African American Vernacular English Quotes

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

I do believe that there are African Americans who have thick accents. My mom has a thick accent; my relatives have thick accents. But sometimes you have to adjust when you go into the world of film, TV, theatre, in order to make it accessible to people.

Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.'

My grammar be's ebonics, gin tonics, and chronic.

However, research in the years that followed found that in many of its important features, African American Vernacular English was becoming not less, but more different from other dialects.

I have cousins in North Carolina who talk in that old Southern style of 'yakking,' if you will. All the black men in my life when I was a boy talked that way, and I love that kind of talk.

When you say, 'Southern,' or you speak about a southern accent, there's always that drawl, and usually from white people. That's what people associate with the South. But we're all different. The black southern accent is different.

But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party - whose members for the most part come from the ghetto - seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people's language.

The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience's ears. It's not the typical Southern dialect that we're used to.

The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience's ears. It's not the typical Southern dialect that we're used to. It has a much more percussive rhythm to it.