Dean on Understanding Language

1. Esmay is an idiot
2. Ebonics is garbage of the worst sort

I live in Australia, and I regularly come into contact with Aborigines, and I concur with the view that people can speak an entirely different dialect of English.

In fact, this has caused problems in courts. There was a case where a young aboriginal man was asked whether he had killed such and such person, and he replied "Yes". He then added, that the victim had got up after he killed him, and he killed him again.

The word "kill" mean very different things to an Aboriginal person.

Furthermore, the intonation of words are rather different. It can be difficult to understand at first, but no more difficult to understand a Scotsman, for example.

Chui
http://teyc.blogspot.com

For what it's worth, Oliver, I disagree with nearly all of Dean's politics. What you're saying is simply incorrect from a linguistics standpoint, though.

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Ebonics is an unfortunate name. Linguists prefer African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE. But it is very much a vernacular or dialect of English. Calling Ebonics 'bullshit' is like saying that the idea of differentiating American English from Oxford English bullshit. At best it's ignorant, at worst it's racist.

I minored in Africana Studies, alongside a friend of mine who is black. Two of the courses I took were linguistics courses, the first an introduction to linguistics that focused on African-American Vernacular, the other a course on Carribbean languages. Languages divide into dialects and vernaculars across any number of fault lines -- geography, sex, class, age, race. Everyone speaks their language with an accent, there is no such thing as 'speaking without an accent.' Everyone uses slang and neologisms that is peculiar to their linguistic context. Everyone is at variance with syntactical standards, especially when the syntax is as fluid and irregular as it is in English.

There are a number of traits of African-American Vernacular English that are shared with what many call the 'Southern Accent,' which is actually a dialect. There are other traits more closely related to the patois of the carribbean islands, with which they share West African, indigenous, Spanish and English roots.

Patois are formed when traders of divergent languages develop an intermediate language centered around the swadish (the group of words that essentially appear in every language world-wide) in order to do business. There is a distinct patois in Hawaii derived from Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, English and native Hawaiian. The only thing allows the people of Papua New Guinea to communicate (since there are hundreds if not thousands of languages spoken) is a shared patois.

They are also formed as a form of coded communication, which is key to the development of AAVE, African-American music and verse structures and speech events. Slaves were taken from any number of language groups and regions in Africa, and were forced to speak English if allowed to speak at all. The rich double-entendres of blues lyrics is one example. Messages such as to where to meet a courier on the underground railroad could be sung as a hymn in plain English, within earshot of the overseer without repurcussion because the slaves understood subtle changes of syntax and re-appropriated vocabulary that the overseer didn't.

I think African American Vernacular is beautiful, and since I grew up exposed to it as a child and have studied it, I can speak it and recognize it quite well (it's not only spoken by people darker than milk). What's more interesting is to hear myself using it unconciously in what would otherwise be 'standard english' situations. Most of my black friends who work closely with white people professionally will actually change their language patterns at work and home -- partly due to racist/classist attitudes about their vernacular, but also because they are making an effort to make mainstream dialect speakers more comformtable, just as you'd speak French in France.

I had friends who called the class I took garbage when I took it. Those who thought that it was bullshit when the class started, though, were all believers by the time it was over. It's science, people. Better recognize.

Sorry about the long comment, but this is something that I feel very strongly about. Hope it makes sense. Feel free to tear into me via email.

It's funny/tragic that white/moneyed America spent 220+ years denying black kids a decent education (as a matter of law), and now blames them for not speaking proper English.

Oliver is eloquent as usual. He still owes me an apology and a retraction, and still isn't man enough to admit it, but I'm over it. Apparently he isn't. [shrug]

In any case: most of you have it correct. Having lived and worked in black neighborhoods for long periods of my life and had many, many good friends who were black, the fact that there is a distinct and regularized difference between the everyday language spoken in black culture and white culture is simply unremarkable. Declaring it "bullshit" is a way of declaring a large (and by the way, often beautiful) part of black culture to be bullshit. Of course all cultures have bullshit, but language usually isn't one of them.

Of course, some black kids never learn the vernacular. Usually this is kids who grew up in predominantly white areas, whose parents rigidly refused to let them slip into the vernacular. That too is unremarkable, and is not unique to American culture but is found in every society where an ethnic dialect bumps up against a dominant dialect.

For anyone who's interested in the general subject of linguistics, and why there's no firm difference between a "dialect" and a "language," and the social results of two closely related dialects butting up against each other, I recommend The Language Instinct by lingust Steven Pinker. Wonderful book. It changed how I looked at all kinds of things--and explained once and for all why it is I can't stand the way English teachers teach the English language.

If you're interested in the specific case of "ebonics," or African American Vernacular English as most people are more comfortable calling it, I strongly recommend Spoken Soul: The Story Of Black English by linguist John Russell Rickford, and his son Russell John Ricford. It's a delightful book, and black people and people who live and work in black neighborhoods particularly should enjoy it.

By the way, in the discussion you link, some of my commenters objected that what the Oakland school board was really doing was pulling a fast one and trying to get bilingual education funding for AAVE (i.e. "ebonics"). Others involved in that case deny it but I'm no longer sure what I think about that question.

What I do know is that "ebonics" may be a word some people think is stupid, but what it describes is not.