Linguistic features of African American English and its impact on English perception

Since the 1960s, the term “African American English” has also become generally accepted around the world, so we will use it in this work. According to William Labov, “African American English is a variant of American English that is the hallmark of the speech characteristics of African Americans. Its pronunciation is akin to a South American dialect that is used quite successfully by representatives of other non-African nationalities.

African American English is complex, controversial and only half understood. It is still unclear to what extent this dialect has influenced the structure of pronunciation in the United States.

According to some sociolinguistic studies, it has been proven that thanks to the communication of the representatives of the southern states of the United States and their slaves, representatives of the higher strata of the population constantly, unconsciously, absorbed the features of the language spoken by their servants. The phonetic structure of Standard English and the dialect we are studying is different.

People often identify members of different ethnic groups by their inherent pronunciation, so the study of phonology is a very important part of sociolinguistics.

At the junction of two consonants at the end of a word, they are often "mute", such as the -st in the word “test”.

Sociolinguists have put forward a theory by which one can explain the absence or presence of certain sounds in various lexical units.

If the next word begins with a consonant, sounds are more likely to be assimilated than if the word begins with a vowel. For example, assimilation is more noticeable in the west side - Wes side than in the west end.

A trailing t or d is likely to be omitted, unless of course it is an -ed ending. For example, assimilation is more noticeable in John ran fast - John ran fas than in John passed the teacher in his car.

In the structure of the lexical units themselves, this phenomenon is especially pronounced. For example, the voiceless consonant in words like author or either is often pronounced f, so African American English speakers might say nufn 'nothing' and ahfuh “author”, “brother” becomes bruvah, and so on.

At the end of a word, th is often pronounced like f. For example, “Ruth” is pronounced Ruf “south” as soufi When the preceding sound is nasal, (eg p or t), the combination th is often pronounced t – tent “tenth” mont “month”. African American English

When the letters l and r occur in words, a vocalization process occurs, so they are pronounced uh. For example, “steal”, “sister”, “nickel” become steauh, sistuh, nickuh.

When a nasal sound precedes a vowel, there is a phenomenon such as “man” becomes ta.

Some vowels in words like night and tu, about and cow are called diphthongs. This means that when a vowel is pronounced, the tongue begins its movement in one place in the mouth and moves to the second. In the dialect we are studying, the vowel in 'night' or 'tu' is often not a diphthong at all. Therefore, “tu” is pronounced like ta in he's over at ta sister’s house [1, p. 98].

In words such as police, hotel, July, the stress falls on the last syllable in standard English, and on the first in African American: po-lice, ho-tel, Ju-ly.

Verbs in the present tense do not have the ending -s in the third person singular. For example, She write poetry (“She writes poetry”).

The particles it or is indicate the existence of something. In standard English they correspond to “there is”, “there are”. For example, Is a donut in the cabinet (“There’s a donut in the cabinet”) and It ain't no spoon (“There isn’t a spoon”, also possibly “They ain’t no spoon”).

Negative forms are formed differently than in Standard Standard English. The ain’t form is often used as a general negative indicator. This form can be used where the form am not, isn’t, aren’t, haven’t, hasn’t is present in the literary language. [3, p. 265].

The double negative is justified by the rule that if there is one negative, then the whole sentence must have part of it: I didn’t go nowhere. There is also a polysyllabic negation: I don’t know nothing about no one no more, which could sound like this in standard English: “I don’t know anything about anybody else”. For example, in the literary language – “I didn’t see anything like that anywhere”, in African American English the same sentence sounds like this: “I ain’t see nothin’ like dat no place”. The use of the negative construction ain’t is a hallmark of the African American language style: I ain’t see for I didn't see or he ai’t gonna do it. Polysyllabic denial often has an emotional connotation. In a negative construction, the qualifying pronoun nobody or nothing can be used with a negative verb for a stronger emotional load: Don’t nobody know the answer, Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on.

The sentence does not end with the particle it without an explanation of this particle. Never say “I don’t know what it is”.

This pronoun does not start a sentence, so “Is dat right?”

This pronoun is never used with the past tense particles “was” or “were”.

African American dialect of English is unacceptable and incomprehensible to native standard language speakers. This often leads to intercultural misunderstanding. The situation is even worse with semantic inversion, which is mentioned above. All this leads to a negative attitude towards the African American dialect of the English language.

There is a difference between grammatical errors in the literary language and correct communication in dialects of the English language. Variants of the literary language have grammatical agreement between the subject and the predicate in the present tense. If the subject is expressed in the third person in the singular (he, she, it or the name of a person or object), the ending -s appears at the regular verb. For example, John walks to the store. In African American English, the verb rarely exists in this form. If the ending -s appears at the correct verb, this can be explained by emotional overtones.

African-American verbs are often used without an ending. In standard British English, almost all verbs have special forms for the past tense, such as look-looked, sothe-sate, go-went. In the African American dialect, the past tense often goes unnoticed due to the absence of any grammatical markers, such as an ending or a particle of the past tense. So a police van pull-up (need pull up), out jump t’ree policeman (need jumped), Jim start to wriggle (need started).

The past tense can be seen by clarifying words, for example, “last night”, “three years ago”, “back in them days” or by coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, for example, “then” [5, p. 78].

Some events that happened in the past are marked by using the verb copula “been” before the verb. Literary standard language speakers may take this as “present perfect” with no “have” or “has”. Although the sentences of African American dialect of English with the particle been differ from the above tense forms. For example, in standard English, this form sounds like this: Not has been married, but in African American English it sounds like: Not been married.

Sentences equivalent to standard English can exist when the verb copula “done” is chosen in African American English. For example, a literary sentence like “Don’t has eaten his dinner” can be expressed as Don’t done eat his dinner.

Events in the future tense and those that have not yet happened are used with gon or gonna.

As mentioned earlier, there are many ways to express negation in African American English. For example, ain’t is used to negate a verb in a simple sentence. This form of negation is akin to the form of negation in literary English “haven’t”. Therefore, the literal sentence 7 haven’t seen him in African American English is expressed as I ain’t seen him. I ain’t step on no line. I said, “I ain’t run the stop sign,” and he said, “you ran it!” “I ain't believing you that day, man.”

In African American English, there is also a special negative construction, which linguists call “negative inversion”. For example, Pilate they remembered as a pretty woods-wild girl “that couldn’t nobody put shoes on” [6, p. 67].

In this article, we investigated the linguistic aspect of the African American dialect of the English language. The study of this dialect is very relevant in the field of sociolinguistics and intercultural communications, racial and ethnic relations.

The study of the historical basis of development and the linguistic features of the African American dialect of the English language form the core of our work. In this course work, we studied the history of the development and formation of the dialect and its linguistic aspects.

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