AAVE online, DW2a

When first posed with this assignment, my first thought was to go to www.bet.com. I expected a website aiming primarily at a young, hip, black audience would embrace the appropriation of African American Vernacular English and use it frequently. However, the only evidence of AAVE I could find on the main page of bet.com was in headline links. One link read “Mayor Kilpatrick is ballin’ again!” Seeing AAVE in the headline, I was attracted to that link because I anticipated many examples of AAVE in the full article. When I clicked on the link, I found that the full story of Ex-Mayor Kilpatrick was written in Standard English. With the exception of one commenter who urges his “young brothas to get an education”, all of the comments on this article were written in Standard English. I felt like I had to search bet.com for a while until I found good examples of AAVE. The best examples of language appropriation are by bloggers not directly affiliated with BET. While some posts were written in Standard English (and one was written in Spanish), majority of the posts had traces of AAVE. One post about Trick Daddy read, “Dis ya boy Fat Tony…niggas out the hood is ready for change”. This sentence follows the rules of AAVE in three places while in Standard English, “Dis”, the omission of the word “of” between “out” and “the” and the subject/verb agreement problem between “niggas” and “is” is incorrect.
Most of the people attracted to BET are familiar with AAVE but not all of them take advantage of the opportunity to be able to practice AAVE or support black people in BET blogs. Although BET editors doe not use AAVE in any of their main news articles, AAVE is definitely appropriated by BET’s many blogs. BET offers blogs on everything from Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan and the latest genetic oddities to Rihanna’s classy ensemble and 50 Cent’s latest beef with DJ Khaled. A post about Trick Daddy by Lisa Williams read “All I can &will say iz obama made history &trick daddy spoke on it……y yall hating on trick black people stay on the subject &stop being ignorant….ya girl roc city” and assumes that all users on BET are black or that all black users support Trick Daddy. The Don argued "Of all the intelligent black actors, athletes and entertainers who have a perspective on what is at stake now, you had to pick this nappy headed nitwit."