THIS
Can confirm. My favorite book on linguistics has an entire section on AAVE that talks about this.
So some people are better at bad English than others? Also, in what kind of classes is this knowledge useful?
It’s useful for the kind of classes where people aren’t busy being assholes about how other people speak, @im-just-a-penguin.
But don’t take my word for it!
Here’s a website dedicated to explaining dialects that goes over the rules.
Here’s a professional linguist who specializes in AAVE, and just one of his many papers explaining that AAVE is a proper dialect.
Here’s a blurb from PBS, introducing the topic of whether AAVE is a creole or a dialect. You’ll notice neither one of those options means ‘just poor English’.
Here’s a paper on the habitual “be” from New York University.
Here’s a link to some information from Portland University. I wish to draw your attention specifically to the phrase: “linguists now agree that AAVE is not ‘broken’ English, or slang”.
Here’s a super-technical paper on phonology in AAVE, which gets down into things like why AAVE speakers may say “axed” instead of “asked.”
Hm. Looks like there are a lot of people who study this stuff for a living who disagree with your assessment that it’s “bad English.” I guess you better get reading … . asshole.
http://writing.umn.edu/lrs/assets/pdf/speakerpubs/Smitherman.pdf
If y’all want to read more on this, also look up professor Smitherman from MSU.
Fun story: I worked as a research assistant for John Rickford, a sociolinguistics professor (and native Guyanese Creole speaker) at Stanford, 10 years ago on his project investigating the Creole Hypothesis of the origins of AAVE. He favors (or did at the time) the theory that it’s a “decreolized” creole. A creole (as it explains under the PBS link) is a language that develops after a generation of children have a pidgin – a mixed language formed in a situation of contact between speakers of different languages – as their primary linguistic input. The creoles we know about, mostly formed in colonial situations where enslaved or low-paid laborers with a variety of native languages were brought in to work on European-owned plantations, have a lexifier language – the European language spoken by the people in power, which provides most of the vocabulary, or lexicon, of the creole – and substrate languages, the languages originally spoken by the laborers, which provide various grammatical structures, function words, and phonological rules. A creole “decreolizes” when it becomes more similar to the lexifier language due to continuing contact with native speakers of the lexifier. AAVE is much more similar to Southern American English than most creoles (Jamaican, Barbadian, Haitian, etc.) are to their lexifiers, which is why it’s still a matter of controversy whether it was ever a creole or was just a dialect that spun off due to the relative social insularity of the community of speakers.
So, what was I doing on this project? Rickford’s team of research minions, which included me, three other college students, and a PhD student supervisor (all women, interestingly), were responsible for going through transcripts and listening to tapes of interviews with speakers of AAVE and a few English-based Caribbean creoles (Jamaican, Barbadian, Guyanese) and cataloguing their use of various grammatical features: plural marking on nouns (present/absent), question inversion (“Who is she?” vs. “Who she is?”), relative clause construction, and probably some other stuff I don’t remember now. The idea was to find out whether AAVE patterned more like the creoles or more like some British dialects, such as Northern Irish English, from which AAVE might have gotten some of its “nonstandard” features. No conclusions were reached after three months, obviously; our job was to collect and systematize data in such a way that it could be quantitatively analyzed. Which is very cool in theory but incredibly boring in practice. I never wanted to see another Excel spreadsheet in my life.
Loki is the Philosopher King 