The Usage of African American Vernacular English in the United States

In this paper, I show the usage of African American Vernacular and the elements that make up the vernacular. While researching this variation of English, I analyze how AAVE speakers experience judgment and discrimination as a result of their speech. To argue the negative experiences that AAVE speakers experience, I analyze the history of AAVE and a few “well known” elements of the vernacular such as the invariant “be”, the third person singular inflectional morpheme, multiple negations, and the deletion of [ŋ]. In this paper I use research from Alice Jackson, Taylor Jones, John McWhorter, Walt Wolfram, and Vershawn Ashanti Young. Building off of the research of the authors stated previously, I make the claim that because of the discrimination and negative judgments by speakers of other variations of English, AAVE speakers are more susceptible to falling behind in school. With an educational background in Education, I was able to utilize information that I have learned about how children learn and how AAVE speaking children are more likely to fall behind because of the variation of English they speak