African American Vernacular English In Animated Movies

This paper, based on relevant theories of sociolinguistics and linguistic features of AAVE, surveys African American Vernacular English in famous animations such as Disney Classics and animations made by Dreamworks with quantitative research.The paper is composed of six chapters.Chapter One begins with an introduction of this paper concerning the research background, main purpose and the frame of the paper.Chapter Two introduces relevant concepts of AAVE and deals with the literature review of it.A qualitative description on AAVE in three American Animations has been made in Chapter Three, and with the help of preliminary study on three movies, the paper has brought forward an assumption of "Potential Rules in Animation".Chapter Four focuses on quantitative study of "Disney Classics" and Dreamworks. Based on the research, the paper comes into a conclusion in this chapter that the development of AAVE in animation is consistent with the history of American Blacks. And also an "AAVE Phenomenon" has been extracted from the study.Chapter Five, on the basis of results of previous chapter, tries to explore the reasons for "AAVE Phenomenon" which appears in American animated movies. Sound explanations as racial discrimination, social status and peculiarity of AAVE, etc have been applied by the author to illuminate 1) Why AAVE plays a minor role in voicing animated movies? 2) Why AAVE has been paid more attention to and now applied in more animations?Chapter Six gets back to the previous assumption and makes a whole review on the paper. As a variety of Standard English, the peculiarity AAVE holds differentiates it from other varieties of English and makes it applied into dubbing or singing. However, due to social and linguistic inequality of American Blacks, the application of AAVE has reflects the resemblance of American blacks in American society. The application of AAVE in animated movies explains the contemporary status of African Americans in USA very well.