# African American Vernacular English

*The Black American language system: American origin, African roots, grammar, and record.*

> Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life.
> Portal: Language & Speech · Status: Verified record · Revised: March 11, 2026 · Revisions: 44
> Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/aave

## Summary

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a rule-governed variety of English spoken by many Black Americans, with its own consistent grammar, phonology, and lexicon. The linguistic record is unambiguous: AAVE is not broken or careless English but a system, a position this archive shares with the Linguistic Society of America and with our sister work, Black’s Dictionary, which keeps the lexicon itself.

## The archive's standing

The variety is of American origin with African roots, a complete system owned by its speakers. The standard against which it is measured is a social ranking, not a linguistic one, and the archive declines the ranking outright.

## A grammar of its own

The habitual be (“she be working,” meaning she works habitually) marks an aspect distinction mainstream English cannot make in one word; the completive done, the remote-past bín, and the future marker finna are equally systematic. Speakers deploy these rules with the same consistency any grammar demands; the features pattern, they do not wander.

## The record and the fight

William Labov’s fieldwork in the 1960s and ’70s established the variety’s systematicity in the linguistics literature and in federal court. When the Oakland school board’s 1996 resolution recognizing “Ebonics” drew national ridicule, the Linguistic Society of America resolved unanimously that the variety is “systematic and rule-governed like all natural speech varieties.” The scholars sided with the speech, not the mockery.

For the words themselves, their origins, their first records, and their receipts, the archive defers to , where every entry is sourced, dated, and attributed.

## Setting the record straight

**The claim:** Slang. Broken English. A failure to learn the standard.

**The record:** A rule-governed grammar, documented in the linguistics literature for over half a century and affirmed by the Linguistic Society of America. Different has never meant less.

## Sources

1. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.
2. Green, Lisa J. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
3. Rickford, John R., and Russell J. Rickford. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. Wiley, 2000.
4. Linguistic Society of America. Resolution on the Oakland “Ebonics” Issue. January 1997.

## Related records

- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/great-migration
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/harlem-renaissance

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Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "African American Vernacular English," revised March 11, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/aave

Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.