African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been spoken by African Americans for centuries but has only recently been acknowledged as a distinct dialect. It is often used in tandem with Standard English (SE) by users of SE, through a concept referred to as code-switching. Although linguists have done substantial work to validate AAVE, there is an incomplete understanding of why the dialect developed and, in particular, the functions the dialect serves for its speakers. In order to begin the work of discovering why AAVE developed the specific features it manifests, I synthesized other linguists’ observations into a taxonomy of five categories that account for most of the dialect’s unique features. My project elaborates on the functions of the categories of tense/mode variation, negation, absence, prosody/ pronunciation, and what Zora Neale Hurston calls “the will to adorn” in AAVE, in comparison to SE. English is the modern world’s lingua franca and has the most second-language learners in the world. It began its journey to succession a little over a thousand years ago. The journey has been a long one with many detours, bumps in the road, and no destination in sight. English as a language was one big accident after another, but its success was no accident. The reason English is so powerful today is due not to any features internal to the language itself, but rather to the power of its users. Britain was the most powerful country at the time of modern English’s conception, and the United States has since become the most powerful. Perhaps it is this political power that gives some users of this language a perception that the language itself is whole and pure. The concept of “broken English” is usually reserved for non-native second language English speakers, but the reality is that English itself is a broken language that people
