english_north_america · United States

United States · African American English (umbrella label)

African American English is a systematic variety with its own consistent phonology and grammar, spoken across the whole United States rather than in one region, and it varies internally: a Detroit speaker, a Houston speaker and a rural Mississippi speaker differ from each other in rhoticity, in vowel quality and in how much of the Southern Vowel Shift they share. This preset models the widely-described common core -- variable non-rhoticity, PRICE monophthongized before voiced sounds and finally, TH realized as a stop word-initially and as a labiodental fricative elsewhere, and coda cluster reduction -- and it is a profile, not a definition. Its rules are rules, not errors, and it is modelled here alongside General American, not against it. Two well-described features are again out of the matrix's reach because they are environmentally conditioned rather than lexical: the pin-pen merger and the voicing-conditioned split in PRICE.