| − | AAVE is a beautiful dialect of English characterized by non-rhoticity and several distinctive vowel mergers. Pesky consonant clusters like /sp/, /st/, and /sk/ are reduced word finally, with the final element being deleted rather than the former, causing words to flow off the tongue much more easily than Standard English. The cross-linguistically rare dental fricatives, /θ/ and /ð/, aka the '''TH''' sound, are shifted to /f d/ (which are much more common). For younger speakers, /skr/ also occurs in words that other varieties of English have /str/ so that, for example, street is pronounced [skrit], which is indeed more common than /str/, a rare and unusual cluster. These sound changes cause English to become more typologically normal and easier to learn. | + | AAVE is a dialect of English characterized by non-rhoticity and several distinctive vowel mergers. Consonant clusters like /sp/, /st/, and /sk/ are reduced word finally, with the final element being deleted rather than the former, causing words to flow off the tongue more easily than Standard English. The cross-linguistically rare dental fricatives, /θ/ and /ð/, aka the '''TH''' sound, are shifted to /f d/ (which are much more common). For younger speakers, /skr/ also occurs in words that other varieties of English have /str/ so that, for example, "street" is pronounced [skrit], which is indeed more common than /str/, a rare and unusual cluster. |