Among linguists, it's called African American Vernacular English or Black Vernacular English. It's commonly called Ebonics, gangsta-speak, ghetto-speak, or black slang. It is one of my favorite dialects of English. And oh, MAN, is it surrounded by misconceptions.
Let me take a choice few from the Urban Dictionary entry:
"A poor excuse for a failure to grasp the basics of english. . . . you can always claim that it has something to do with a sort of symbolism or is a defining trait that makes your race great, versus own up to the fact that it is essentially laziness at it's finest."
"A 'variation' of English entirely made up of slang and southern word shortenings. . . . has almost no defined syntactical structure."
". . . some uneducated sounding pseudo-language whose purpose is for the most part to insult and denigrate 'Whitey.'"
"About the LAMEST, most pathetic excuse a person could come up with for not bothering to learn even the most basic of semi-proper English."
(I especially like how whoever wrote that first one, presumably a self-proclaimed Grammar Nazi, can't get their "it[']s" straight. But anyway.)
No, no, no. (Though to my great relief, there are some more accurate definitions given.)
Let me start by debunking a myth that a lot of people seem to believe unquestioningly: There is no single proper or correct form of English. At least not one that people actually speak. There are rules floating around which you probably learned in your English classes, or on your own if you were interested enough. You use "who" and "whom" according to these rules, but that doesn't make you correct -- that's just your dialect.
In other words, it's meaningless shit that people make up so that they can communicate about stuff that does have meaning. Take the word "tree," for instance. There is nothing in that word, that particular combination of sounds, which suggests anything inherently related to those big green plants. The word is only a symbol that all speakers of English recognize as referring to the plant.
A language does not exist because its rules are written down in a book. It exists only because people speak it. Before the rules can be written, there must be people using them in the first place. Language is in a constant state of change, and any given language is spoken with a gradient of accents and dialects, where words are pronounced a little differently, mean slightly different things, and put in slightly different orders.
African American Vernacular English is one such dialect. A group of people who spend a lot of time speaking with each other will eventually begin to pronounce things differently and coin their own words. In this case, the group was members of African-American culture. The same exact process happened with East Londoners, Australians, Dubliners, hillbillies, valley girls, Minnesotans, and Scots. (What actually influences the changes in pronunciation is different from case to case.)
Here's some more myths to debunk:
AAVE has no grammar. It's impossible to speak a language or dialect that has no grammar. Every form of spoken or signed communication has rules for stringing words together. In AAVE's case, the rules are sometimes different from other forms of English. I think the coolest example is aspect marking on "to be." In short, this is the reason why many people think AAVE speakers don't use verbs. They do, but they only use "be" in specific environments:
He late means something like "He is late right now."
He be late means "He never shows up on time." A more likely usage would be He be late everywhere. (Or not. I don't speak AAVE, so I'm guessing on that one.)
For many more examples, check out the table on the Wiki article. Really, read that whole page if there's any doubt in your mind that AAVE has grammar.
Someone who speaks AAVE is uneducated, stupid, or illiterate. This is just plain untrue. There are plenty of AAVE-speakers who are none of the above. Some dialects do have a negative correlation with higher levels of education, but that is either the result of (a) the dialect not being spoken in areas with good education (for socioeconomic reasons) or (b) people making a conscious effort to get rid of the accent they have always used, because it has negative connotations at their school.
AAVE is slang. The distinction between slang and formal language is arbitrary. All native English speakers can express themselves with varying levels of formality, but that's a social phenomenon -- all of those levels are equally real and valid communication.
AAVE is lazy English. True enough. But so is every form of English. Humans don't like exerting effort to speak. They are constantly finding the balance of language use that allows them to exert as little effort as possible while still being clearly understood. So, yes, AAVE speakers are being lazy -- but so is everyone else!
AAVE speakers did not learn English properly. Possibly because they are lazy or uneducated. If you are a native English speaker, answer me this: Did you learn English when you started elementary school? Of course not. Nobody learns their first language formally. You learn it by listening to your family and other people speak it. By the time you got to that English class where they told you not to end sentences with prepositions, you were already 100% fluent in English. This is true no matter what dialect you speak.
I do know that this was the original meaning, actually! And now I will talk about that.
The original "ebonics" program was actually an attempt to teach what is called Standard American English to AAVE-speaking kids. I watched a recording of a classroom that was doing this, and it was actually pretty cool. They were taking various phrases that are only grammatical in AAVE (such as "He funny") and having the kids "translate" into standard English.
People misunderstood what exactly was happening in this program -- they thought the kids were being taught AAVE. This is rather absurd when you think about it. The kids already spoke AAVE just fine... they didn't need anyone to teach it to them in school.
It's ironic. People didn't like the idea of kids speaking non-standard English, and they ended up rallying against a program that intended to teach the kids... standard English. I think it just goes to show how mixed up people are about AAVE. They're so freaked out about it, they can't even get these important details straight.
I have a strong hunch that the bias against AAVE is 100% racial. It's hard to say, because hillbillies and valley girls (whose dialects I also like, by the way!) also get a bad rap. But still. Institutionalized racism against black people? Yeah, that never happens...
AAVE is awesome and sounds beautiful. Forget what you thought you knew about proper English, and give it another listen.
