The sociolinguist William Labov and several associates, both white and black, have conducted detailed studies of what they call Black English Vernacular (BEV). (Vernacular means ordinary, casual speech.) BEV is the “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the United States today. It is also spoken in most rural areas and used in the casual, intimate speech of many adults” (Labov 1972a, p. xiii). This does not imply that all, or even most, African Americans speak BEV.
BEV is a complex linguistic system with its own rules, which linguists have described. Consider some of the phonological and grammatical differences between BEV and SE. One phonological difference is that BEV speakers are less likely to pronounce r than SE speakers are. Actually, many SE speakers don’t pronounce r’s that come right before a consonant (card) or at the end of a word (car). But SE speakers usually do pronounce an r that comes right before a vowel, either at the end of a word (four o’clock) or within a word (Carol). BEV speakers, by contrast, are much more likely to omit such intervocalic (between vowels) r’s. The result is that speakers of the two dialects have different homonyms (words that sound the same but have different meanings). BEV speakers who don’t pronounce intervocalic r’s have the following
homonyms: Carol/Cal; Paris/pass.
Observing different phonological rules, BEV speakers pronounce certain words differently than SE speakers do. Particularly in the elementary school context, the homonyms of BEV-speaking students
typically differ from those of their SE speaking teachers. To evaluate reading accuracy, teachers should determine whether students are recognizing the different meanings of such BEV homonyms as passed,
past, and pass. Teachers need to make sure students understand what they are reading, which is probably more important than whether they are pronouncing words correctly according to the SE norm.
Phonological rules may lead BEV speakers to omit -ed as a past-tense marker and -s as a marker of plurality. However, other speech contexts demonstrate that BEV speakers do understand the difference between past and present verbs, and between singular and plural nouns. Confirming this are irregular verbs (e.g., tell, told ) and irregular plurals (e.g., child, children), in which BEV works the same as SE.
SE is not superior to BEV as a linguistic system, but it does happen to be the prestige dialect—the one used in the mass media, in writing, and in most public and professional contexts. SE is the dialect that has the most “symbolic capital.”
In areas of Germany where there is diglossia, speakers of Plattdeusch (Low German) learn the High German dialect to communicate appropriately in the national context. Similarly, upwardly mobile BEV-speaking students learn SE.