f. Mash
According to Green, mash in African American Vernacular English used to mean press or apply light pressure to an object to achieve result. The example of
using mash is “mash the button again so the elevator will come to this floor”
Green: 2002, 22. Otherwise, in Standard English mash based on The New Webster‟s Dictionary is to cause to become a mash, by grinding, crushing etc
1997: 253.
g. Some
For African American Vernacular English, some used to indicate the extremity of a state of action, it has the meaning of very. It can be seen in “Kareem Abdul
Jabar is some tall” Green, 2002: 23. According to The New Webster‟s dictionary, some is an indefinite quantity or indefinite number of people or things,
or it can be used also to indicate approximately 1997: 419.
c. History of African American Vernacular English
Based on history, English was employed in England, it spread across the world due to the colonialism. They colonized many countries and contacted to the
people. It makes them as the most spoken language in the world. That is why English has many dialects such as American English, Singaporean English,
Australian English, etc. The African firstly came to America was due to slavery. African Slavery in
America was began in early of the seventeenth century brought by the Dutch. According to John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford in their book
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
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