One should know the meaning of AAVE before using it on social media platforms like Tiktok, Facebook and Instagram. Lot of people are facing criticism as they used this word AAVE.
The actual meaning of AAVE get different on TikTok sometimes due to many people participating in trend and using it in their videos. So, one should know the difference between actual meaning and meaning of it on Tiktok. One should have also notice that lot of Black people found it problimatic whenever some non black used this abbrevation in their videos. This could get politicized and can also get against you if you don’t know meaning of this abbrevation.
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What is the full form of AAVE and what does it mean ?
In a normal dictionary, AAVE simply means ‘African American Vernacular English’ also called as Black Vernacular English (BVE). So, this word refered as a ‘Language of African People Living in America’ or simply ‘Language of Black People’. AAVE is dialect of English created and used in Black communities which is way of speking English in African Accent.
Sometimes people criticized Black people as a wrong English speaker for speaking AAVE. But, Linguist Geoffrey Pullam described these criticisms in his 1999 essay “African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English With Mistakes.” Pullam explains, most Standard English speaker thinks that AAVE is just a badly spoken version of their language, marred by a lot of ignorant mistakes in grammar and pronunciation used by an ignorant urban underclass, which is not true.
According to linguists at The University of Hawaii, AAVE came through, “processes of second language acquisition”.
What is the meaning of AAVE on TikTok ?
There are many slangs which people using in Tiktok, some of them came from AAVE. People might have think that these words are internet words and it already existed. But, it came due to AAVE speaking content creators. Some content creators got criticize heavily when they tried to justify that some slang terms belonged to Internet culture. In reply to their justification, people explained that these all belong from AAVE. This is where lot other TikTok user confused with the meaning of AAVE. Later, those influencers had to delete their content where they used these slangs.
Now, Tiktok is open for all content creators from different part of the globe. Many content creators originally speaking AAVE made TikTok vidoes where they seen speaking in their accent. Some of their video got trending. So, people got to know about accents of AAVE people. But, many non-africans or people from different culture trying to copy & speak AAVE in their videos, it seems offensive to African community.
Many black and africans requesting other communities on social media to avoid their way speaking in AAVE because it looks that they are mocking the black or African people. Now, as the Africans have their way of speaking in English, one should not make joke out of it. People must be respectful for type of diversity on open platform like TikTok.