THE VARIATION OF FUTURE GOING TO IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH

Abstract

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), Black English Vernacular (BEV), or Ebonics, is a social dialect or a non-standard linguistic variety of American English which carries distinctive grammatical and phonological features. Because of these features, AAVE is considered a unique communication system that has been recognized among linguists as an alternate, regular, and systematic form of vernacular language. Common phonological characteristics of AAVE include reductions or deletions of particular sounds (e.g., [sstə] for Standard American English "sister" [sstər]) and different realizations and vocalizations. In this article, we examine the abbreviations of future going to (i.e., onna, gon, I’ma) which have been typically associated with AAVE. The variants of future going to have been studied in the interviews with six African-American public figures: rap artists Redman, Prodigy, MC Lyte, and Queen Latifah, a talkshow host, Oprah Winfrey, and a blues musician, B. B. King. We analyze the completely abbreviated form I’ma in correlation to gon, gonna, and going to in the first person singular and explore the use of gon in relation to gonna and going to in the remaining grammatical environments. The main objective of this study is to calculate the frequencies of future going to variants in the speech data of each interviewee and test the sociolinguistic variability of the feature by considering the influence of two external identity characteristics, gender and affiliation with Hip Hop culture