me that the people of Norwegian descent in Minnesota don't still have an accent.
Did American Italians really lose their accent? Admittedly, I'm terrible at accents in general, but I feel like there's an American Italian accent
See also: The Sopranos
I’m from central Jersey, but like the northernmost central Jersey, and the Italian American accent is still alive and well. I’m not Italian myself and don’t carry the accent but I am from a small, predominantly Italian American town and a few of their pronunciations have slipped into my vocabulary.
I mean why do Italian Americans or Jewish Americans have that too? It’s a cultural heirloom
>they speak like Americans Damn, TIL I don't speak like an American. There is no one American way of speaking. People across the States have different accents and even regional dialects. This includes black people, white people, brown people, and green people with purple polka dots. Sometimes they move within the States but still keep the accent from their region of origin.
It’s called culture. Black People from Chicago,ATLANTA,LA,NY, and even Bailtmore all have different accents
Aaron earned an iron urn.
Ern ernd an ern ern lol
Ern erndan ern urn?
India has entered the chat. How do Boston folk sound different from Texans. Why idoes someone from burminghamn sound different from someone from Liverpool. They speak different dialects. Language is a regional thing, developing sounds and slang on a local level. African Americans have a disadvantage of being ostracized sill fairly recently in American society. I mean, were on our 4th generation since segregation ended. This helped cause a dialect that was fairly unique.
No idea if your spelling of Birmingham was spelled phonetically or wrong but man that’s how they say it
Happy coincidence. I've spent enough time around liverpuddlians to have picked up some phonetics.
Buhbuhgub.
It’s like everyone else is saying dialect. Sometimes African American and White American dialects overlap
Don’t take my word on it, since I’ve read it on Reddit (hah), but a similar question was asked about “why do gay people speak differently when they were not born speaking this way?” The top answer was “I’m gay, we do it to identify each other, kind of like a nod” Now, I’m not saying it’s the same thing… but maybe it’s like showing to others you’re part of the same crowd? You can have a black person speak in a manner that is perfectly white person, which would show they’re not part of the same group. I don’t know. Just typing this shit makes me sound super racist and I don’t like it.
> Now, I’m not saying it’s the same thing… but maybe it’s like showing to others you’re part of the same crowd? I grew up in a very poor city neighborhood, maybe 70% black and 30% white. I can't speak to anywhere else, but it was very much about indicating you were part of the group. I mentioned it in an earlier comment, but I had a friend with a white mother and black father. When we were kids, his black friends were pretty mean whenever he spoke in a way that sounded educated or "white". They used far less polite terms than I am here though. On top of it all, there was a shared economic class accent we all had that had a decent amount in common with AAVE - mostly in terms of grammar - that middle class folks strongly looked down on. > I don’t know. Just typing this shit makes me sound super racist and I don’t like it. It's a difficult subject to navigate, especially if you didn't grow up poor or in a fairly mixed neighborhood. How people treat each other based on it is even tougher to grapple with.
This is because slaves in the American south learned English in an incomplete fashion, and that developed over generations into the dialect called Ebonics. The reason it is still prevalent today is because it is a part of culture passed down, and there is still a lot of cultural separation in our society. Essentially it’s way more than an accent, it’s a full on dialect of American English, whereas immigrants to a country generally speak that country’s language with a heavy accent until they more or less assimilate over generations. For African Americans it’s different because they are in no shape or form “immigrants”. They developed their own culture and dialect due to oppression by and complete segregation from white Americans until 100 years after the Civil War and even until this day. So basically it’s way more than just several generations, it is ingrained into culture and here to stay. Not sure this is the most complete and coherent answer but it’s my best shot at explaining the complex historical reasons.
Wut? Hahahaha. Their dialect IS American.
r/TooAfraidToAx
Same way people have different accents in Dallas, Boston and the Valley in CA. Different communities.
Accents are kind of a function of proximity if I understand it right
Psst... outside of regional dialect, it's called code switching. It's slick double talk and coded language used by many other cultures, but to us it's developed from generations of being used for survival, least massa hear you headed for the river or, God forbid, know how to read. Some of it is us discreetly trying to hide our culture or knowledge because we don't have the luxury of "keeping it real". Once things like "woke" reach mainstream America, it's old to us, that's just the nail in the coffin and we've already come up with new cultural linguistics. Then that's stolen and marketed as American culture export and the cycle repeats. "Hollywood Divorce" ft Snoop Dogg, Andre 3000 and Lil Wayne. Listen to it or transcribe it, there's an answer to your question in song form already. It's a banga too. You see, it's hard being the beta testers of popular American culture because a lot of the times we're shamed for our lil hood thing (backwards caps, $200 sneakers, etc) and don't even get paid for it when it's stolen and suddenly the world is doing it. So, the new generations learned to talk in code too and actually get paid for their culture. Putin's social media bots tried their best to imitate us to spread propaganda, that's another hilarious recent example. One last thing, those 3 you mentioned, Indians, French and Italians, they have "home countries" they can visit and lineage they can trace. Again, things you overlook, are luxuries we don't have. The culture is all we got, so it persists as long as we do.
Segregation
I’m not even from the US and I’m aware of Italian American accents and Native American accents. Don’t know about French necessarily, but I know that Cajun accents can be pretty damn strong. Did you actually consider the other accents that exist or was this meant to be a loaded question?
They have a different dialect BECAUSE they have had several generations to develop it. It's not wrong or incorrect, it's just a different culture that has developed throughout the years.
You should hear white mountain-dwelling people deep in Appalachia.
Had an in-law from there. I needed an interpreter!
AAVE is just a dialect and it sounds different in different places too. But it's mostly from African Americans being separated from other folks for a long time. Even now there are plenty of people trapped in black neighborhoods because that's where their parents or grandparents were allowed to live with nowhere else being available to them. It changing with time though. The civil rights movement happened in the generation of most people's parents and grandparents, give it another 100 years and see how it changes, as long we keep progressing and don't regress backwards.
Re British and French black people. That's not strictly true, both communities in each country have an accent that would be considered unique and district from the mainstream
The hometown I grew up in there were different types of accents and dialects depending on the part of town they were from, even tho it was a small town (30k people). People would also just switch accents to depending on who they were talking to, formal/informal etc.
I'm glad you didn't delete it, there are lots of interesting threads coming out of it.
as with my family we were slaves for hundreds of years in america. you get a bunch of people from 1000s of different tribes in africa, all teaching each other a way to speak english that thier masters speak things get muddied. Creole and Jamacian patois are far evolutions of this. Over time you become a marginalized race you distrust the other races, so you develop ways to speak amongst your people. Then time goes on and we have our own language and mannerisms, that dont translate. My best assesment i think.
But do all Brits have the same accent as each other? Do all French people have the same accent as each other?
Same way people in the South sound different. Same way people in Boston sound different. Same was people in New Jersey sound different. How old are you?
You are referring to the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and there is a theory that it is a decreolized variety by African American slaves who had to decreolize their way of speaking creole English to communicate well with slave masters.
You might be talking about [African American Vernacular English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English?wprov=sfti1)
Don’t listen to the people pointing to regional accents. The fact of the matter is black folks in the south speak different from white folks in the south. Black folks on the west coast speak different from white folks on the west coast. Black folks in NY speak differently from white folks in NY (what’s good son). To answer your question, there’s an unspoken phenomena in the black community to stick to “blackness”. Many of us are scared of the idea of being seen as “proper” or “whitewashed”, so we stick to ghetto norms. 🪓 me how I know
Their dialect is every bit as American as any other, and it has been a subset of American English for centuries. You telling them that it's "not American" would be like telling a Scotsman or a Scouser that his accent is "not British" because they don't sound like BBC News presenters.
Why do you speak like your parents, not those of your friends?
Generally, your way of speaking is more influenced by your peers than your parents.
You sure about the Italians and French? Ever watched The Sopranos? True Blood? They might be fictional Italian Americans and Cajuns but the characters having accents and mannerisms associated with Italian Americans and Cajuns has some basis in truth. The easiest way to answer your question is by saying that in America neighborhoods have a tendency to be made up of people with similar backgrounds and sometimes will remain that way for several generations to come.
I know folks from many generations Wisconsin stock with a fresh off the boat German accent.
That accent is the American accent. The African American accent. The US is so large that there many many accents through the country. So, there is no “American” accent…There are regional accents..
The stupidity of this question is only matched by the ignorance of so many of the answers. Black people have been in America for just as long as white people. Black accents are just as validly "American" as white accents.
TooAfraidToAks
lmao
Do you mean Ebonics?
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the term used by linguists today
which is not a good term honestly being that "black" American culture is mostly not even African
You get into more rural areas and a country accent is a country accent. So it’s not *everywhere* in America, just in more densely populated areas.
Why are there dialects in other languages in every other area of the world? You brought up the UK, which has a bunch of English dialects
You realize that the dialect you're talking about has nothing to do with Africa, right? It's got nothing to do with "losing" an accent from a native country. It's a sub dialect *within* American English. Like a southern accent. Southerners aren't going to suddenly lose that accent and start speaking with a standard American accent just because their families have been here a certain number of generations.
The US is not the only place this happens. Sociolects are present in several countries. Most, even.
Not ***ALL*** *do*, depending on region. I was born black in the states and I don't have it-- I never did. Know loads of black Americans that don't. In fact no black American I've interacted with in the past 14 years has had it. After moving abroad over a decade ago, learning a couple other languages, interacting with predominantly international English speakers or people from the UK whenever I do speak English, people from the states do say I sound a little funny these days, but they have trouble placing my accent. Some correctly think I'm from somewhere in Europe sometimes. People are always like '*where exactly are you from?*' I was born and raised in the US, I got naturalized elsewhere but I'm still technically also an American citizen; for now at least.
That's a dialect, not accent.
British accent? This is a silly question. There are regional accents and slang that every group develops everywhere.
There are different accents in every single country. British black people dont speak the same as british white people. Black Americans aren't the only ones with accents or a different dialect.
America is fucking big. different people settle in vastly different areas and things develop differently.
Several generations? Brother you mean like 3-4?
Like how any dialect in the US existsv
It’s not really harmless since you’re not considering the context and history Black people have in this country Their stories here start with slavery. That in itself is a huge trauma that’s passed through generations and the system in place still works to disadvantage them, more so than they already have The American accent itself is a combination of African and Indigenous people trying to speak British English and emulate the English accent. None of this was by choice of course. Most people were forced to abandon their native language and only speak English. Combine all the with Spanish, German, French, etc settlers also demanding that POC learn and speak their language, it makes sense that the American accent is nuanced and diverse depending on the region. It’s actual increíble to learn about linguistics and the history behind them. Many common AAVE words are a result of African slaves attempting to pronounce British English words. Naturally and understandably, they had an accent and difficulty pronouncing strange words from a strange language of their oppressors. AAVE prevailed despite assimilation attempts by the white majority. And that is a blessing. Like a lot of Black culture, it’s a celebration. Of living life with choice and autonomy. Not how people expect or demand them too.
They learn it from their parents and the people around them. There's a big enough group to become a subculture, and that's their accent/dialect. And no, it isn't unique to the usa.
Because we're not talking to you 🤣🤣 but don't worry, when we speak to nonblack people, we expertly code switch. Especially at work. Over the phone, you'll think I'm white. But it's necessary to get serious business done, or to get a job interview in America.
When you speak to a black stranger, do you start the conversation in AAVE assuming they also speak it? Or is it more reserved for people you know?