Black English Vernacular

Origins

Black English Vernacular emerged from the crucible of the Southern plantation life of millions of enslaved Africans. They had been forcibly abducted and brought to North America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries and spoke various West African languages, and slaveholders often purposely intermingled slaves from different languages and regions, fearing that fluid communication might foster attempts at rebellion or escape. As subsequent generations of slaves grew up in this creolized context, English became their native language, albeit an English acquired informally and under conditions of intense repression and social segregation.

Sociolinguist John R. Rickford compares three different hypotheses concerning the evolution of Ebonics. The Afrocentric view holds that most of the distinctive phonological and grammatical features of Ebonics reflect features of the Niger-Congo languages spoken by the original enslaved Africans in the New World. The Eurocentric (or “dialectologist”) view holds that African slaves quickly lost their original languages and that the distinctive features of Ebonics evolved through contact with the English dialects spoken by English, Irish, and Scotch-Irish settlers (including many indentured servants, who were in closer contact with African slaves). Rickford critiques both of these hypotheses in favor of the creolist view, which holds that as African slaves acquired English, they developed a pidgin that combined features of English and African languages; this pidgin eventually evolved into Ebonics. Evidence in support of this view includes the many similarities between Ebonics and English-based creóle languages of the Caribbean, as well as Gullah, an English creóle spoken by African Americans on the sea islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina.

Following the abolition of slavery, millions of former slaves and their descendants moved north, seeking employment in the burgeoning industrial centers of the North and freedom from the violent Jim Crow regime of the South. However, continued racial segregation prevented African Americans' linguistic assimilation into Northern White speech communities. Later, as the United States expanded westward, Ebonics persisted and spread as a distinct dialect, although with regional variations.

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