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Black people’s accent

  Tags: Accent
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63 messages over 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next >>
gRodriguez
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 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
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 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
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 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
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 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
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 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
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 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).


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
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 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
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 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).


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?


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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