Social Variation in Language

Sociolinguistics is the study of the linguistic features that have social relevance for participants in those speech communities (Yule, 2020). For instance, African American English (AAE) or also known as Black English or Ebonics, is a variety used by most African Americans. AAE is widely used in many different regions of the USA. The form of AAE that has been most studied is usually described as African American Vernacular Language (AAVE). The term “vernacular” is a general expression for a kind of social dialect typically spoken by a lower-status group and treated as “non-standard” language. Today, AAVE is widely used in the internet culture and has co-opted into Generation Z slang. The real-world example demonstrated how social variation of African-American Vernacular Language is used in internet culture. This example shows the correlation between social variation and the popularisation of AAVE in internet culture.

The use of AAVE dates way back to the 17th and 18th centuries when the settlers' dialect was introduced into the American South (Winford, 2015). Although the roots of contemporary AAVE were established in the rural South, the emergence of urban AAVE was undoubtedly a by-product of the Great Migration during the early and mid-twentieth centuries. During the Great Migration, African Americans moved from the rural South to large metropolitan areas of the North (Wolfram, 2000). In recent years, the use of AAVE has dominated social media platforms such as Twitter, Youtube and Instagram.

AAVE has been continuously stigmatized in this country, often viewed as inferior, lazy, or flawed grammar. AAVE is saddled with a standing of simply being faulty English (Charity Hudley and Mallinson 2011). However, it has been confirmed multiple times that AAVE is a systematic, rule-governed dialect of English, like any other (Wolfram 1969; Labov 1972; Pullum 1999; Rickford 1999). Because of its prominence deficiency, there has not historically been any standard orthography for AAVE (Green, 2002). As native AAVE speakers have battled for equal (and integrated) education, AAVE-speaking children are expected to learn standard written English in school based on the prestige of Mainstream American English (MAE). While authors like Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston have scuffled with penning dialect as they heard it, none of their attempts have been widely adopted.

It is interesting to see that in order to avoid duplication, retweets and advertisements were removed from the dataset. In addition, the maximum number of tweets was limited to 3,000 per user to prevent an uneven skew across the dataset. The final corpus comprises 15,804 tweets. While Ilbury acknowledged that both the number of users and the size of the dataset are modest, particularly in comparison to the large‐scale datasets obtained by other computer science scholars (Eisenstein, 2015), the intentionally restricted dataset allows for close qualitative analysis of orthographic variation and the related interactional stances that these features afford.

Apart from that, it is intriguing to see that the corpus of 15,804 tweets was manually trawled as an example of orthographic variation. All tweets containing non‐standard spellings were extracted and were individually examined for the presence of AAVE features by cross‐referencing the feature to existing accounts of the spoken variety (Green, 2002; Thomas, 2007). Unlike in computer science,, where variable patterns are analyzed automatically using computational tools, the features in this paper were manually analyzed. The purpose of this is to increase the accuracy of the coding process and, second, to examine the specific interactional contexts in which the feature occurs (see also Georgakopoulou, 2006).