Do black people of other cultures (French in particular) speak with a different grammar or inflection consistent with Ebonics in America? Also, are black French people discrimated against similarly to American blacks?
In the first case, from personal experience with Blacks who grew up in England and who grew up in France, I can say absolutely NOT. There is no trace of “Ebonics” in the way they speak. Now, they don’t speak “BBC English” or “Francaise l’Academie”–their ways of speaking are distinct, but they are not in the least bit like USA “Ebonics”.
As for discrimination–I’ve no information there.
That’s exactly what I would expect. Ebonics is a cultural thing, and really has nothing to do with race other than the fact that the subculture that uses it happens to be composed mainly of black Americans.
No, of course not. Do you think white people of other cultures speak with a different grammar or inflection consistend with American Southern dialects?
Oh, and FYI, the accepted linguistic term is not “Ebonics”, it is “African-American Vernacular English” (AAVE for short).
I think it’s clear that the OP realizes Ebonics/AAVE is a solely American dialect. If I was understanding his question correctly, he was wondering if there are analogous racial dialects in other countries.
the point I was making was that Ebonics is not a racial dialect. There are blacks* who don’t speak Ebonics, and non-blacks who do. The dialect is the product of a specific subculture, and it just so happens that the subculture in question consists mainly of blacks. Correlation != causality.
*While it may appear very un-PC, I refuse to use the term “African-American” in this context, since someone can be an American of African descent and yet not be black. African-American is not a valid way to describe a race.
Joe, I think everyone knows that the vast majority of Black Americans do not speak Ebonics. But I think it’s straining the point to try to seperate a dialect called African-American Vernacular English from its racial origins.
If you’re going to be picky about names, you can start by quitting using the term “Ebonics.” The standard term for the dialect is “African-American Vernacular English” or “Black Vernacular English” (as Lamia has already noted). The term “Ebonics” was created in a report by the Oakland (California) School Board that was a masterpiece of confusion about linguistic notions. I’ve been to a meeting of the LSA (the Linguistic Society of America, the national association of linguists) where this was discussed, and they’re still angry at how badly some important linguistic concepts were explained in the report. It was as if someone deliberately set out to parody these facts about language.
Short answer – yes, although research into the question is complicated by the fact that “in France, it is illegal to maintain data bases applying racial, ethnic or religious categories to named individuals.” See this report for details.
During World War I, however, black soldiers from the USA were generally welcomed by the French, as this page mentions. Such African-American entertainers as Josephine Baker found that France was much more welcoming than was the land of their birth.
[edited to fix links]
That first page I attempted to link above was the HTML version of a .pdf document titled “Chapter on the General Situation of Discrmination in FRANCE”. Googling on that phrase should allow you to access the report.
I have read in various places of the belief that the distinctive elements of AAVE are holdovers from West African languages. If that’s true (and I don’t know if it is or not), it doesn’t seem unreasonable to wonder whether the English spoken by Caribbean blacks and the Portuguese spoken by Brazilian blacks, etc., are similarly influenced by West African grammatical forms.
Some of the distinctive elements in AAVE derive from African languages. Some don’t. There’s some dispute about how much of AAVE comes from African sources.
Someone who has lived in these areas may know better, but when I hear some people from Spanish speaking country with a heavy African presence (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama, Venezuela) there is difference from Mexican or Peruvian Spanish for instance. I have heard that those dialects have a strong African influence.
Not all people from those nations have the same dialect or accent and not all of the people that speak Spanish this way are of African descent.
One example of a supposed African influence was some nasalisation of final ‘n’, and also an elimination or movement of ‘s’ sounds in certain positions.
In AAVE, this is heard with some speakers (think of how ‘bone’ may be pronounced by some) and also the ‘s’ is often moved in “ask” by some people.
Of course this may just be random bs with no linguistic basis.
Fascinating. Is this school board report available online anywhere?
I take it, then, that the linguistics journal Ebonics has changed its name or has ceased publication. Anyone know?
I would recommend James McWhorter’s Word on the Street for a very clear, very instructive look at the history, impact, and implications of Black Vernacular English.
FWIW, Ebonics is not listed in the Master Journal list by ISI.
Who is ISI? Well, they publish the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index, which are the standard research tools for literature reviews in their academic fields. If they don’t list the journal, there are three main possibilities:
- The journal is not in existance any more
- The journal has changed its name
- The journal does not meet their criteria for an academic research publication.
I hae no idea which category Ebonics might fall into.
Black people leaving in France are recent immigrants (excluding people from the french indies living in mainland France), first, second, at best third generation. If they have a distinct inflexion, it’s related to their original country accent/language. There’s no widespread and common language peculiarities in the french black population.
And yes, they’re discriminated against. I’m unaware of any country where racism doesn’t exist. I couldn’t compare with the US, though…
When I was a PhD candidate in Psychology (about 15 years ago), I happened upon an issue of Ebonics in our department’s library.
I found several of the articles interesting, and I remember discussing several of the issues raised in that particular issue with some of my fellow PhD students studying language and linguistics. IIRC, the articles in the journal were written in the style of an academic journal.
Therefore, given my limited knowledge of the journal, I also don’t know which of paperbackwriter’s categories to put it in.
I’d like, however, to add a fourth category: I have a fallible memory. But really, how likely is that? 
I am not familiar with any journal by that name, and I would be greatly surprised if it ever existed. “Ebonics” simply is not a linguistic term. It is so little used in the academic world that I honestly thought your question above was sarcastic until I read your next post. Perhaps the journal you remember seeing was an issue of an academic journal devoted to the subject of AAVE/the Oakland controversy and so had the word “Ebonics” on the cover.