Chompsky is certainly a linguistic genius, although I don’t share his politics…
At any rate, his proposition opens an equally interesting thought-- do all living languages stem from one original paleo-language or did language spring up simultaneously in different ancient populaitons. There is a guy, Greenberg(?) at Stanford (?) who claims to have proven the former and has projected his paleao-language back about 100k yrs. Interestingly, that’s pretty close to what mtDNA says about when Homo sapiens came into being. Needless to say, though, this is not accepted orthodoxy.
At any rate, you certainly appreciate dialects a lot more travelling in Europe than here in the US. It’s hard to say we have much more than just regional accents. Makes sense, though, since we’ve only been speaking English here for a few hundred years.
It’s funny, Chomsky’s linguistic work and his connection to the field are so strong in my mind I get this moment of dissonance anytime his name comes up in a political context. I rarely think of him as “Noam Chomsky, left-wing intellectual” at all, even though I know he’s pretty happy in that role!
I think it’s pretty unlikely that all modern languages evolved from a common ancestor. The usual way of supporting Chomsky’s universal grammar theory is to point to basic human brain structure – different languages can’t be all that different, since our brains are so much alike. Not much room to argue with that, although the existence of a true Chomskian innate human grammatical “deep structure” has yet to be conclusively proven.
Heck, even in England alone you’ll find greater variation dialects than you do in the great big US of A! I’ve heard there are some regions of the country where natives can honestly tell what side of the hill or end of the valley their neighbors come from due to speech differences alone. Thanks to a long Anglophile phase in my teens even I can make a fair guess as to what part of the city a Londoner comes from, although I’m no Henry Higgins. But when dealing with my fellow Americans, I usually can’t do better than a broad region like “Upper Midwest”.
BURNER, your example is no good because you’re conflating slang with a dialect. They aren’t the same thing. AAVE is a dialect, your song lyrics are slang. Plenty of AAVE speakers wouldn’t know what they meant either.
“But when dealing with my fellow Americans, I usually can’t do better than a broad region like “Upper Midwest”.”
Not sure if this is still valid, but the accents around Boston used to be distinct enough that you could tell pretty much which part of Boston someone came from by their speach. When I lived there, I kind of didn’t like the fact that you automatically stated making assumptions about someone as soon he openned his mouth. But you really couldn’t help it… People are pretty mobile these days, though, and TV tends to tie us together more.
Chompsky’s idea of universal grammer is so brilliant that it falls into one of those “why didn’t I think of it” categories. It makes SO much sense, once someone explains it to you.
How many different languages might there have been? Is there any generally accepted list of mother tongues?
FWIW, isn’t English sometimes refferred to as “A Bastard Language,” because of having so many roots? (If this assumption of mine is wrong, please clarify that, too.)
I had an interesting discussion about that theory with my Japanese neighbor, who is in the US studying English. She’d read Chomsky in school in Japan and thought his theories were both brilliant and interesting, but “they don’t make learning English any easier!” However, she added that, as different as Japanese and English are, the fact that she’s been able to learn English as a second language at all (and IMHO her English is quite good) does suggest the existence of a deep-rooted similarity even between languages that are very different on the surface.
Goodness, I haven’t any idea! There must be people who specialize in that area of study, but I ain’t one of 'em. Maybe someone else here is? I imagine it must be very difficult to be sure about anything relating to ancient languages that predate the development of writing. By looking at historic interaction between cultures and similarities between different known languages (both living and dead) it is possible to group languages into families, but even then there are a few misfits like Basque that don’t seem to be related to any other known language.
English does have a lot of roots, although plenty of other languages have colorful histories as well. To give an ultra-condensed overview of the evolution of the English language, Old English is essentially a Germanic offshoot. (There are surviving German and Dutch dialects that are very close to Old English.) Then with the Norman Conquest came a big dose of French – the year 1066 is usually considered the dividing line between Old and Middle English, although it took a few centuries for French to really blend into the batter. Latin played a big role too, first through Roman settlers in the British Isles and much later through the Roman Catholic Church and the use of Latin as an intellectual lingua franca. Then colonial expansion brought all kinds of borrowed words into the language, words from exotic places ranging from the Americas to the East Indies. So you can see that’s a pretty mixed background, and I’ve only covered the basics.
To be precise, English has only one root-- Old Germanic, which derives from Indo-European and before that who knows? Most languages borrow a lot from other languages, but English tends to do so more than average. Lamia’s summary pretty much tells the story, except for a big influx of Danish (Old Norse, actually) when Denmark ruled Britain before 1066 times. Since Old Norse was a lot like Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), we end up with a lot of very similar words: Shirt/Skirt is a common one, with the latter pronunciation coming from old Norse. It’s interesting that English borrowed so many French words, that it’s a bit easier for us to learn French or Spanish than German. Most of the “big” words are from French or Latin. And again, we have all the cognates: “get” from Old English, “receive” from French. The list goes on and on. It’s really pretty fascinating.
I believe that most linguists think that all the languages currently spoken in the world were probably all derived from one language. There’s no real way to prove this, though. DNA and linguistic reconstruction seem to indicate that everyone living today had common ancestors 60,000 to 100,000 years ago. It’s not clear then how old human language is. It’s possible, for instance, that it’s 500,000 years old, but no human ever ventured out of Africa (and probably a small region of Africa) for the first 400,000 years. Up till that point, every human being was part of a group with little genetic diversity and speaking just one language. Then they broke up into several groups who migrated to various parts of the world. All the genetic diversity presently found in mankind developed after this point. The language spoken just before this point evolved over the next 100,000 years into all the present languages of the world.
If this is true, we couldn’t possibly say anything about the evolution of language before the big migration 100,000 years ago. The languages spoken by humans from 500,000 B.C. to 100,000 B.C. would be simply unknowable. You can only reconstruct a proto-language if you have a number of its descendents. Even at the best then, if we were to reconstruct the ancestor of present languages, we would only be reconstructing the language spoken 100,000 years ago, just before the big migration. (But even to do that would mean that we would have to be able to reconstruct languages from their descendents 100,000 years later. Nearly all linguists think that that’s simply impossible. They think that with current tools of language reconstruction, we can’t go back further than about 10,000 years.) It’s possible that language evolved several times back before 100,000 B.C., but all except one of those languages died out.
On the other hand, it may be true that language only originated 60,000 to 100,000 years ago, just before the big migration. (I have a personal fondness for this idea.) In that case, we can reconstruct the original language if we were able to reconstruct original languages 100,000 years ago. I personally think that we may be able to improve our techniques of linguistic reconstruction so that we may push back the barrier on how long ago we can reconstruct languages.
No one has still come up with any clear ideas about how to deal with the social and political “issue” of either formally introducing or formally rejecting AAVE in public school systems.
I still feel that it doesn’t really matter what is spoken in school (or the home), so long as the students have a good grasp of written SEV. Good enough to at least understand the questions on standardized tests.
It seems that most people here agree that speaking a dialect doesn’t (or shouldn’t) have much effect on a child’s SEV reading and writing skills. If that’s the case, then what’s the issue here?
Sure, students who speak AAVE at home will be at a disadvantage. But, there will always be disadvantages. (At least in a capatalistic society.) As much as we would like every student to be on a completely equal footing, it’s not going to happen. Just not possible.
Students who grow up in Louisiana, and speak Creole in their home, are going to have to work a lot harder, because they are ata disadvantage. Canadian students who grow up in a French-speaking household are going to have a harder time than most, when they enter an English-speaking 1st grade. A Polish student, whose parents don’t speak much English, is going to have to study harder than the other kids to keep up. This is completely expected. If you fall behind, to do you best to catch up. Common sense.
Remember, education is a 2-way process. A teacher can teach her arse off, but it hardly matters if none of the students are learning. As much as teachers have a responsibility to teach, students also have a responsibility to learn.
AAVE is not holding any students back. It’s not stopping them from being able to make themselves understood in the Queen’s English. It’s not making them any less intelligent. It’s just a roadblock. A deterrant that is frustrating, but not completely dehabilitating.
In many other situations, this roadblock would hardly be noticed. But, for many social, political, etc. reasons, AAVE is getting much more airtime. As someone mentioned above, it’s nearly impossible to divorce a discussion of AAVE from it’s sociopolitical context.
The issue, as I see it, is that there are racist people, many of whom may not realize that they are racists rather than the Holy Defenders of the English Language, who discriminate against AAVE speakers and want to see the dialect dead. There are many other non-SEV American dialects, and although some do expose their speakers to ridicule and discrimination (even being the president won’t spare you from being mocked if you speak the wrong kind of Southern dialect!), none attract quite the extreme negative reaction that AAVE does.
A woman I am very close to who works in academia but talks like the daughter of an East Texas turkey farmer has been told quite rudely on multiple occasions that “You need to do something about your accent”. However, I don’t believe anyone has ever said outright that she could speak perfect SEV if only she weren’t so lazy and stupid. And no one has ever said that she should abandon her native dialect entirely, even when speaking to her own family, only that it’s inappropriate for an academic setting. Yet people say those kinds of things about, and to, AAVE speakers all the time – even professional educators who should know better.
This sort of thing does not encourage children to practice SEV. It encourages a lot of other things though, like racial tension, unneccesary shame, and a hurt and angry resistance to learning SEV. The problem isn’t that AAVE speakers are left to learn SEV on their own, although I doubt special and considerate help in that area would do them any harm. The problem is that they are openly discriminated against in many situations, including in the public school system, in a way that people who speak other non-SEV dialects are not. This discrimination is in no small part the result of a misguided belief that AAVE is not a legitimate dialect in its own right but a stupid, lazy, and ignorant corruption of English. With that belief in place AAVE speakers can’t even hope to compete on a level playing field with others who don’t speak SEV as their mother tongue, much less those who do.
I mout cou’d add something to this here discussion. We been talkin’ as though most English speakers speak a staindard way, and them Blacks jus’ cain’t be bothered to talk the way the rest of us folks do. But here about 25 miles west of Rocky Maount (same vowel as in “the Tao”) mos’ folks talk laike I’m typin’ this par’graph.
AAVE is a linguistic dialect. Like every other dialect, it has its own rules for syntax. “It is I” is poor colloquial English – it’s formal English, suitable for oral speech on certain “high” occasions and for the majority (but not all) of written work. But it’s as out of place in normal middle-class conversation in most dialects as a hockey goalie fully uniformed is in the middle of a baseball game.
If one’s contention is that it is inappropriate to use AAVE in the context of an educational program designed to teach standard American colloquial English and formal written English, among other things, to all students, there may be some grounds for saying that, and there may be the counter-argument that outside intentional “total-immersion” language programs, one works starting in the native dialect to teach another language form. But the assumption that because speakers of AAVE are not using the grammatical forms of your own dialect of colloquial English, they are not using any rules, is flat out wrong. Linguistic scholars have studied it, and identified rules, using predominantly analytic structure rather than English’s bastardized synthetic/analytic forms, under which sentences are constructed in AAVE. Its vocabulary has some unique coinages, borrowing as it does from perhaps the richest language in history.
A good, short book that I now recommend to everyone which does a thorough job of answering most of the standard misunderstandings about language (including about AAVE) is Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill.
Incidentally, linguists don’t use the term “Ebonics.” They call it “Black English” or “African-American Vernacular English.” They would certainly never call it “Jive.” Linguists mostly think that the Oakland public schools manifesto about “Ebonics” (back in 1997 or 1997) was so badly written and so full of misunderstandings of basic linguistic facts that it’s going to take them years to recover from the state of public confusion that that statement caused.
This point can hardly be emphasized enough. The unique rules of AAVE aren’t obvious to speakers of other English dialects because, despite some people’s claims that AAVE is incomprehensible to them, it is otherwise quite similar to those other dialects. To return to Old Gaffer’s example of the “be [verb]” construction, “She crying” or “She be crying” seem wrong to SEV-speakers not because they are so very different from the proper SEV phrase “She is crying” but because they are so very close to it! It is not readily apparent to those unfamilar with AAVE that the speaker is using one of the rules of that dialect to make a distinction that has no precise SEV equivelant. Instead it seems like a simple mistake of dropping or misconjugating the verb “to be”.
Okay. From this post, I assume the “main” issue you’re groping for here is that “it’s bad for people to be racist.” And, obviously, I wholeheartedly agree. I’m sure most people would vehemently agree.
I agree that the negative reactions to AAVE are greater than most other dialects. But these reactions are not universal. The “majority” of Americans would more than likely not respond negatively to AAVE. We’re talking about a few, ignorant, racist people who, if they had no knowledge of AAVE, would probably extend their racist notions through other means, and find something else to criticise.
I really don’t think this is an academic issue, as much as it is a social issue. The place to combat this racism is in classrooms, but not with the formal introduction of AAVE as a Second Language. This racism should be countered by teaching understanding, and good morals, and creativity, in the classroom.
Also, could you please give a few examples of people or groups that want to see AAVE “dead?”
Generally, most students who speak AAVE in the classroom are going to attend schools where at least some of the faculty also speak AAVE. The hurt, anger, and shame are feelings provoked by societal issues, not educational or academic issues.
Please give examples of how AAVE speakers are “openly discriminated against in many situations, including in the public school system, in a way that people who speak other non-SEV dialects are not.” I’m not exactly sure what you mean. Please explain how this discrimination is unique, and therefore different than discrimination of other dialects. I understand the effects of this discrimination, but not the actual discrimination itself.
Also, it’s sad, but the negative image of AAVE and it’s speakers does negatively propegate itself. What is the biggest window through which AAVE makes itself known to the general SEV public? Entertainment. It’s through music, movies, sports, etc. that most people first experienced, and continue to judge AAVE.
You and I both know that AAVE has a rich, deep literary, musical, and social history. It’s impossible for us to picture the history of America without the birth of jazz and the blues, which inspired to much of today’s culture. But for most people, AAVE is directly related to “violent, misogynistic, morally-depleted hip-hop music, and overpaid, unintelligent, druggie athletes.” As long as this association exists, the Average Joe is going to be reluctant to forfeit his intolerance of and/or annoyance with AAVE.
Kids, on the other hand, aren’t nearly as judgemental, and have seemed to take a liking to AAVE culture. Which I’m sure is why we are hearing more and more about the backlash against AAVE. Never before has there been such an interest, especially amongst SEV youth, in AAVE music and culture. So, as we see more and more acceptance by the youth, we’ll see more and more resistance by the older generations.
But, we can only hope that today’s youth, with a much more intimate relationship with and understanding of AAVE, will become less and less preoccupied with race.
Racism certainly does extend farther than speech issues, and in terms of bad consequences of racism I’m sure being looked down upon for your way of speaking beats being lynched. However, the belief that AAVE is not a dialect but rather a lazy and stupid collection of mistakes can easily serve as “proof” that African-Americans themselves are lazy and stupid. Even people who don’t have this prejudice already might be persuaded by the argument if they don’t realize that the common “mistakes” AAVE speakers make are not mistakes at all but rather follow the grammatical rules of the dialect. Getting everyone to realize that AAVE is a legitimate dialect wouldn’t end racism, but it would help.
It would also help the related racist belief that African-Americans must speak AAVE and that most cannot learn SEV at all (because they are so lazy and stupid). I think almost every black professional who doesn’t use AAVE at work has a story about meeting a business contact in person for the first time after speaking with them on the phone, and finding that the other person is amazed to discover that they’ve been dealing with a black person. And witness the backhanded praise heaped upon black public figures who speak SEV. Chris Rock does a bit about the way people always damn Colin Powell with the faint praise of saying he “speaks well”, a compliment usually reserved for the mentally handicapped or people recovering from a stroke. Once you begin paying attention to these things it’s hard to miss the fact that white public figures are rarely described as “articulate” or “well-spoken”, but black ones often are – as if it’s something extraordinary that a black person might actually manage to master SEV!
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If you run a search on other threads dealing with this issue, you’ll see people who are upset, perhaps even outraged, that African-Americans who they know can speak SEV perfectly well in a formal or business setting dare to use AAVE when speaking to their friends or family. “I know they can talk properly when they want to, so why must they speak in that lazy, ignorant way?” Others get angry just hearing kids hanging out speaking AAVE. Seems like they want the dialect dead, not just restricted to non-professional situations.
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Again, if you check through the older threads you’ll see people saying that they wouldn’t give an AAVE speaker a job. Pretty basic discrimination there, although there are admittedly some jobs where the ability to speak SEV is a reasonable requirement. But there are also many jobs where the ability to speak AAVE could be a valuable asset (such as in businesses in predominanly AAVE-speaking neighborhoods), and no one ever mentions that.
As for in the schools, AAVE-speaking children are often made to feel stupid for not speaking SEV or are harshly corrected for making “mistakes” that are perfectly correct contructions in AAVE. There’s a big difference between being told “‘She crying’ is wrong, you should say ‘She is crying’” and “Can you say that in SEV? No? It’s ‘She is crying’”. It’s also not unheard of for AAVE-speaking children of normal to above-average intelligence to be placed in remedial classes with children who have problems with speaking proper SEV not because it is not their native dialect but because they are learning disabled or mentally handicapped.
I agree with many of your insights, but I still feel that school children don’t get as much slack for speaking AAVE, as you make it sound.
As I said before, there are very few instances where there is only 1 or 2 AAVE speakers in the classroom. Most AAVE speakers, I would guess, live in predominately AA communities, with AAVE speaking teachers. If students attend a school across town, it’s still likely that it’s a public school, there will be AAVE-speaking teachers.
I went to public schools, from K-12, and often was made fun of by AAVE speakers, who mocked my “white” voice.
And, I’m sorry, but “she crying” has no place in the classroom, especially in English class. The student should be corrected, though obviously in a much nicer way than being told “No, that’s wrong, you’re an idiot.” Academic and education dialogue in the classroom, in my opinion, should be an extension of a students reading, writing, and speaking skills. “She crying” is acceptable in speaking, though not in writing and reading. It is a grammar mistake, as there is no verb. It is acceptable to omit the verb in a literary setting, declaring poetic license. But, before you playfully break and bend grammatical rules, you should know the original rules.
Again, speaking AAVE is harmless if the speaker has a firm base in written SEV. But, unfortunatley, that’s not always the case. And that lack of a firm base of grammatical knowlege can have a negative effect on the students entire life.
You forgot to add “in SEV.” It is clearly not a grammatical error in AAVE. This is exactly the attitude that labels AAVE constructions as errors that has been challenged throughout this thread. The placement of the verb “to be” in AAVE follows similar constructions in many other languages and a couple of dialects of English and it is not an error–just different.
There’s no guarantee that an AAVE neighborhood school has AAVE-speaking teachers, no matter how many of the students speak AAVE. The majority of African-American teachers are working in schools with a high percentage of minority students, but even those teachers may not speak AAVE or realize that it is a legitimate dialect.
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I can’t think where you are getting this idea from. I had a mobile childhood and attended three middle schools and two high schools (all public), and I never, ever encountered a single teacher who spoke AAVE in my presence. Some of them may have been able to if they wanted and just chose not to, but there can’t have been many of them. In fact, I had very few African-American teachers at all, for the simple reason that there are very few African-American teachers out there. According to the statistics in this article, around 90% of teachers in public schools are white. I don’t believe there are any available statistics on this issue, but I feel pretty safe in saying that there are vanishingly few white people who speak AAVE as their native dialect and not all that many more who can speak or even understand it as well as a native. Since there’s no such thing as a formal AAVE as a second language class, non-native speakers tend to make a lot of mistakes when it comes to the unique grammatical features of the dialect because they just don’t know what the rules are.
So what are the odds that any given AAVE-speaking child will ever hear a teacher speak AAVE? What are the odds that the child will ever have a teacher that can understand the subtle nuances of AAVE? I’d calculate them as “not very good at all”.
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Same thing happened to me, and my sisters. But it was other students doing the mocking, never teachers. Did teachers make fun of you?
According to the rules of AAVE, “She crying” is perfectly acceptable. More than that, it is the best and clearest way to indicate in AAVE that the woman in question is crying right now but is not someone who cries habitually. The latter is “She be crying”. This distinction might be more clear if I use another example. “My mama sick” means that my mother is not feeling well today, but “My mama be sick” indicates that she is suffering from a chronic or reoccurring illness.
Correcting either of these phrases to the SEV “My mother is sick” loses a part of the meaning. Native AAVE speakers are not going to be happy with this correction, no matter how kindly it is offered, because “My mother is sick” leaves it unclear as to how serious or lingering the illness is likely to be. At the same time, unless the teacher is a native AAVE speaker or has studied the unique features of the dialect she or he is unlikely to realize that the child is not merely being stubborn but attempting to convey an idea that cannot be expressed quite as simply or elegantly in SEV (although this particular grammatical rule does have its equivelants in other languages, such as Spanish). In order to best help the student to learn SEV, the teacher would have to understand what is going on and help the child come up with an SEV construction that is grammatically correct but does not lose the sense of the AAVE phrase. This isn’t a terribly difficult task (“My mother is sick today” or “My mother has a cold” should suffice), but becomes nearly impossible if the people involved don’t realize that they’re speaking two different dialects with distinct grammatical rules.
Maybe someone else here is? I imagine it must be very difficult to be sure about anything relating to ancient languages that predate the development of writing. By looking at historic interaction between cultures and similarities between different known languages (both living and dead) it is possible to group languages into families, but even then there are a few misfits like Basque that don’t seem to be related to any other known language.