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To honor and celebrate Black History Month, our February Tuesday Teaching Tips posts will be dedicated to deepening our understanding African American English (AAE). This week, we will explore the history behind AAE and how it developed. When educators understand the historical underpinnings of AAE, they are empowered to share this knowledge with their students and are less likely to devalue the dialect as ‘poor grammar’ or ‘unskilled’ General American English.

Let’s begin by debunking the most prevalent misconception: ‘African-American English is slang.’ This is NOT true. It IS an ingenious linguistic system that evolved under the most treacherous of circumstances during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Slave traders purposefully prevented captives from communicating. The enslaved were separated and forbidden to speak their native tongue. This intentional separation is known as language planning. The goal of language planning is to linguistically isolate individuals that share a common language, thereby suppressing rebellion (Baker-Bell, 2020). So, African-American English emerged as “a linguistic survival strategy” (Baker-Bell, 2020, p. 71), and became a means of communication not understood by their oppressors. “[It] was a tool for enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist, rebel, and reclaim their power in the context of domination” (Baker-Bell, 2020, p. 71).

There are different theories on the exact origins and roots of AAE (Green, 2002), but it is best viewed through its systems and patterns. AAE has set syntactic (sentence structure), phonological (sounds), semantic (vocabulary), pragmatic (use of language), and lexical patterns that are intertwined with structures of general English (William Patterson University, 2017). It also includes speech events and rhetorical features, including Signifying, Semantic Inversion, Playing the Dozens, Call and Response, Cultural Reference, and Linguistic Inventiveness (Green, 2002; Baker-Bell, 2020). These speech events were often used as a way for individuals to code messages and use language with double meanings. For example, many of the negro spirituals or religious songs that originated from enslaved Africans included covert messages to facilitate survival and escape (Jantz, 2013; Baker-Bell, 2020). The songs contained coded messages understood by the speakers of the dialect but not the slave masters. For example, slaves working in the field sang the spiritual “Wade in the Water.” The verse, “Wade, wade, wade in the water, cause God’s gonna trouble the water,” was a message. The verse signaled to the enslaved attempting to flee to get off the trail and into the water so that they could not be detected (Jantz, 2013; Baker-Bell, 2020).

AAE is a dialect with a rich history and deliberate origin. Like all dialects, AAE is a valid language system that is rule-governed with many linguistic properties functioning together. All students should be taught the legitimacy and history of their language, especially a history as empowering as AAE. As we kick off Black History Month, let’s remember the words of Maya Angelou,

[W]hen you know better, do better.

Use this knowledge to uplift and empower all students to respect the language they are loved in!

Looking for classroom resources?

Check out Maya's Book Nook!