Yes, but that has nothing to do with which human language people actually learn. It’s a serious misinterpretation of Chomsky’s “deep structure” theory of language to think that humans are born hardwired with the ability for a particular human language rather than human language in general. Any normal human infant has the potential to learn to speak any human language with perfect fluency.
That’s not how I was interpreting it either, LammieBaby. 
But I’m glad you cleared it up for any who were.
But, it does bring up in my mind the question of just when children really begin to form their own distinct language pattern.
I can speak both English and Spanish, having been reared in two very bilingual areas (Houston and LA). I have a Castillian lisp when speaking Spanish, even the TexMex type I was exposed to. I also have a very distinct drawl speaking English that I have to conciously work against in professional situations. My parents have barely any accent, sounding more like Tom Brokaw than me. My Dad does have the Castillian lisp when speaking Spanish, though.
So, when does the dominant pattern actually form?
You apparently picked up the Texas drawl from your friends while living in Houston. You picked up the Castillian Spanish from your father (was he born in Spain?). I presume that you picked up the Texas accent because you spent more time with your Anglo Texas peers than with your parents, but you didn’t pick up the Mexican accent in Spanish because you didn’t spend quite so much time with Hispanic peers. Is that correct?
Pretty close, WW. Dad spent alot of time in Europe during the occupation, mostly around the Med which is where he picked up Spanish, French, German and Italian. ( I know a little French but no German or Italian 
) He was born in San Antonio into a 2nd gen Prussian / American (immigrated 1880’s, I believe) family but his family considered Hispanics to the same as Blacks, i.e. not to be associated with if you could help it. Lucky for me, he broke out of that mold (mostly). Mom is part Indian (Cherokee / Comanche, odd combo if you know Native Americans…) part Irish from Tulsa. We moved around alot, but I consider myself more Texan than anything else. But, that would explain why my Spanish is Continental and my English mostly Southern, verdad?
The crucial period for language acquisition seems to run from roughly the ages of 2 to 8 years. In the rare and tragic cases of children who don’t acquire any language during the crucial period their language acquisition ability atophies and they become unable to master any language at all. But during the crucial period children can acquire any human language with relative ease.
As I mentioned before, children learn to speak from everyone in their environment. If there is a difference between the speech of a child’s parents and that of the other people in the environment, the child will tend to speak in the way that they have the most exposure to or that will be best understood by all. Had you grown up in an area where no one outside your family ever spoke Spanish you may have ended up with little or no Spanish skills yourself. This might have happened even if both your parents spoke Spanish at home, as long as they understood English well enough that you weren’t forced to maintain your Spanish-speaking abilities to communicate with them. I have heard of some older members of immigrant families actually refusing to learn English to ensure that the younger members don’t lose their bilingual skills.
In your case, I think the same phenomenon explains why you don’t speak English with the same accent as your parents. You got more reinforcement for the local regional accent from others, and your parents could still understand you when you talked that way, so that was the pattern that “set”. It’s interesting that your Spanish accent is more like your father’s than that of other Spanish-speakers in your environment. I would guess that you probably had more exposure to Spanish at home than other places so that pattern “set” instead of the less familiar TexMex one. If that’s not the case then I have no ready explanation, but I see upon preview that Wendell Wagner has already made the same suggestion and you have confirmed it. That’s what I get for taking a long snack break. I’m going to leave the now-redundant portion of my message in anyway though, just so I won’t feel that I’ve wasted my time in writing it. 
Pretty good, Lamia
Also, my elementary school Spanish teachers (only two different ones for grades 3 - 8, longest we stayed in one school system) both spoke Castillian, and most of the lessons were for “proper” Spanish. Dad was teaching me Spanish long before school. He wanted bilingual children. I remember some trips to Mexico City to see the bull fights (among other things). Man, that was something for a 6 yr old! After the service, Dad was a petrochemical engineer. That’s why we moved and traveled so much.
I wonder if schools in Mexico City have a similar AAVE/SEV problem with Formal Spanish/ TexMex?
I’ve been told that these days it’s more common for high school and elementary school Spanish teachers in the U.S. to teach their students to speak with a Mexico City accent (which is pretty close to a Tex-Mex one) rather than a Castillian accent. I’m surprised that your teachers used a Castillian accent, NoClueBoy.
I’m 40 yrs old. And, like I said, both those teachers spoke a Castillian accent themselves. But that was a long time ago. Things probably have changed. And maybe, they kind of favored me for my Daddy inspired accent, I couldn’t really say at this far removed time.
Man, I’ve been online way to much today. See you all later.
Hmmmm…My understanding of “mainstreaming” ESL students was that they were frequently treated exactly like AAVE students, i.e., contemptuously, with no attempt to educate them in their native laguage or ease their transition into English. Isn’t this the whole bi-lingual education issue that gets voters in western states all riled up. (I know my location says Colorado, but I’m in DC now. I only lived in CO for a year.) Of course neither situation is helpful for the kids, (and both stem, I suspect from racism), but when kids who everyone agrees speak legitimate foreign languages get the shaft, what chance do AAVE speakers have?
Not, of course, that we shouldn’t have this debate, or push for better practices. But don’t think, if we could just get schools to treat Black kids as well as they treat Hispanics. . . .
Oops, I was actually responding to the discussion on the first page. I thought I was reading page 2. Oh well, my comments still stand and are pretty clear (I hope), even if the seem to be a bit of a non sequetur.
That’s fine. I kind of hijacked my own thread. But, continue with AAVE, SEV, & ESL ideas…
This is a good point, and I’m glad you brought it up. Treatment of students who are not fluent in English could be much better, although it used to be much worse. But the general attitude even today seem to be that anyone who cannot speak English (or the most desireable dialect of English) had better learn to do so right quick, with as little use of the school’s valuable time and money as possible. It doesn’t matter whether they maintain their native language or not; in fact, it may be preferable that they do not. Multilingualism does not seem to be a particularly highly valued trait in the US, as can be seen by the dismal quality of foreign language instruction in American schools.
A shortage of teachers qualified to teach English as a second language is also part of the problem. A friend of mine was saddled with an ESL class as part of her very first teaching gig right out of college. She was, by training, a Latin teacher, with a degree in Classics. At least she knew some foreign language teaching methods, but she had no experience at all teaching English, English as a second language, or students who did not speak English well. Since none of her students were from Ancient Rome she couldn’t even offer them help in their native language.
You and me both…but I find this thread more interesting than my thesis proposal.
I disagree with the racism angle. I think it’s more ignorance than arrogance.
“I find this thread more interesting than my thesis proposal”
Me, too. (With my own work, of course, Lamia, not yours.) We agree, too, that ALL ESL students are getting the shaft. Aside from tripling the budget that this society devotes to language training, I wonder what we might do to see that ESL students get educated.
If we’re saying that these students need to be mainstreamed as soon as possible, for their own advancement’s sake, and we are considering maintaining their non-English language(s) to be a real luxury considering the tight resources we make available, then why is it so bad to put a top priority on mainstreaming them quickly?
Seems to me, we’re damned if we do and if we don’t here. If we (somehow) were able to offer top-notch instruction in SEV facility, we would stand accused of bulldozing over their native languages, tossing their entire cultures into the dustbin, and if we don’t we stand accused of not caring about these children and consigning them to a lifetime of impaired language skills, blithely accepting their status as second-class citizens.
>Just to emphasize what Lamia said, they are not mispronouncing words, but speaking them correctly in their dialect.<
That is to say, they aren’t pronouncing them incorrectly, they’re mispronouncing them correctly.
:dubious:I don’t think so.
Ebonics is not a dialect with any rules or order at all. It is verbal laziness. Letters are not pronounced in the middle or ends of words. Lottery becomes “lorry.” MF has become “MoFo.” No wonder Ebonics speakers can’t get jobs working with the public, especially on a national or international scale. People who learn English as a second-language do not learn slang, so it is almost impossible for them to understand Ebonics. I worked at a company that had to hire a black woman to teach the black workers how to answer the phone and to say things like “Excuse me for a moment, I’ll be right back,” instead of “Ah be beck.” I guess a white person teaching them to speak would have been insensitive. This was in Los Angeles. We actually had an unofficial “Ebonics desk” for sending callers who were incomprehensible to the Hispanic and white workers. Anyone who speaks to me in jive gets hung up on or ignored. BTW, I do have black friends who speak perfect, normal English and feel the same way I do about ebonics.
FWIW, you’re confusing two quite different things – descriptive linguistics analyzing the so-called “urban Black dialect,” and proper colloquial “English as she is spoke” by the majority of Americans, skin color being irrelevant.
Ebonics does follow rules, which are not the proper rules for English. This is also true for various Pidgins and creoles formed on the basis of English and other spoken languages throughout the world.
People can and do disagree on whether there is any value to “working in Ebonics” or recognizing it in the elementary and secondary schools. (There is no doubt that it is a fertile subject for philologists – we are observing the birth and early evolution of a distinct dialect, with the obvious benefits to understanding the evolution of language generally.) To assume, however, that it is “laziness” or “bad English” is merely to perpetuate ignorance. It’s “bad English” in the same way as Cicero’s orations were “bad English” – they didn’t pretend to be “good English.”
Ebonics uses analytical rather than synthetic verb forms and idioms. “Tengo que jugar al beisbol” is excellent Spanish, but a literal translation of the words is “I have what to play to the baseball” rather than the accurate rendering, “I have to (=must) play (at) baseball.”
Yo be chillin’ at yo’ dissin’ of Ebonics, now! 
(And if that wasn’t clear and obviously an accurate construction using rules that you will recognize, I’ll be very surprised.)
I’m stunned that someone with your apparent interest in language (most of your posts seem to be on the subject) and even more apparent willingness to condemn others is so astoundingly ignorant on the subject. You have clearly not only ignored the many fine points made by myself and others in this old thread you’ve dredged up, but have ignored the entire field of modern linguistics. Ignorance is what we’re trying to fight here, but we can’t do it without a little cooperation from the ignorant. Go read a book or something.
Heck, I’ll even recommend one for you, because although you don’t merit the consideration and I doubt you’ll bother to actually check it out someone else here might – The Language Instict, by MIT’s Steven Pinker. That was the very first book I read in my very first Philosophy of Language class, and it is an interesting, informative, and clearly-written introduction to the field. There is even a brief section specifically about AAVE that should make it plain to anyone how wrong Virgowitch and all who share her racist opinions on the subject are.
This should of course be The Language Instinct. Please forgive any other errors I have missed; I just had surgery last week and cannot see well enough to type to my usual standards yet.
I’ve had a couple of my old threads pulled up in the past week. Weird.
What is eveident about this ressurection though, is the newest poster to this thread didn’t read the whole thread or the thread I linked to. Because, after reading all that, even if you don’t agree with the linguistic study being discussed, you would have to see that it is being treated as a real linguistic study.
Otherwise, I have to assume that newest poster has some real personal gripe about AAVE that doesn’t belong in a (reasonably) calm debate.
There are dissenting opinions in this thread, but, for the most part, we did avoid pointless racism.
This was my first really instructive thread in my life on The Dope. I’m glad to say I’ve learned about other subjects and have even helped a couple of others with things I know. Plus, I like to entertain and be entertained.
So please, Virgowitch, don’t be so hasty. I get myself in pretty deep at times, then I sit back and watch. I haven’t left, I’m learning.
I am an actor who has studied and learned different dialects all my life as part of my craft. There is a distinct difference between a dialect, and the slurring, mumbling, dropping of syllables and laziness in enunciation of English that I personally encounter in people speaking jive. Calling that mess a dialect is like calling an epileptic seizure ballet.