A new report published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal (PNAS) presents findings from research supported in part by the Russell Sage Foundation. In the study, a group of social scientists including RSF trustee Lawrence Katz, RSF grantees Jens Ludwig and Jeffrey Kling, and RSF author Greg Duncan, used data from the Moving to Opportunity program to examine how different neighborhoods affect low-income black youths’ use of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).

Residential and economic segregation in the U.S. have contributed to growing differences within the population in AAVE use. While the use of AAVE has been shown to increase in-group solidarity and strengthen identity, it is also associated with discrimination in schools and workplaces, which may exacerbate the disadvantages of youths growing up in high-poverty areas. In their study, the authors present experimental evidence that suggests that neighborhood effects on speech that lower youths’ use of AAVE could increase their lifetime earnings by approximately $18,000 (or approximately 3–4% of lifetime income).

The abstract states:

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is systematic, rooted in history, and important as an identity marker and expressive resource for its speakers. In these respects, it resembles other vernacular or nonstandard varieties, like Cockney or Appalachian English. But like them, AAVE can trigger discrimination in the workplace, housing market, and schools. Understanding what shapes the relative use of AAVE versus Standard American English (SAE) is important for policy and scientific reasons. This work presents, to our knowledge, the first experimental estimates of the effects of moving into lower-poverty neighborhoods on AAVE use. We use data on non-Hispanic African-American youth (n = 629) from a large-scale, randomized residential mobility experiment called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which enrolled a sample of mostly minority families originally living in distressed public housing. Audio recordings of the youth were transcribed and coded for the use of five grammatical and five phonological AAVE features to construct a measure of the proportion of possible instances, or tokens, in which speakers use AAVE rather than SAE speech features. Random assignment to receive a housing voucher to move into a lower-poverty area (the intention-to-treat effect) led youth to live in neighborhoods (census tracts) with an 11 percentage point lower poverty rate on average over the next 10–15 y and reduced the share of AAVE tokens by ∼3 percentage points compared with the MTO control group youth. The MTO effect on AAVE use equals approximately half of the difference in AAVE frequency observed between youth whose parents have a high school diploma and those whose parents do not.

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