African American Vernacular English is a full, rule-governed variety of English with its own grammar, sounds and vocabulary. Linguists have documented its consistent rules for decades. One example is the habitual "be," as in "She be working," which marks an action that happens regularly and has no single-word equivalent in standard English.
AAVE developed among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the US, shaped by English dialects, West African languages and the conditions of segregation. Its speakers have long been judged as uneducated for using it. In 1979, a federal judge ruled in the Ann Arbor "King School" case that a Michigan school district had to account for Black students' home language in teaching them to read. In 1996, the Oakland school board recognized "Ebonics" to help teachers build on students' language, sparking national backlash. The Linguistic Society of America backed the board's linguistic reasoning in 1997.
Bias against AAVE has real costs. Research on the 2013 George Zimmerman trial found that key witness Rachel Jeantel's AAVE testimony was misunderstood and dismissed. Meanwhile, AAVE terms like "woke" and "lit" are widely borrowed in pop culture and online, often without credit to the communities that created them.