| ▲ | dhosek 3 hours ago | |
As a writer and amateur linguist I can always spot the people who don’t understand how AAVE works because they seem to think that it’s just “bad grammar” and don’t realize that it does in fact have its own grammatical rules. One that’s not exclusive to AAVE, but is common across most informal spoken English in the US (maybe beyond—I know there’s at least one Genesis song that uses this which suggests it may exist in informal British spoken grammar), is the use of the oblique case when a subject has two or more elements joined by and: “Steve and him went to the store” insted of “He and Steve went to the store.” (Ordering is also subject to different ordering with formal English dictating that the first person pronoun comes last, but informal English putting it first: “Me and him” vs “He and I.” The other thing I find interesting is that formal English has eschewed the double negative as an intensifier while most (all?) other Indo-European languages employ it. Compare Spanish “No veo nadie” (literally ”I don’t see nobody“ which is the informal English formulation) to English “I don’t see anybody.” | ||