Lippi-Green, Rosina˙˙
The article begins by explaining how many people are using AAVE. 12% of Americas population is African American, 80-90% of those African American speak AAVE. There are social and regional and stylistic variations of AAVE just like there are in other languages. Lippi-Green gives a short definition of AAVE as "a functional spoken language which depends on structured variation to layer social meaning into discourse".˙˙
Lippi-Green gives examples of AAVE and how it can be used not just grammatically and phonologically but also by using the rhetorical devices of AAVE. She says that they are heard in prominent and successful African American public forums.˙˙
She states that the "real trouble" with Black English has nothing to do with grammar or rhetoric styles. Black English is evidence that there is a distinct, functioning and healthy African American culture that is not white and doesn't want to be white.˙˙
Lippi-Green then goes into the different attitudes about black English. ˙˙
NON-BLACK ATTITUDES TOWARD AAVE˙˙
Non blacks seem to be more comfortable focusing on phonetically problems and blacks seem to focus on grammatical problems. The example of the pronunciation of the word "ask" is given. AAVE speakers may pronounce the word "aks". This is not just a matter of not pronouncing correctly. If the word is looked up in the OED you will see that one form of the word ask is ax. It survived until almost 1600. Criticism of the pronunciation of this word is usually that the pronunciation "aks" is a result of lack of education. Another thought was that "aks" is wrong because we wri e "ask". This is an illogical argument because...˙