 A couple thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks decided that all languages, besides ancient Greek, sounded like bar bar bar bar bar. So they started calling the people who spoke them barbarians. Or at least that's the popular story about where the word comes from. There's actually similar words in Latin and Sanskrit, so the word probably goes all the way back to PIE. But the point is, the Greeks really did refer to everyone who didn't speak Greek as barbaros, and they really did think of them all as barbarians. After all, from their perspective, ancient Greek just sounded right, and all the other languages sounded weird and wrong, and if they couldn't see that, then it must be because they're stupid, smelly, uncivilized barbarians. You'd think that after all this time, we would have figured out that people who speak differently than you aren't just doing it because they're dumb, that whatever people are raised with winds up sounding correct to them, and that no one's language or dialect is inherently better or worse than anyone else's. But no. Two and a half thousand years later, we are still struggling with this basic concept, and in my own country, there's one way of speaking in particular that people could really stand to actually learn a little about. I mean, there are loads of different ways that people speak in the US, but there's one that people don't even usually think of as a legitimate accent or dialect, instead they just call it slang at best or broken English at worst. What I am referring to has been called many different things over the years, but the standard term among linguists and what I'll be using for the rest of the video is African-American vernacular English, or AAVE. No matter where you live in the US, whether it's the West Coast or the East Coast or Chicago or the Deep South, black people often have a way of speaking that's very different from white people. Hmm. Um, black people have a way of speaking that's very different from white people? No, you can't see the white one. Black people have a different way of speaking from white? Eh, you still can't really see him. Black people have a- that just looks weird. I'ma be honest, I have no idea how I should illustrate this. Okay, you know what? I give up. From now on, black people in AAVE are purple, while white people in general American English are pink. By the way, general American English is a dialect of English, which is very close to what I'm speaking right now. It's the one that people tend to use in professional settings in the US. Something I want to clarify is that not all black people speak AAVE. In fact, it's actually incredibly common for black people to speak both AAVE and general American English, making them, well, they're not bilingual since AAVE isn't a separate language, but is bi dialectal a word? Oh cool, it is. So yeah, not only that, but AAVE varies a fair amount from region to region and even from person to person, but at the same time, a black person from Los Angeles will very frequently sound way more similar to a black person from Chicago or New York than to a white person from LA. Why is this? Well, there are two main theories about where AAVE comes from. The older of the two theories is that AAVE diverged from early modern English just like American English and British English. Whenever different groups of people stop talking to each other, they inevitably start speaking differently. Sometimes they don't talk because they're too far away from each other, which is how the different dialects of Latin became more and more different until we wound up with French and Spanish and the rest. But it can just as easily happen for other reasons, just so long as people are talking to other people in their group way more than everyone else. And even though the slaves who were brought over from Africa would have had to learn English at first, they would have definitely been talking with each other way more than with white people, a situation which continued even after slavery ended, all the way up until... well, it still came to that way actually. Over time, this could have easily led to the divergence of general American English and AAVE. AAVE was concentrated in the southern US for most of its history, since up until the 20th century that's where almost all black people lived. But during an event called the Great Migration from around 1910 to 1970, millions of African Americans started moving to the north and they took their dialect with them. The other theory about where AAVE comes from says that it didn't just diverge from general American English over time, but that it started out very different from the English that white people spoke. When the African slaves who were brought to the US got there, they wouldn't have spoken English at first. Initially they would have spoken in Bundu, or Betty, or Yoruba, or Edo, or Housa, or Ezone, or Ful, or Igbo, or, um, wow, there are a lot of languages in this region. Anyway, the theory says that these languages mixed together with English when they got to the US, creating a sort of hybrid language that over many generations became more and more influenced by and similar to the English that white people spoke. Both theories are probably true to an extent. AAVE is mostly English, but it also clearly has at least some influence from African languages. Exactly how much influence came from which source that AAVE's birth is still an ongoing debate on linguistics. Now, I've spent the majority of the video so far talking about AAVE, but I have yet to actually talk about what it sounds like, or what makes it different from general American English. You've probably actually heard it before, but a lot of people just assume it's a series of mistakes and mispronunciations, when it's actually just as rule-based and internally consistent as general American English. Phonologically, a couple big differences are that in AAVE, the TH, TH, and TH sounds change to T, TH, D, or V, depending on the context. And also, consonant clusters that have a stop sound as their second sound are often simplified, with the stop sound being dropped. So, both of us think that we'll find the desk there would become something along the lines of both of us think that we'll find the desk there. There are other differences depending on the region, but those two are among the most widespread, and I think the most noticeable. But what people tend to notice way more than differences in pronunciation in AAVE are its differences in grammar. AAVE will often sound like it's just dropping words all the time, but it does so in a very consistent pattern. In general American English, we have a habit of contracting words, for instance, making she is the one into she's the one. But there are some circumstances where we can't contract things, like we can't make I don't think she is into I don't think she's. Well, as a general rule of thumb, wherever general American English can contract, AAVE can delete. She is the one becomes she to one, but I don't think she is can't become I don't think she. Another difference people tend to pick up on is the fact that AAVE treats double negatives differently. In general American, I don't have none means that you do have some, but in AAVE, it would mean that you don't have any. In AAVE, multiple negatives reinforce each other, while in general American, they cancel each other out. I think it's worth noting that all the things I've talked about so far in AAVE aren't unique to AAVE. Dropping linking verbs happens all the time in languages besides English. Like, this means I am hungry in Chinese, but there are only two words. It literally translates to I hungry. And the first part of the Muslim Declaration of Faith, la ilaha ila Allah, word for word translates to no God but God, but means there is no God but God. As for the double negative thing, multiple negatives reinforcing each other actually used to be the norm in English. Shakespeare and Chaucer would regularly say things like, nor never none shall mistress be of it, save I alone. Or he never yet had no villainy, nay, um. Well, it means something like he never yet had no vileness said. Unless you're willing to say that everyone who speaks Chinese or Arabic, as well as Shakespeare and Chaucer were all doing it wrong, it doesn't make any sense to say that AAVE is wrong either. But I've saved my favorite part for last. Most of what I've talked about so far has been about how AAVE simplifies things, reducing the number of possible sounds, shortening consonant clusters, dropping words. But the AAVE tense system is arguably much more complicated than that of general American English. When speakers of AAVE say things like he be working, people who don't speak AAVE often assume that this means the same thing as he is working and they're just not conjugating the verb. But he be working is actually a usage of what's called the habitual be and it actually means something along the lines of he works sometimes or he is in the habit of working or he has a job. It's a bit hard to translate actually. So he be working could actually easily be true even if the person you're talking about happens to be at home right now. It's an entire tense that just doesn't exist in other dialects of English. This is probably my favorite example of how people can be very quick to just write off others as doing it wrong. But when we actually listen to each other and take a closer look at what we're saying, we find that what looked at first like a simple error is actually just another tool people use to express themselves, one we might not even have. Linguistics doesn't often have much in the way of practical application. It can feel a little like philosophy at times, interesting but not immediately relevant to much. But the biggest practical lesson we can learn from linguistics is that everybody's speech is just as rich and complicated and logical as our own even if it doesn't look that way at first. And when some people's speech is labeled correct while others is labeled incorrect, it's usually just because the people who speak correctly also happen to be the ones making the rules. So when you hear someone say something that sounds wrong to you, before you correct them, maybe take a moment to ask yourself if instead of a mistake, it might just be a different way of getting your ideas across that you've never heard before. In my experience, the world starts to look like a much more interesting place that way. Catch you guys in my next video.