'We're not here': Linguistic accommodation between AAVE and WAVE-speaking youngsters in an urban middle school

The purpose of this study was to learn if urban middle school teenagers who spoke WAVE (White American Varieties of English) in a predominantly African American school, accommodated or "picked up" features of the AAVE (African American Vernacular English) spoken by most of their classmates. Five WAVE students were interviewed in a monoethnic condition and also in a multiethnic condition where they spoke with AAVE peers. Tape-recorded interviews were analyzed for the presence of speech markers characteristic of AAVE. The incidence of these markers in the AAVE students was compared to that of the WAVE students in both the monoethnic and multiethnic conditions.;The study found that all WAVE speakers showed some level of AAVE maker occurrence, even in their unaccommodated speech. A t-test did not show an overall significant difference in occurrence of AAVE markers for WAVE speakers under the monoethnic and multiethnic conditions. However there was a significant chi-square value for three of the five WAVE speakers. It was therefore possible to reject the null hypotheses, that there would be few or no AAVE markers in the unaccommodated speech of WAVE students, and that there would be no significant difference between WAVE speakers in the monoethnic and multiethnic conditions.;This study includes contextual data that described the conditions at the school where the study was conducted. Samples of student speech are included. There is discussion of why linguistic accommodation may have occurred. The data showed that linguistic accommodation between AAVE and WAVE students, often described in teacher lore, is an actual occurrence.