AAVE (ebonics) continue discussing please

Great Debates
41

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You are certainly wrong if you are attempting to liken AAVE to a contemptuous mangling of SEV, and it looks very much like you are doing just that. I hope I am mistaken, as I would hate to think that so many people have wasted their time by defending AAVE as a lingusitically legitimate dialect.

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Pretty much everyone who thinks that AAVE is not a dialect but a contemptuous mangling of SEV suggests that African-Americans should “stop talking in that ignorant way”.

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Would I change my mind about what? The fact that you speak four languages certainly does not change my belief that it is wrong to call a person lazy if they have been unable to manage to become similarly accomplished, especially if they have limited access to the sort of instruction necessary to gain such an accomplishment.

People strongly identify with their native dialects, and tend to resent any suggestion that their dialect is inferior or that they or others in their community should be trained out of it. Condemning the way a person speaks is condemning them as well as their culture in a significant way. Given this, and the rather unfortunate state of American race relations in general, is it any wonder that some AAVE speakers refuse to learn SEV and view those who do with suspicion? I’m not saying that this is the most rational way to look at things, but it is an understandable one.

42

All self-destructive behavior “makes sense” to a degree, i.e ., we can understand why people engage in it, but you seem to be defending it. African Americans should use the existence of racism to justify their perpetuating their own suffering?

43

I would very much like to know where you got the idea that AAVE speakers have insisted that anyone else learn their dialect. I have never heard of such a thing myself.

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I am defending a not unreasonable response to a genuine threat to a unique dialect. In the US almost every effort to instruct AAVE-speaking children in SEV (and in many schools no effort is made at all) is based on replacing AAVE with SEV. The chief exception to this would be the Oakland Ebonics debacle, something that almost immediately became the butt of jokes across the country and remains so to this day. Many AAVE-speaking children are faced with a difficult choice. They can admit that their native dialect, an integral part of their culture, is inferior and wrong and put a lot of hard work into a potentially fruitless attempt to learn how to “talk right” (or as many of these children would tellingly put it, “talk white”), or they can just refuse to learn to speak fluent SEV. This is a choice where both options are self-destructive.

The way to help AAVE-speaking children learn SEV is to find a better way to teach it to them, one that is not based on “correcting” them out of AAVE. But it seems that most people would rather just call AAVE “wrong” and expect its speakers to magically learn how to speak “correctly”.

44

Ok, I think I’m finally getting it.

Children who speak AAVE are disadvantaged in our public school system which is taught in SEV.

Not just grammar, but everything. Math, the sciences, history, even foriegn languages are taught in our public schools with the assumption that all students speak SEV.

So, an AAVE speaking student, unfamiliar perhaps with certain “proper” speech patterns, words, and idioms of SEV would fall behind other students unless they put forth special effort to conform to SEV. Provided they even knew that there was a difference.

And the teachers have only SEV textbooks, lesson plans, etc… regardless of their primary tongue. Also provided the teachers knew the difference.

So then, on both sides, some children grow up speaking SEV (in their own accent, dialect…) and as adults don’t recognize that AAVE is a real language, not just a “black” way of talking. Likewise, AAVE speakers, perhaps not understanding that they do not speak SEV, view SEV speakers as talking “white.”

It is in reality a language difference, but becomes a perceived racial bias in the minds of some people, whether Black or White.

So, how do we mainstream an understanding of this potentially damaging issue?

45

How about “mainstreaming” it as we do with every other language that isn’t SEV? I don’t get this concern at all. LOTS of schoolchildren are brought up in other-language households, and our solution is to teach them SEV as quickly as possible so they can join the mainstream of students. How is doing otherwise with African-American students not discriminatory and IMO extremely patronizing? Why is it ESL instruction with, say, a Greek-speaking 7-year-old but “oppressive indoctrination” with an African-Americna 7-year-old?

46

Dude, I’ve tried to stay out of this,but some on… the point was that we should treat this like other languages; apart from a very small exception we don’t, we treat it like improper English.

47

Other languages are instantly recognized as such, and then SEV is considered a second language. AAVE seems (I repeat, seems) to be unrecognized by many as a language and instead considered as “improper” speech. I’m not talking about you, P.R.R., but I don’t see much understanding of this in my day to day interaction with mainstream America, whatever ethnic origin they are. Outside of academia, the only mention I can recall of AAVE is that Oakland school board thing. That’s what I’m talking about.

48

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The above may be a bit of an overstatement, but I think you are on the right track. I’m not sure how much of a disadvantage AAVE-speaking students are at when it comes to reading, as reading is really a new language for everyone. However, I’m sure it doesn’t make things any easier for them that the language they are reading is more closely related to SEV than to their own dialect.

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This is a crucial point: both students and teachers are unlikely to realize that the students are speaking a different and legitimate dialect. The issue of dialects is not one that weighs heavily on the minds of most people. Indeed, most people aren’t too clear on what a dialect even is. Even children recognize that different kinds of people talk in different ways, but the distinction between speaking in a different dialect, speaking with a different accent, and just plain speaking incorrectly is difficult for many people who have not studied linguistics (and some who have).

Almost all AAVE-speakers have enough exposure to SEV that they can understand it perfectly well, and a great many can speak SEV or some very similar dialect when they want to. Few realize that they are switching between two dialects, though. Most think of it more as “the way we talk at home” vs. “the way I talk at school/work”. People who only speak AAVE tend to think of it as “the way we talk” vs. “the way they talk”, with “they” being people from a different neighborhood, of a different social class, or of a different race. Children who only speak AAVE generally come from families where everyone speaks AAVE and live in neighborhoods where everyone speaks AAVE. Although they may realize that, say, their teacher speaks differently they are unlikely to recognize this as a different dialect and even less likely to think it is something they should emulate. What child would want to sound like their teacher rather than their friends?

AAVE-speakers do not receive ESL instruction. That’s the whole point here, that these children are unfairly expected to master a dialect other than their native one with no special instruction whatsoever, or perhaps worse still with instruction that involves telling them that their normal way of speaking is ignorant and wrong and that they must stop speaking that way. Rather than helping children to learn a second dialect this attitude has probably done more than anything to make it so that they never learn SEV.

49

SO you’re saying what, Lamia? That an African-American child who can’t express himself or comprehend instruction in standard English is…what? Simply screamed at? “Get with the program, you ignorant, lazy non-functional excuse for a human? Your so-called culture SUCKS, and you damned well better starting speaking correct English, maggot!” Or maybe we’re trying to instruct them in standard English, but catching a lot of resistence from the A-A community who think that “instruction in standard English” = “insults to the AA community, disrespect for AA culture”, etc?

How exactly do you (or does anyone) propose we treat AAVE? I’d be very interested in seeing such proposals, apart from “we need to find a better way.” Lacking that better way, what should we do NOW? And finally how would those immediately applicable proposals not be wildly out of whack with what we can do for children who speak other languages?

50

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I realize that you are attempting a ludicrous exaggeration, but I would not be surprised if there were at least a few teachers in the country who do just that. But far more frequently non-SEV speakers are treated the same way as children with speech impediments or mental problems that interfere with language skills, or they are placed in remedial classes with children of below-average intelligence, or the issue is simply ignored and they are left to fend for themselves with no instruction in SEV whatsoever.

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I’m sure you’d like to think that.

The obvious solution, one you would have seen mention of already if you had been paying attention, would be to adopt a program similar to those already used to instruct children in English as a second language. It would be much simpler of course, as AAVE-speakers already know much of the necessary vocabulary and grammar. Such instruction need not be limited to only AAVE-speakers, or only speakers of non-SEV dialects; all children could benefit from a study of diction and elocution.

51

Sorry if I’ve seemed inattentive; I promise you I’m not being deliberately so. This thread seems a good and highly various one to me, and it’s hard to pick up every idea that’s tossed out sometimes.

Are you really saying that the A-A community would be (or should be?) behind such a program? Politically, I wonder how they, on the whole, feel about this concept. Do African Americans want their children segregated into “ESL” type tracks and SEV tracks? Does this resistence, if it exists, increase if the “ESL” type instruction goes on for years and years?

52

I would be against any further segregation of African-American children; goodness knows there’s enough of that in the schools already. But I don’t think that would be necessary. First of all, most children who only speak AAVE do so because it is the norm in their neighborhood, and are likely to attend schools where most children speak AAVE or other non-SEV dialects.

Secondly, it would be possible to include SEV-speaking children in dialect exercises. If I remember the plan for the Oakland Ebonics program properly, it involved activities like having children orally translate phrases from one dialect to the other and listen to their teacher read a storybook written in mixed dialect (one character speaks SEV, one AAVE). Sadly, this highlights one of many problems people had with the program – SEV parents feared their children’s speech would be tainted with AAVE if it were used in their lessons.

This is a narrowminded view, but I am not so optimistic as to think it could be overcome easily. However, such problems could be avoided by instituting elocution and diction lessons for all children. It was not all that long ago that such things were a standard part of the curriculum, and training in formal speaking is something that all children could benefit from regardless of their native dialect.

It is worth stressing that for many American children that native dialect is not SEV; few people sound as much like the national TV newscasters as they think they do. Thanks to a mobile military childhood my natural speech is fairly close to SEV (much closer than that of my parents), but still includes some Southern dialectical elements. I can now eliminate most of those elements from my speech at will, but I wasn’t even aware of many of them until my teens. And from Fargo to Fairfax, the US is full of people whose speech is much less like SEV than my own. AAVE-speakers are unique only in the degree to which their dialect is likely to be perceived by others as improper, ignorant, and lazy.

53

I think the problem to deal with first is letting it be known that there is a problem.

Seriously, how often has this subject come up outside of discussion boards like this or college courses in language studies? I had only the merest idea of wtf AAVE was until just a few days ago. And I’m relatively well educated and extremely curious.

So, first things first. Maybe in early grammar classes (2nd or 3rd grade) introduce students to the idea of different dialects in the same basic language. AAVE and SEV being just two. Of course, IMHO, SEV would have to be taught as the standard American form of the English language. Just because it is.

I’m also quite keen on exposing younger schoolage children to different languages in general. Learning both Spanish and English as a youngster has been of great use to me.

54

“most children who only speak AAVE do so because it is the norm in their neighborhood, and are likely to attend schools where most children speak AAVE or other non-SEV dialects.”

This is where I have had a hard time imagining an A-A parent, who speaks SEV (more or less), living in a largely AAVE-speaking area, NOT putting up terrific resistence to having his or her children exposed in public school to the element (AAVE) that he or she has devoted years to shielding his or her kids from. Very hard to get around, and I sure wouldn’t like to be the the assistant principal who had to explain this policy.

55

that is a good point, PRR. Because that’s the way our world works. And not everyone wants or needs to change. But, it seems to me that the dialect differences do exaggerate certain racial biases when they’re treated as “White speech” vs “Black speech.”

Just a thought.

56

It’s highly unlikely that a children living in largely AAVE-speaking areas would not already know how to speak AAVE, although they might refrain from doing so around their parents. Peers have a greater influence on the developing speech patterns of children than parents or other adults do.

57

Really? I thought our language patterns were indoctrinated in us by our infant and early childhood caregivers (read: “parents”), since we seem be to hard wired for language and begin learning as soon as we are free of the womb (Freedom! Sweet freedom!), possibly even before. (Some parents swear by reading or singing to their unborn children).

58

I’m sorry, I guess I wasn’t being clear: I meant if a mother (to avoid that nasty “his or her” stuff) speaking SEV and raising her kids to do so, but who lived with her kids in a neighborhood that one of these AAVE-as-ESL programs was going on in the schools, I would raise holy hell upon discovering that most of the instruction in my child’s school was being conducted in AAVE for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to imagine that the courts wouldn’t rule that this woman’s kids were suffering by being denied access to an education just because they happened to speak fluent standard English.

59

Language development continues well into childhood. You may have observed the amazing ability children have for picking up new languages. You may also have observed that children rarely speak like their parents if they grow up in a different region than their parents did.

Neither I nor any of my siblings speak with the same accent or in the same dialect as our mother.

A family friend who was born in China but immigrated to the US at age three speaks flawless American English, but her father’s English is heavily accented and her mother barely speaks English at all.

Obviously our language patterns were not already established by infancy or early childhood.

I fear there has been some sort of misunderstanding. I have never suggested an AAVE-as-ESL program, but rather a modified SEV-as-ESL program. I have never suggested that instruction take place entirely or even primarily in AAVE. There would be little point to such a thing, as AAVE-speakers understand SEV perfectly well (although it may “sound funny” to them). The two dialects are mutually intelligible. The problem is that some AAVE-speaking children cannot speak SEV well or at all. Given this, teachers would do well first to recognize that AAVE is not a sign of subnormal intelligence or laziness, and second to assist AAVE-speakers in learning to speak SEV in addition to AAVE. This process could be facilitated by the use of AAVE/SEV code-swapping exercises. That’s all.

60

I know that. But hasn’t there been alot of research lately into language capacity being an innate part of the human brain? I seem to recall that some sort of study showed how isolated twins even formed their own language… That’s what I was thinking of…

I know, I know, a preposition is something a sentence should never be ended with. (My teachers hated me saying that, he he…)