AAVE
Americanabbreviation
abbreviation
Usage
African American Vernacular English is a designation used by linguists to describe a North American dialect of English used by some Black people. Like older names for this dialect, the full term is usually used only once or twice to introduce it in writing or speech; thereafter the abbreviation (AAVE) is used, with the result that the abbreviation is far more common than the expanded form, especially in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, and sociology.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
She no longer had to blend in or prove herself to people who would look down on her for speaking AAVE, she said.
From Washington Post
"In AAVE, awake is often rendered as woke, as in, ‘I was sleeping, but now I’m woke.’"
From Fox News
Che responded to the backlash in a since-deleted Instagram post in which he copped to writing the segment and revealed he was new to the acronym AAVE.
From Fox News
By using narrow speech corpora both in the words that are used and how they are said, systems exclude accents and other ways of speaking that have unique linguistic features, such as AAVE.
From Scientific American
“She chonk” becomes problematic when the word “is” is removed because such phrasing also is used in AAVE.
From Los Angeles Times
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
