AAVE And African American Motion Pictures

For the past five decades, African American vernacular English or AAVE has not only exerted a profound influence on the American society, but also the whole world alike. As far as whatever fileds are concerned, economic, cultural or political fields, American black people are gradually occupying a due space. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out research on AAVE, and widen range of the study.With distinct ethnic backgrounds, people are bound to be affected by their ethnicity and features of their mother tongue languages when they speak. Wherever you are, in Britain or USA, particularly, in the U.S., various ethnic racial groups and different cultures mixed up. Language in various districts has its own features. As Trudgill (2000) pointed out, different social groups use different linguistic varieties. There are mainly two kinds of varieties: regional varieties and social varieties. And for the latter one, there are mainly two reasons for its development: the social barriers and social distance, which include class, age, sex, race, education and wealth. People with different backgrounds speak different varieties of English. The situation obviously exists among low-education people. In the past decades, African American people occupy an inferior position in the social stratum; therefore, they can hardly obtain education opportunities the same with white people. That is one of the reasons why there are such differences between White English and Black English.African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which is also called African American English, or sometimes called Black Vernacular English (BVE) or Ebonies, is an African American English variety. It is a form of American English spoken primarily by African Americans. As a matter of fact, AAVE is different from SAE (Standard American English), but the differences between them are regular. In other words, there is a pattern to go by in variation of phonetic sound, vocabulary and grammar of AAVE. It is neither changeful nor obscure. On the contrary, AAVE has its own linguistic features. The speakers'idiolect could contain all these features. Although Black English is often stamped with a degrading mark, or fallaciously recognized as a kind of slang, and subordinates to White English, AAVE carries tremendous power in shaping American culture. The main reason is that African Americans are a noticeable social-class in their daily life. Typically, African American Vernacular English has become a significant social dialect in the past decades. Although it is often considered as a more low-leveled variety, there is no evidence that AAVE could and should be regarded as a kind of inferior or degraded language variety.This paper, on the relevant theoretical basis of variety and divergence, and one of the fundamental theories of sociolinguistics-to some extent, languages can reflect people's social status, reviews the achievements of African American actors in motion picture industry, and analyzes some movies, through which it presents the linguistic features of AAVE and its influence on society. To sum up, in the western society, different social variations reflect different social classes, and these differences among social classes greatly affect people's daily life. This thesis is composed of five parts.In the Chapter one the author introduces the purpose and significance of this study.Chapter two expounds the researchers'study on AAVE. It also summarizes African American film history.Chapter three, also the most important part in this thesis, focuses on the analysis of African American motion pictures, and compares them with those in daily life.Chapter four describes influence of discrimination in several aspects, meanwhile analyze the relationship between languages and films.This thesis takes the actors'speech as examples to analyze the linguistic features of African American Motion pictures in terms of grammar, vocabulary, phonology and other special features. Through discussion and detailed analyses, this paper advocates that as a well-established English variety, AAVE with its unique linguistic framework and abundant cultural elements, makes screen images more vivid, and holds a significant place in the study of the evolution of America's multi-cultural society.Chapter Five is the last part of this thesis. On one hand, it concludes with some findings in this study, on the other hand, points out some limitations and suggestions.