African-American English

AAVE phonology exercise

Table (1) contains transcriptions of certain words as pronounced by AAVE speakers and as pronounced in standard American English.

Table (1)
AAVE	Standard English	gloss
		'watching'
		'doing'
		'riding'
		'running'
		'nothing'
		'something'

If you considered only the data in Table (1), a generalization you might make is that AAVE has no velar nasal consonant, and that it always uses an alveolar nasal instead. However this generalization is inaccurate. Consider the next set of words in Table (2).

Table (2)
AAVE	Standard English	gloss
		'think'
		'pink'
		'punk'
		'thank'
		'sank'
		'singer'
		'finger'

Clearly these words are pronounced with a velar nasal, so it's false to say that this sound cannot be pronounced by AAVE speakers. There must be some other reason why the AAVE words in Table (1) do not have a velar nasal.

Question 1. Is the distribution of the velar nasal (where it can occur) phonologically conditioned in AAVE? What is the evidence for your answer to this question?

Now consider the data in Table (3). These forms also contain velar nasals.

Table (3)
AAVE	Standard English	gloss
		'thing'
		'sing'
		'song'
		'long'

Question 2. In your answer for Question 1, you may have decided that AAVE allows velar nasals in a restricted phonological context. Do the forms in Table (3) respect these same restrictions?

If your answer to Question 2 was 'no', then there must be some other reason why velar nasals are not found in the words in Table (1), but are in the words in Tables (2) and (3). Do you think it's a random difference? Or is there something else about the words in (1) that distinguishes them from the others?

Answers and discussion.

This exercise uses data adapted from Dillard (1972) and Smitherman (1977). Some of the AAVE forms may not be transcribed exactly as pronounced, in order not to complicate the exercise.

African American English

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