Phonological Features of the Consonant System of African American Vernacular English

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous language: English abstract: This term paper will give a descriptive summary of the sound patterns used in African American vernacular English but will also go further by discussing the linguistic environments in which such patterns occur. It is restricted to the phonological features of the consonant system of African American vernacular English (AAVE) and does not deal with the characteristics of the vowel system. Furthermore this term paper should show that speakers of AAVE do not haphazardly insert and delete sound and that it is not fair to evaluate the sounds as lazy speech since the patterns used in the sound system of AAVE are completely regular and the way in which sound combinations occur is very systematic and based on defined rules. This work also tries to make clear what AAVE is and in which ways it is different and similar to general American and Standard English.The first chapter introduces two different theories about the question how African American English might have been developed. In some contexts it has been suggested that the pattern of final consonant sounds in AAE has similarities with the pattern of final consonant sounds in West African languages. Part two deals with the feature of consonant cluster reduction which has received the most attention in the phonological studies of AAE. Speakers do not always say the same thing the same way all the time of course so the percentage rate of reduction may be greater for some speakers than othersChapter 3 focuses on the fact that interdental fricatives represented orthographically by th in Standard English are often realized by labio- dental fricatives among some AAE speakers. It reveals that voicing value of consonant sounds plays a major role in the production of sounds. For example /f/ and /v/ occur in environments in which voiceless th and voiced th occur in Standard English.Part 4 concentrates on