African American vernacular: history, features, and cultural significance

Origin and Evolution of the African-American Vernacular

It has often been suggested that the so-called "African-American vernacular" is largely attributable to the influence of oral traditions based in sermons and prayer services of black churches. Alternatively, it has also been suggested the African-American vernacular is more a function of secular influences in general and of the music of African-American artists in particular. I would argue, instead, that the contemporary African-American vernacular is a natural result of more general influences that predate both religious and artistic contributions. In that view, the relationship between the African-American vernacular and both religion and secular artistic influences is precisely the reverse. Specifically, neither the religious sermons in black churches nor jazz artists of the early and mid 20th century is responsible for the evolution of the African-American vernacular. Instead, both are actually results rather than causes of an African-American vernacular that predated both and contributed to their evolution and not the other way around.

Likely Historical Origin of the General African-American Vernacular and Accent

The most general and virtually universal aspect of tonal speech patterns and vernacular among American-born African-Americans is simply the domestic southern accent. That should be surprising if it were not the case since the overwhelming majority of the captive African slaves throughout the 18th and 19th centuries lived their entire lives in the southern American states. They learned English and received whatever early socialization they absorbed outside of their families directly from their captors, all citizens of the southern states.

Even the relatively few Free Blacks in the 19th century and those fortunate enough to live in the Free states descended directly from southern-raised slave families and slave owners. To this day, the most significant influence and determinant of the so-called African-American vernacular is no different from its comparable influence among a community of Caucasian-Americans only two or three generations from their "roots," as it were, in the southern states. Moreover, typical southern regional variations are also likely to be discernable to the trained ear among contemporary African-Americans.

Undoubtedly, more than a century of intense racial prejudices and persecution and discrimination ensured that African-Americans of the early and middle of the 20th century interacted as little as possible (or as little as necessary) with the dominant Caucasian populations. That likely resulted in much greater retention of the southern "twang" than among southern Caucasians who migrated North (or elsewhere) at the same time. Southern Caucasians were much freer to assimilate into their adoptive societies and lose their southern accents much more over comparable time periods.

The Influence of Racial Inequality and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s

Racial inequality and the overt discrimination throughout the first three decades of the 20th century excluded African-Americans from musical careers in the creative sense, outside of the Minstrel Shows and the other rigid genres of white entertainment that blacks were able to break into without prohibitive obstacles. In that respect, it was racism and social exclusion that isolated African-American musicians of those eras and led to the evolution of different music. In principle, African-American music of the early 20th century evolved in the same way as Darwin's famous finches of the Galapagos Islands: community isolation.

Substantially because of the effects on African-American soldiers of returning to a segregated society after their combat experiences during Word War II, racial pride popularized expressions of unity and terminology of self-elevation such as the use of "Man" among and between African-Americans. It is likely that this intensified and grew tremendously in common usage by the onset of the Civil Rights Era of American 20th Century History. In principle, African-Americans probably used "Man" as a specific way of rejecting and putting to rest the long-used pejorative "Boy" used for generations to subjugate African-American males regardless of their chronological age or their relative chronological age to any white person. Thereafter, it lost its original connotation but remaining within the vernacular as well as spreading widely to much more general usage among non-African-Americans as well.

Contemporary Thoughts on the General Phenomenon of Black Baptist Churches

Clearly, the institution of the Southern Baptist Church also played a significant role in the development and spread of many aspects of African-American culture. On a superficial level, that is no less understandable than the influence of southern accents and dialects on African-Americans. However, on a deeper level, it is curious, to say the least, that once freed, the southern blacks would have adhered so closely to the religion of their captors. In that regard, contemporary African-Americans are predominantly Southern Baptist simply because that was the religious denomination of almost all of their "owners" prior to the abolition of slavery.