Americans in public forums. These may be individuals who grew up in
AAVE-speaking communities but who are bidialectal, or others who grew
up with a different variety of English altogether, and still chose to try to
acquire AAVE (with differing degrees of success, as seen in Baugh’s
(1992) examination of the mistakes made by adults who are acquiring
AAVE as a second language.
So some subset of AAVE speakers have learned how to shift toward
*SAE in terms of grammar in order to evade the overt discrimination that
comes along with their mother tongue. Most of these people will still
signal their allegiance to the community by means of intonation and other
prosodic features. This is almost certainly not a conscious decision, but an
element of language performance – an attempt to satisfy the expectations
of the listeners – that is a common feature of human communication.
Defying the definition
The 1990 census reported that the U.S. African American population grew
about 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, for a count of 29,427,000, or
about 12 percent of the country’s total population. In 2007, the estimated
population figures saw some change (Figure 10.1). How many Americans
of African descent speak African American Vernacular English is a
relevant but difficult question, in part because there is no definition of
AAE or AAVE that has wide consensus.^6