psychonaut writes:
> Fascinating. Is this school board report available online
> anywhere?
Here’s a whole page of links to the Oakland statement and the reaction of linguists to it:
My reaction on first hearing the term “Ebonics” in connection to the Oakland statement was "Who was their consultant in coming up with this name? Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson? Is White English to be called Ivornics?
I wrote:
> Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson?
Sheesh, can’t I get anything right? Of course, it was Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder who did “Ebony and Ivory.” Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson did “The Girl is Mine.”
I don’t know how well a professional boxer might represent an entire population of blacks in England, but Lennox Lewis sure doesn’t have the AAVE accent.
Ebonics was coined by Robert L. Williams of Washington University, in St. Louis, in 1973, apparently for a presentation on the subject for a linguistics seminar. He followed that up with a book that promoted the word in 1975. However, it does not appear to have been taken up by anyone else prior to the Oakland School Board incident.
The terms in general use in 1972 (based on my textbooks of the period) were Black English or (more rarely in 1972) Black English Vernacular or Black Vernacular English, each of which had superseded the older Negro English and Non-standard Negro English*. At a guess, (because I have not yet found a specific citation), I would think that African American Vernacular English replaced Black Vernacular English sometime after the Chicago declaration of “African American” as a preference by Jesse Jackon’s group sometime in the early 90s (or late 80s?).
- “Non-standard” in this case was simply the technical description, differentiating it from Standard American English, and was not in any way a pejorative.
Me nah bidness wid a fi oono idea dem bout how dem talk.
Thanks! I was really wondering about the etymology of “ebonics”. :smack: I really never got it before. Now I do. Thanks again.
She wasn’t the girl I went to seek,
I met her by there merest chance,
She did not speak the French of France,
but the surded French of Martinique.
but the poem doesn’t say whether it was due to race or region
Dang!
I met her by the merest chance
Previewed, too.
He’s not the best example in that he spent much of his youth in Canada. His accent sounds distinctly North American to me.
There is a definite Anglo-Black vernacular. It’s main influence is Jamacian Patois (the majority of the UK’s Black population orginate from the West Indies) and it is also heavily influenced by AAVE.
To the extent that the community of Black speakers of European languages besides English shares a similar history there may be some speech features shared with AAVE (or Ebonics).
This is my conclusion based on the reading I have done on the issue in my linguistics classes. I am by no means an expert, but I think I kind of know what I’m talking about.
The Africans brought to the New World as slaves came from al over west Africa, and they were all mixed together so that they couldn’t communicate well. British, Dutch, Portuguese (and I’m pretty sure also Spanish and French) people transported them. THe place where the slaves ended up varied, and they could be living in places that spoke either Portuguese, Spanish, English, or French. The languages that arose as a result of this massive upheaval in the people’s lives would vary according to the mix of languages that the slave community brought and the language of the masters.
However, the study of these sorts of language contact situations shows that they very often produce similar effects. This may happen regardless of the languages involved, but most of the examples involve an Indo-European language as the language of the “dominant” group, and several non-indo-european languages as the “subordinate” group.
One thing to bear in mind is that the historical trend, at least among Blacks in America (perhaps elsewhere as well, but I don’t know), has been a move towards Standard English. This would tend to decrease any similarities they might share due to historical background with Black people who spoke other languages.
There are a couple points I left out
[ul]
[li]Speakers of AAVE, like everyone else, are able to move along a continuum of language usage. That is to say, many African Americans are able to speak Standard American English (SAE) as well as AAVE. Everyone does something like this in their life. In fact, it is quite common around the world for people to speak one distinct language at home and another at school or at work. Sometimes the languages are without a doubt separat languages and sometimes they might be called dialects.[/li][li]Related to the point above, I believe that many many African Americans speak AAVE, often in the home. I do not know the numbers, and in any case any number I found is likely to be an estimate. I did a very quick search for a number, just to back up what I’m saying a bit and I found the statement here that “Repeated studies in city after city show that about 60 percent of the African-American residents of the inner city speak this dialect at home and with intimate friends.” We ought to bear in mind that AAVE is often stigmatised, so it is quite possible that people are underreporting their use of AAVE [/li][/ul]
I wonder what has been written on the cultural role of BVE; it’s interesting to me that many black people I know seemlessly switch between BVE and Standard English when talking to white people and when talking to black people.
Has in-depth analysis been written of the linguistic properties of the dialect? I’ve only ever been able to find glosses, explaining (simplistically) things like the rules for the omission of “be”, and I wish I could find a more comprehensive (but comprehensible to a non-linguist) discussion of it.
Absolutely. Extensive academic work has been done on BVE.
Two of the more highly-regarded BVE scholars in American academia are University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov (FWIW, white) and Cal-Berkely linguistJohn McWhorter (FWIW, black).
Labov’s most recent popular work on the topic is Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (1998). Labov has studied BVE for over 30 years, and is an unquestioned giant in the field.
Obfuscariat has recommended McWhorter’s excellent book Word on the Street below. McWhorter writes in just the style you are looking for – aimed at the layman without condescension, but well meaty enough for those versed in linguistic theory.
sjc writes:
> However, the study of these sorts of language contact situations shows that
> they very often produce similar effects. This may happen regardless of the
> languages involved, but most of the examples involve an Indo-European
> language as the language of the “dominant” group, and several non-indo-
> european languages as the “subordinate” group.
This phenomenon is called “creolization,” incidentally.
Excalibre writes:
> Has in-depth analysis been written of the linguistic properties of the dialect?
> I’ve only ever been able to find glosses, explaining (simplistically) things like
> the rules for the omission of “be”, and I wish I could find a more
> comprehensive (but comprehensible to a non-linguist) discussion of it.
The phenomenon of the ability to change between dialects is called “code-switching,” and a lot has been written on it. There have been a fair amount of studies of AAVE, in general. I don’t offhand know what the best thing to recommend to read on all of these things is.
One thing I would like to recommend to anyone who would like to know about all these things is to read a good introductory text on linguistics. I’m sorry if this sounds patronizing, but a lot of people want to discuss linguistic matters without a basic foundation of knowledge about the subject. One of the books that is often used in first college courses about linguistics would be a good place to start. Another would be David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, which despite the name can be read straight through.
Just today I came across something written by a guy from Zambia (an African country where English is taught and widely used) to another Zambian. It was entirely written in U.S.-style “Ebonic” slang. Yo homie, I be keepin’ it real, etc. Maybe a few years behind the times, as transferred slang so often is. Many Black Americans may not realize how closely people in Africa are watching their style and imitating it. I hadn’t realized it myself, until I read it. Most of the English-speaking Africans I have met use carefully formal English.
Jamaica seems to hit the nail on the head. One of my favorite albums is “Owner fe de Yard” by The Ethiopians. That phrase sure ain’t the King’s.