I have a) no idea why you’re asking this question, and b) no idea what the answer is. This is why the only AAVE expression I use is “on point” (and sparingly), because its meaning is easy to grasp. “Fleek”, “dragged”, “throwing shade” (I sort of get that one but like the word facetious can’t really use it in context), and anything to do with tea are just not in my vernacular.
Oh, I guess “cool” counts but that’s been thoroughly assimilated by now.
Of course, I live 3000 miles away from any place AAVE is spoken, so my understanding of it is gleaned through tumblr and imported sitcoms. We don’t have a concept of BBE (Black British English?), but if we did it would probably include the phrase “innit bruv”, unless that’s part of the chav dialect? Fuck, the relatively small island of Britain can’t decide on what to call a bread roll (it’s a bap guys, a barm is a completely made up word that my spell-checker can’t handle). We’re not ready for race-based dialects when we have so many regional ones going on.
This appears to have gotten away from me a little bit, so tl;dr: fuck knows.
We don’t have a direct equivalent – the closest we have is Multicultural London English which is basically a combination of slang from many different backgrounds – AAVE, various Caribbean dialects and cockney in particular.
Interesting thing I’ve noticed about that is that the pace of change of MLE seems really high – I understood a reasonable amount in 2011 or so, then a couple of years later had real difficulty with it. It’s pretty cool 😀
England does have BBE (or BEV (Black English Vernacular), but it is not so prominent as AAVE for a few reasons.
Features of BBE include vocabulary like “bruv”, “innit”, “ma boi”, “man demz” and “safe”. Accent features are things like diphthong flattening, th- fronting and fronting of back vowels.
However, (I believe) the main difference that means that BBE is not really a thing in the same way that AAVE is, is the history of Black people in the UK compared with in the US. BBE comes from people from the Caribbean migrating to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, and as such has more (historically) in common with Jamaican Creole than AAVE, which developed from the creoles spoken by slaves back in the day. Therefore, BBE is a much younger migrant dialect (which is still totally important as a marker of identity) whereas AAVE is a really massive historical identity marker with shit tonnes of historical significance.
Another thing to note is that London and its surrounding areas, where BBE is predominantly spoken (I don’t think I have ever heard it spoken in the North), is a huge cultural mixing pot, so lots of features of BBE are no longer unique to that variety, and have become common features of MLE, which in turn become common features of Estuary English, which is the fastest spreading dialect in the UK, so basically everyone between 12 and 35 uses features of it without really realising that they are doing so, and that in doing so they are adopting features of MLE and BBE.
Please note that I am not an expert in this area either, so if anyone has any corrections to what I just said, they should share them.
The excellent apunninglinguist laid down much better facts than me!
What does ‘dragged’ mean in AAVE
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