Ebonics is a term that refers to the language of all people descended from African slaves, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America). It is a vernacular form of American English used in the home or for day-to-day communication rather than for formal occasions. The term Ebonics was created in 1973 by a group of black scholars who disapproved of the negative terms being used to describe this type of language). Since the 1996 controversy over its use by the Oakland School Board, the term Ebonics has primarily been used to refer to the sociolect African-American English, a dialect distinctively different from Standard American English).

Ebonics is a blend of the words ebony and phonics, and it simply means black speech. In theory, scholars who prefer the term Ebonics (or alternatives like African American language) wish to highlight the African roots of African American speech and its connections with languages spoken elsewhere in the Black Diaspora, e.g. Jamaica or Nigeria. However, in practice, AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and Ebonics essentially refer to the same sets of speech forms.

Ebonics pronunciation includes features like the omission of the final consonant in words like past (pas ) and hand (han), the pronunciation of the th in bath as t (bat) or f (baf), and the pronunciation of the vowel in words like my and ride as a long ah (mah, rahd). Some Ebonics pronunciations are more unique, for instance, dropping b, d, or g at the beginning of auxiliary verbs like dont and gonna, yielding Ah on know for "I dont know" and ama do it for "Im going to do it".

The influence of African languages on the structure of Ebonics has been rather elusive, limited to some features—such as copula omission, lack of subject-verb agreement, and absence of subject-auxiliary inversion in main clauses—that this dialect shares with Caribbean English creoles and Gullah. The origins of these peculiarities probably should not be located exclusively in black African languages.