gRodriguez Triglot Groupie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3788 days ago 44 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC2, Galician Studies: Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1 of 63 24 December 2013 at 1:51pm | IP Logged |
I have been in vacation on California for the past to weeks and I noticed something that
for me was very strange. All the black I've met or seen on television have a certain
accent. The one I've met were born and raised on San Francisco and so were their parents
and grandparents, but they for some reason spoke very differently from the white people
(but the vocabulary was the same). For the record they were all regular people of medium
class (Is that the proper English term?).
So can someone explain? I really curious why since there isn't such thing where I live
(São Paulo, Brasil).
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5080 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 2 of 63 24 December 2013 at 2:37pm | IP Logged |
The politically correct term for this kind of English is African American Vernacular English (AAVE). There's a good Wikipedia article about AAVE.
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Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 3767 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese
| Message 3 of 63 24 December 2013 at 2:45pm | IP Logged |
Its just Ebonics.
I'm a little surprised that you say they were of "medium class". Usually ebonics is spoken among black
folks in the ghetto (I should know). Most Middle Class people, regardless of color speak proper English (of
course with the normal use of slang and colloquialisms).
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6357 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 4 of 63 24 December 2013 at 2:55pm | IP Logged |
Standard English is a better term than proper...
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culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 3757 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish
| Message 5 of 63 24 December 2013 at 2:59pm | IP Logged |
Were they speaking very informally with a lot of slang or were they speaking with their "news anchor" type of AAVE English?
I believe I read that AAVE is very uniform because the Black community only moved out of the south to the northern states of the US relatively late in the US's history. (1910-1960) Since they moved away relatively late, there wasn't much time to differentiate their English between the blacks in the South. Thus they speak very similarly.
Most americans, I believe, can speak an English-influenced by AAVE to some extent, especially with the omnipresence of rap and hip hop in music and popular culture. Usually people 40 and under but I'm sure there is some 75 year old guy that knows him some urban slang.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_%28African_Amer ican%29
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culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 3757 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish
| Message 6 of 63 24 December 2013 at 3:03pm | IP Logged |
Tollpatchig wrote:
Its just Ebonics.
I'm a little surprised that you say they were of "medium class". Usually ebonics is spoken among black
folks in the ghetto (I should know). Most Middle Class people, regardless of color speak proper English (of
course with the normal use of slang and colloquialisms). |
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In my neck of the woods a lot of non-ghettho blacks speak ebonics a lot. Here, both poor and medium-class blacks tend to speak ebonics. Upper-middle class African Americans not so much. Are you in Chicago?
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fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4475 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese
| Message 7 of 63 24 December 2013 at 3:07pm | IP Logged |
I'm also from São Paulo and I've experienced the same when I worked in the US. For me it was very strange, because I had a B2 level English by then, and I could speak pretty much freely with the white and latino people, but with the black it was a struggle every single time.
I worked at a Burger King there, so my fellow coworkers were either teenagers or people who were in prison, but worked during the first part of the day. I guess they all had been arrested for selling pot or something like that, so they weren't aggressive or anything, and the amount of black and white people was about the same, 50-50, but even with them it was really easy to maintain a conversation with the white guys and really hard to do the same with the black guys. Also, my manager was also black, middle class, and he had the same accent.
I guess that in my case that's because I learned most of my English through video games, films and a British language school here in Brazil, so my ears weren't "trained" enough to understand that accent. In São Paulo, and Brazil in general, that really doesn't exist. Only maybe when you compare the accent of a region with another one, or different social classes, but pretty much never within the same "group" or area.
By the time I came back home (2,5 months later) my comprehension had improved a lot, but there was a girl whom I still couldn't understand at all.
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Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 3767 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese
| Message 8 of 63 24 December 2013 at 3:07pm | IP Logged |
culebrilla wrote:
Tollpatchig wrote:
Its just Ebonics.
I'm a little surprised that you say they were of "medium class". Usually ebonics is spoken among black
folks in the ghetto (I should know). Most Middle Class people, regardless of color speak proper English (of
course with the normal use of slang and colloquialisms). |
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In my neck of the woods a lot of non-ghettho blacks speak ebonics a lot. Here, both poor and medium-
class blacks tend to speak ebonics. Upper-middle class African Americans not so much. Are you in
Chicago? |
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No, I'm in Houston.
I should clarify a bit. Middle class blacks tend to speak ebonics around the poorer blacks and standard
English around white folks. They kinda have to straddle two worlds.
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