What is AAVE?
AAVE is an acronym standing for "African American Vernacular English"
It is used primarily to describe vocabulary developed and used in more casual contexts by lower and middle class African Americans.
AAVE also referrs to specific vowel and constanant pronunciation coming together to form differing accents.
I will now waste a portion of your time discussing today's topic, ignorant white people (like myself) parroting modern AAVE
as a joke, until it inveitably becomes gentrified and used in everyday vocabulary by those same people without understanding
the original meaning of the word, or the context in which it was formed.
I've tried to avoid using certain terms and vocabulary I knew I didn't have any right using. Not that I was aware of what AAVE was until about week ago, I just knew the tone and context of those words originated a community I was not apart of. As an example, think of the most heterosexual woman you know calling any gay person she runs into a "twink". I'm sure you've either interacted with or personally know people like this, and are familiar with the fact that because she is not familar with the context in which the word is usually said, she is using it in an incorrect and overly generalized sense. The queer community, thankfully, doesn't have a lot of words this applies too. The same cannot be said about AAVE. Just about every phrase or word that's become the new funny meme trend to say is a piece of AAVE. Twin, slime, crash-out, gang, ts, tuff, low-key, high-key, the list goes on. As I mentioned, these have all become trendy for one reason or another, almost always because they were introduced by a handful of people on social media.
As you can probably infer, I have mostly negative things to say about this, and if you are currently reading this and were not awar eof AAVE before this point, or that most internet 'slang' is just co-opted AAVE, it's time to swallow a major horsepill when I tell you that you should probably be making conscious efforts to say those words a lot less, or just not at all.
These words, as I see them used online, are not in their correct context and are consistently percieved as gentrification. As another example, the word "larp" has an entirely different meaning from how it is currently being used, but is becoming malleable and slowly morphing into something else. This isn't as extreme or harmful, though, because LARPing does not find its roots in a specific ethnic group that has been constantly and consistently discriminated against for hundreds of years at this point. AAVE does. If you showed a friend a family heirloom of yours and suddenly a week later people are putting TADC stickers on it and pairing it with shitty reaction images in the comments section of a Danganronpa shipping discourse TikTok, I'm sure you'd have at least somewhat of a negative reaction.
By associating AAVE with these usually nonserious and joking contexts, you are inadvertently perpetuating an already decades old controversy associated with AAVE, by percieving it as "informal" or "inferior" compared to more standard English vocabulary. This has not only been debunked as false, but only further pushes the stereotype that people of color are, themselves, "informal" and "inferior" compared to white people. I don't believe that anyone who uses these words is intentionally co-opting AAVE because of some hidden racist agenda they have, but social media tends to have that whole context changing and wiping effect on a lot of things, making this a lot easier to take place than it otherwise probably would have been. By perpetuating these stereotypes, it makes it a lot easier for bigoted remarks to be normalized (more than they already have), and I shouldn't have to explain why that's not very good in a political climate like this.
Of course, everything has its exception. The co-opting of AAVE is not always an inherently negative thing, and with time I have no doubt in my mind that the sociological and cultural perception of a few of these words will be far different than they are now. "Cool" technically used to be a piece of AAVE and was considered an informal part of speech. Hell, the title of this whole... think I'm doing has the word "Woke" in its title, which is a modern piece of AAVE. Where these terms differ is how the culture has changed surrounding them. This blog isn't really supposed to be about racial injustices specifically though, so I might change it... (maybe "Curved Left"? like a penis. lol.). Where these differ is the culture and sociology surrounding them, making them casual and formal-adjacent compared to their original contexts. Still, though, without being aware of them it's easy for this entire dialect of english to be boiled down to just "what the kids are saying", as I've seen this be referred to as "Gen-Z Slang" when that's not a very accurate descriptor and was itself spawned from the repeated and constant gentrification of these words.
Despite all of this, I think the worst part has to be the reception to this slowly becoming a thing that people are more aware of. As you might expect, anyone who speaks up about this is shunned as "caring too much" or being, dare I say, "too woke". And it's LEFT-LEANING PEOPLE ACTING LIKE THIS. I have seen people respond to being criticized by this in dismissive and defensive ways that does, by all accounts, directly combat their political beleifs. But it's whatever I guess. People will keep being ignorant and everyone else will just continue to deal with it until climate change makes lightning bolts into nukes and we all die.
I haven't even touched on the grammatical rules of AAVE, which have *also* been gentrified by social media, but this one is already dragging on for too long, so if you want to know more, as the most ignroant conservative you know would tell you; do your own research.
tl;dr: please research the context of "slang terms" you see in tiktoks because i gurantee you're too white to be using them ok thanks bye