1.5.3. Black English

The most widely recognized and researched is American Black English. Most middle class blacks do not speak Black English and are indistinguishable form the white people. It is the poorer and working lower class both in rural South and urban North who speak the most distinctive form of this variety. It is often associated with the values of vernacular culture including performance style especially associated with black males (as boasting, ritual insults, preaching). One of the main debates connected with Black English concerns its origin. Some maintain that Black English derives from an early creol that itself derives from West African pidgin English. The term “pidgin” is used by linguists as the label for speech varieties that develop when speakers of two or more different languages come into contact with each other and do not know each other’s language. Pidgin is not the native language of any group. Where pidgins still exist, their use may be confined to the marketplace or similar domain (trade languages/trade jargons).

Black English contains grammatical categories especially of the verbs which are different from American grammar. Some scholars believe that Black English derives from the English of the white slave owners and slave drivers which ultimately derives form the English of Great Britain and Ireland. There are a great number of researchers that take the position between these two maintaining that both have had influence on Black English.

It has generally been believed that Black English has phonological system that differs greatly from that of American English though it is often similar to white southern vernacular English. They share following features:

● /I/, /e/ sound similar: pin = pen

● merger of /OI/ and /O/ especially before /l/: boil = ball

● merger of /I/ and /x/ before /Nk/: /TINk/, /TxNk/ sound as /TxNk/ think = thank

● merger of /Ir/ and /er/: cheering = chairing

Both Black English and Southern English are non-rhotic and simplify consonant clusters: e.g. /desk - des' - desiz/. But only Black English regularly deletes the inflectional endings /s/ and /t/, /d/: e.g. looked > look, eats > eat, Fred’s > Fred.

Some scholars have called the existence of the category of tense into question because the Past Tense marker -ed is frequently missing. However the Past Tense forms of the irregular verbs where there is no -ed are always present (e.g. wrote). A number of other grammatical features of Black English include:

● “been” as the marker of the present perfect: e.g. I been known him. – I have known him.

● “be done” is used as future resultative: I'll be done killed that man if he tries to lay a hand on my kid again.

The most discussions have centered on what is called invariant or distributive "be". In Black English there are two distinct usages of the copular "be": The first involves zero use of the copular: “She smart”, “She tired”. It is used to describe intermittent state and it is often goes with the appropriate adverb such as “sometimes”: e.g. Sometimes she be sad.