An Introduction to Ebonics

 

Scrabble Tiles Arranged to Read ‘You Choose Your Words’

Ebonics is an English creole of the African American Vernacular English (AAVE), spoken predominantly by the African American diaspora. It’s widely used in Charlie Mon’s Never Imagined, an urban fiction story representing the Black experience in a low-income neighborhood of San Bernardino.

Keep reading to learn how Ebonics sounds and looks and how it’s perceived in pop culture.

The Sounds of Ebonics

Ebonics pronunciations are pretty distinct, but there’s no consistency to them. For instance, some speakers omit the final consonant in monosyllabic words ending with two consonants. You can expect to see terms like ‘past’ pronounced as ‘pas’, ‘hand’ as ‘han’, and so on.

Turning a disyllabic word or a phrase containing two words into one monosyllabic word while uttering a sentence is also common. For example, the term ‘alright’ is pronounced ‘aight’, and ‘you all’ is pronounced ‘y’all’. You’ll also see ‘I’ma’ used instead of “I’m going to”, as in the following dialogue from Never Imagined,

It’s a reason for everything and I’ma hold on to that.

The Looks of Ebonics

Although it’s common to delete and add sounds in a continuous speech, it’s less common to delete helping verbs and misspell something on purpose. The rules of Ebonics grammar may not be in line with English syntax, but that doesn’t make them wrong.

Like every dialect, they follow a pattern. For instance, it’s common to omit the helping verb from sentences and depend on the context to establish the tense. You’ll see sentences like “You trippin’” instead of “You are tripping”, and “You fine” instead of “You are fine”. Ebonics speakers omit all tense-establishing verbs from their sentences except the present ‘am’ and any present tense ‘are’ or ‘is’ from the end of a sentence.

They also tend to aspirate their indefinite a-article by adding an ‘h’ after it. For instance, take the following dialogue from Never Imagined,

You ah fool, boy. When did you come up wit’ that one, gee?

You’ll notice that ‘with’ was written ‘wit’, going back to the earlier discussion about omitting last consonants from words ending with two consonants.

Two African American Men Laughing at Something While Facing a Caucasian Man

The Wider Perception of Ebonics

While Ebonics has received praise from the likes of Toni Morrison, others see it as a dialect of the uneducated by others, regardless of race. Despite her widespread use of Ebonics, even Maya Angelou found the 1996 Ebonics resolution by the Oakland School Board in bad taste.

Regardless of the wider perception, the resolution and the wider use of Ebonics at the school level have improved reading and writing skills for African Americans across the board. 

Explore this AAVE creole in Never Imagined, an urban fiction story penned by Charlie Mon, detailing a crime in Las Vegas that sets off punishment in a ‘hood in San Bernardino, California.

Buy the book to follow the lives of Michael “Trip” Lewis and Drevon “Dre” Wright as one of them is thrown in prison and the other forced to live with his father after a run-in with law enforcement.