African-American Vernacular English

A well-known musician once said, “ Realistically, English is a universal language; it’s the number one language…for communicating with the rest of the world.” English is the most widely used language in the history of the world. In 2015, there were sixty-seven sovereign states and twenty-seven non-sovereign entities where English was an official language. Additionally, many country’s subdivisions have declared English an official language at the local or regional level. Despite being the most widely used language in the world, English varies from country to country, and even from region to region! Each variety of English has its own set of rules and guidelines, as a result, a universal standard had to be proposed (The History of English: Origins
An additional example of where standard English is suitable is in writing, especially in business letters, tests, and reports. Nonstandard, or informal, English is used in everyday conversation at home, school, work, and recreation (The History of English: Origins and Uses). Nonstandard English is also utilized in personal letters and journal entries. But, how does an audience tell the difference between standard and nonstandard English? The first way to tell the difference between standard and nonstandard English is in sentence
African-American Vernacular English originated in the slave plantations of the American South, and it shares a number of phonological and grammatical features with Southern dialects of American English ( Nordquist, Richard). Contributing to the evolution of American English was the migration of blacks from the South after the Civil War to urban areas of the North. They took their Southern speech patterns with them, including all of the linguistic forms that had been incorporated into the grammatical structure of speech among slaves. Unlike most white immigrants to urban centers, who eventually adopted local dialects, blacks generally remained isolated in impoverished ghettos and as a result retained their dialect. This physical isolation contributed to linguistic isolation and the maintenance of African American vernacular English (AAVE). The retention of unique linguistic forms, racism and educational apartheid have since led to numerous misconceptions of this dialect ( Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice). One word that came into the English language through the Black dialect is chigger, also known as a harvest mite or