Movement Metathesis. The theory of African American Vernacular English

Spoken Soul, they said, “when the African slaves arrived on the American mainland they were often put to work on plantations alongside these indentured servants. Since the number of African slaves was relatively small in the beginning, the first slaves would have had little difficulty learning the English that spoken by their employers and fellow laborers ” Rickford, 2000:132. The development of African American Vernacular English itself is still controversial for some linguists. Thus, there are two theories regarding how African American Vernacular English was developed in America: the dialect hypothesis and the creole hypothesis. The dialect hypothesis conducted by the dialectologist stated that the slaves learned English from people surrounding them. “The African American Vernacular English dialect formed from dialect spoken the lower-class Euro-Americans in the southe rn US” Parker, 2005: 148. As immigrants whose their native language was not English, they learned the „wrong‟ English or non-standard English, and they continued to use that language. The second hypothesis is called the creole hypothesis. Based on the glossary in the An Introduction to Language , a Creole is “a language that begins as a pidgin and eventually becomes the first language of a speech community through its being learned by children.” Fromkin et al, 2003: 579. By the process of decreolization, African American Vernacular English has begun to more like Standard English. However, due to the social and racial segregation made the linguistic differences between African American Vernacular English and SE were visible. If significant numbers of women are also brought on to the plantation and people are prevented by slavery from ever returning home, it is inevitable that the men and women from different language group will marry and have children with whom there will be little option but to speak in the pidgin. While the multitude of African languages initially resulted in the slaves developing a pidgin based on English vocabulary, the following generations of slaves grew up speaking only the pidgin, and the original African languages ceased to be passed on at all. When a pidgin language replaces the original vernaculars that caused it to evolve in this waym we say that the pidgin has become a creole. Crowley, 1992: 267 Due to the slavery, African slaves at that time could not raise better life or education. “More that half of all slaves in 1860 worked on plantation, and most of those were fieldhands” Tindall, 1997: 438. The slavery had started since early of the seventeenth century until 1860s, brought up anti-slavery movement to United States. A civil war between the Confederate States of America and the United States that killed billions of white and black people from April 1961 to April 1965 caused Abraham Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1863. “Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which warned on January 1, 1863, all slaves in Confederate States or areas still under active reb ellion would be „thenceforward and forever free‟ Tindall, 1997: 512” However, this emancipation did not satisfy enough for the blacks, it seemed not legal enough. That is why in 1865, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 1865. The amendment was the sign of the end of war and about the abolishment of slavery in the United States. “thus removing any lingering doubts about the legality of the emancipation” Tindall, 1997: 514. Unfortunately, the Thirteenth Amendment could not guarantee the rights of African-American citizens. They still had to face racial segregation, which means those „Black‟, Americans were separated from the „White‟ American. The government in 1877 even raised new laws that were known as Jim Crow Laws.