World Health Organization. Manual of the International Statistical
Classification of Diseases, Injuries, and Causes of Death, Sixth Revi-
sion, Adopted 1948. Geneva: World Health Organization, 1948.
Martha Slay
Greg R. Alexander
Mary Ann Pass
BLACK ENGLISH
African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also re-
ferred to as Black English, African American English,
and Ebonics, is a rule-governed variety of English
spoken by some African Americans in the United
States. Most linguists agree that the dialect has its
roots in the Creole language developed as a result of
contact between West Coast Africans and European
traders. Creole, brought by slaves to North America,
went through further transformation as a result of
contact with southern white varieties of English. So-
cial isolation and segregation of African Americans
further increased the divergence of the dialect from
other dialects of English spoken in the United States.
The dialect differs from Standard American En-
glish (SAE) in phonology (e.g., ‘‘bafroom’’ for ‘‘bath-
room’’), morphology (e.g., nonobligatory plural with
numerical quantifier; ‘‘two dog’’ for ‘‘two dogs’’), and
syntax (e.g., habitual or general state marked with un-
inflected ‘‘be’’; ‘‘she be fussing’’ for ‘‘she is fussing
now’’). The features are optional and the frequency
of their use varies as a function of the speaker, inter-
locutor, and context.
Controversies surrounding AAVE center on its le-
gitimacy as a distinct dialect of English, the extent to
which its linguistic features differ sufficiently from
SAE to be considered a distinct language, and the ex-
tent to which its linguistic features result in mutual
unintelligibility between speakers of the AAVE and
SAE. Some critics of AAVE view it as being ‘‘broken
English’’ and its use as a deficit to be corrected. Oth-
ers have argued that AAVE is a unique language just
as French and Russian are unique languages. AAVE
is neither; it is a rule-governed variety of English. The
differences between the two dialects has the potential
of penalizing AAVE speakers who are assessed with
test instruments that do not take into consideration
the features of their dialect. Further, the sociopoliti-
cal reality dictates that educators facilitate the acquisi-
tion of SAE while respecting the legitimacy of AAVE.
See also: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE;
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Bibliography
Baugh, John. Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Mufwene, Salikoko, John Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh,
eds. African American English. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Wolfram, W., C. T. Adger, and D. Christian. Dialects in Schools and
Communities. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999.
Aquiles IglesiasBLENDED FAMILIES
Although approximately 50 percent of marriages end
in divorce in the United States, living in a family
headed by a single parent is usually only a temporary
situation for most parents and children. The majority
of divorced men and women will eventually remarry.
In fact, roughly one-third of divorced people will re-
marry within the first year after their divorce. As a re-
sult of these multiple marriages, families may take a
variety of forms. One form, the blended family, con-
sists of unrelated siblings (i.e., stepsiblings) from ei-
ther the mother’s or father’s previous marriages or
romantic relationships, who are brought into a new
family when parents cohabitate or remarry. Family
members’ adaptations to the new relationships in
their stepfamily evolve over time and are influenced
by a variety of factors.See also: CHILD CUSTODY AND SUPPORT; DIVORCE;
STEPFAMILIESBibliography
Hetherington, E. Mavis, Sandra Henderson, and David Reiss. Ado-
lescent Siblings in Stepfamilies: Family Functioning and Adolescent
Adjustment. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child
Development 64, no.4, serial no. 259 (1999).
Wilson, B. F., and S. C. Clarke. ‘‘Remarriages: A Demographic Pro-
file.’’ Journal of Family Issues 13 (1992):123–141.
Glendessa M. InsabellaBOWLBY, JOHN (1907–1990)
John Bowlby was an English psychiatrist who devel-
oped attachment theory, one of the century’s most in-
fluential theories of personality development and
social relationships. Born in London, England, Bowl-
by graduated from Cambridge University in 1928 and
began his professional training at the British Psycho-
analytic Institute as a child psychiatrist. He was
trained in the neo-Freudian object-relations ap-
proach to psychoanalysis, which taught that chil-
dren’s emotional disturbances were primarily a
function of their fantasies generated by internal con-
flict. While embracing the psychoanalytic emphasis
on the importance of the early years for children’s
healthy emotional development, Bowlby felt that this
approach neglected the importance of their actual
early experiences with their parents.
After World War II, Bowlby became the head of
the Children’s Department at the Tavistock Clinic,
where he focused his clinical studies on the effects of64 BLACK ENGLISH