African American Vernacular English and its Use in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Pre-University Paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 15, , language: English, abstract: African American English (AAVE) was first brought to the attention of linguists when in the 1960s, the government realised that African American (AA) children from urban ghettoes were worse in school than white pupils. When this approach failed, linguists suggested that AA children only spoke a different dialect than white children and that consequently, it would be necessary to teach them SE as an additional dialect. To counteract this, it financed compensation programmes in which AA children should be taught Standard English (SE) "by means of structural drills and techniques adopted from foreign language learning".

However, this approach also failed because the failure of AA children in school seems to be a result of a cultural and social divide between AA and white American society, of which separate dialects of English are only a symptom.It will therefore be the aims of this paper to prove this belief wrong and prove that AAVE is indeed a rule-governed language, to investigate its origins and its use in Zora Neale Hurston's most famous novel, Their EyesWereWatching God.