African American Vernacular English

In The Color Purple, Alice Walker goes to great lengths to capture the dialect of African Americans living in the deep South. The following linguistic features are employed by Walker to represent the characters' vernacular.

• Use of ‘ain’t’ as a general negative indicator, often instead of don’t, doesn’t or didn’t. E.g. ‘This here by the bed ain’t fresh.’
• Double negatives are often used e.g. ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with Shug Avery.’
• The verb ‘be’ is often dropped e.g. ‘She just sick’ instead of ‘She’s just sick.’
• ‘Is’ and ‘Are’ are often omitted e.g. ‘Who your daddy?’ Instead of ‘Who is your daddy?’
• Present tense verbs are uninflected for number/person e.g. ‘She look like’ or ‘The minute she hear it’.
• The genitive –‘s ending may not be used e.g. 'my sister doctor over Macon' is used to mean my sister's doctor.
• Altered syntax in questions e.g. ‘Why I’m not good enough?’ instead of ‘Why aren’t I good enough?’
• Consonant Cluster Reduction - final clusters of consonants are reduced or dropped e.g. ‘He rub his chin’ instead of ‘He rubbed his chin’ or ‘Somethin’ instead of ‘Something’.
• Final consonants changed i.e. ‘ast’ instead of ‘ask’ or ‘kine’ instead of ‘kind’.
• ‘Done’ and ‘Been’ used to emphasize the complete nature of the action e.g. ‘And God done fixed her.’
• Some initial vowels and consonants dropped or replaced e.g. ‘bout’ instead of ‘about’ or ‘I want dis’ instead of ‘I want this’.
• Vowels changed altering the sound e.g. ‘git’ instead of ‘got’ or ‘set’ instead of ‘sit’.
• Tenses used differently to Standard English, specifically the past tense e.g. ‘She shrug’ instead of ‘She shrugged’ or ‘I sure hope you done change your mind.’ Instead or ‘I hope you’ve changed your mind.’
• The pronoun ‘They’ is used instead of the determiner ‘their’ e.g. ‘the horses flicking flies off they rump.’