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Abstract or Introduction

Ebonics is probably the most popular and widespread linguistic phenomena in the world today. This is mainly due to the fact that American music is a worldwide predominant cultural reality. Black American music with its inherent linguistic characteristics, by the same token, looms large within that heritage. In this paper I will commence with a description of the term “Ebonics” and some information on the scientific state of affairs concerning its origins. Then I will proceed to some phonological aspects and conclude with a short look at its grammatical structure and idiosyncrasies. African-American English, the linguistic variety spoken by many African Americans in the United States of America, is a system with specific rules for combining sounds to form words, phrases and sentences. The first researchers who took an interest in this called it “Non-Standard Negro English”, “Negro dialect” or “American Negro speech”. However, because of the growing objections to the term Negro, other terms had to be found – parallel to the changes – in referring to black people. But even though the terms “African-American Vernacular English” (AAVE), “Black communications”, Black dialect”, “Black English”, “Black Vernacular English”, “African American language”, “African American English” and, as Stanford Afro-American Linguist John Baugh named it, “Black Street Speech” (Baugh, 1983: 11), have all been used to label this variety over the past forty years, the word “Ebonics” (a blend of ebony and phonetics that was created in 1973 by a group of black scholars) is probably the most popular one today. This essay is to be understood as a brief survey on its grammatical and linguistic features.