Neighborhood effects on use of African-American Vernacular English

Abstract

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is systematic, rooted in history, and important as an identity marker and expressive resource for its speakers. In these respects, it resembles other vernacular or nonstandard varieties, like Cockney or Appalachian English. But like them, AAVE can trigger discrimination in the workplace, housing market, and schools. Understanding what shapes the relative use of AAVE vs. Standard American English (SAE) is important for policy and scientific reasons. This work presents, to our knowledge, the first experimental estimates of the effects of moving into lower-poverty neighborhoods on AAVE use. We use data on non-Hispanic African-American youth (n = 629) from a large-scale, randomized residential mobility experiment called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which enrolled a sample of mostly minority families originally living in distressed public housing. Audio recordings of the youth were transcribed and coded for the use of five grammatical and five phonological AAVE features to construct a measure of the proportion of possible instances, or tokens, in which speakers use AAVE rather than SAE speech features. Random assignment to receive a housing voucher to move into a lower-poverty area (the intention-to-treat effect) led youth to live in neighborhoods (census tracts) with an 11 percentage point lower poverty rate on average over the next 10-15 y and reduced the share of AAVE tokens by ∼3 percentage points compared with the MTO control group youth. The MTO effect on AAVE use equals approximately half of the difference in AAVE frequency observed between youth whose parents have a high school diploma and those whose parents do not.

Keywords: African-American Vernacular English; code switching; language; neighborhood effects; segregation.

Fig. 1.

MTO effects on neighborhood conditions. Impact on each outcome of assignment to the LPV group for non-Hispanic African-American youth whose language sample from the MTO long-term survey was analyzed. The squares represent the ITT estimate for the effect of being assigned to the LPV group, rather than control, for the outcomes listed on the x axis: neighborhood (census tract) share poor and share black at the address where the youth was living 1, 5, and 10–15 y after random assignment (the 10- to 15-y address is where the youth was living as of May 31, 2008, just before the beginning of the long-term survey fielding period). Share poor and black are z-scores, standardized by the control group mean and SD. The box whiskers represent the 95th percent confidence interval around the estimates. Census tract characteristics are based on interpolated data from the 1990 and 2000 decennial Censuses as well as the 2005–2009 American Community Survey.