Phonetic realizations

Many of the vowel and consonant phonemes in tables 1 and 2 have AAVE allophones that are different from StAmE and are either unique to AAVE or are shared by other non-standard American dialects. The Northern Cities Chain Shift is a phenomenon affecting the speech of white speakers in the northern United States. Its essential features are the tensing and raising of [æ] to [ε], the backing of [ε] to [Λ] , the lowering of [ç] to [a], and the fronting of [a] to [æ]. According to Labov (1994), AAVE speakers are not participating in this shift.

The vowel system of AAVE differs from other American English varieties in several ways, although it does share some of its features with Southern white varieties. In table 3 we display and comment on some of the more frequently noted AAVE variations from StAmE.

Table 4 summarizes the realization of the AAVE vowels, based on Wells’ system of lexical sets.

The entries on Table 5 give examples of some distinctive AAVE consonantal allophones