Why is it that many blacks (or African Americans for you PC folks), consistently mispronounce words?
The pattern I’ve noticed:
ask = axe
both = boff (trailing ‘th’ replaced with ‘f’)
that = dat (leading ‘th’ replaced with ‘d’)
This seems to happen continuously, and education doesn’t seem to matter. Chief Moose’s press conferences were littered with these verbal errors. Coach Tyrone Willingham of Notre Dame was giving an interview and sounded perfectly articulate… and then launched a trailing ‘th’.
My question is, why? Is this part of the ebonics dictionary, a regional thing, or is it just something that is picked up around homes/neighborhoods? And if it is a regional thing, why is it that I’ve not noticed these peculiar speech trends in any other segment of the population?
Many of the black guys and gals I’ve known over the years could speak both standard English (which many of us regard as “proper”) and their own version of it – it usually did come down to education. But then I could say the same about a lot of the southern guys and gals, too. Of course, there’s always an accent of sorts left behind. The only group of people I’ve ever met personally, though, that couldn’t “switch” lingos were people from the eastern part of the country, i.e., Massachussets.
It seems to me to be far from universal among Black/African-American people throughout the US. I would venture a guess to say that it’s more frequent among younger and more urban segments, where the pressure to speak more to the standard is less.
Perhaps. Although I would think that my circle is diverse enough to ask the question. I’ve never asked any of my black friends because, quite frankly, I didn’t want to insult anyone.
If it is a regional thing, fine. But I can honestly say I’ve never heard a white person say ‘axe’.
While I know some folks who seem to have great difficulty pronouncing their "r"s, most folks have no problems with them. I regularly switch in and out of my accent, such that my firends never know what to expect, and that’s even before I moved out of the area. My father switches accents frequently (though not deliberately, I suspect), depending on whether he’s in a professional setting or a social one.
That’s for accent … if you meant word choice, I frequently say “pop” rather than “soda”, and hardly ever say “wicked”…
Balthisar is right. Lots of Southerners do it, too, altering their accent and word choices as the situation requires. Heck, I do it, depending on whether I’m hanging out with friends or in a job interview.
I think it’s probably a regional/neighborhood thing. If you grow up listening to your family and friends talk that way, of course that’s how you’re going to talk. And while you might speak a more standard version of English in a professional setting, it makes sense that when you’re in a comfy social setting, you’ll laps back into what you know best.
I can’t answer why you have not heard it before, but I do know that both “aks” and “dat” appear in several American and British dialects. While “aks” is more frequently associated with blacks in the U.S. and “dat” (or “dem,” “dese,” and “dose”) are more frequently associated with Eastern European immigrants and some sections of New York City, they each appear in various dialects on the isle of Britain.
In general, I would guess that it is a result of the frequency or lack of certain phonemes in various dialects. If the “th” that we associate with either “this” or “thin” is generally lacking in a dialect, then those words will be pronounced “dis” or “tin.” Similarly, a dialect in which “ask” is the only word that uses the final /sk/ phoneme, the speakers are liable to change it to the more comfortable (to them) final /ks/.
In Buffalo, there’s kielbonics, the dialect spoken by many Polish-Americans. The “th” sound is replaced by “d,” so you’ll hear white folks say “dat.” There’s also the filler word “dere,” the kilebonics version of “there,” often used before or after nouns, business names or place names. A Cheektowaga resident may say …
“I got to go to dat dere Wal-Mart’s dere on dat dere Unionroat and get some of dat dere mulch dere for da frontlawn dere.”
which means …
“I have to go to the Wal-Mart on Union Road to get some mulch for the front lawn.”
You don’t get much whiter than Billy Joel, and on the Glass Houses album, he goes back and forth between “ask” and “axe” in the song “Don’t Ask Me Why.” There’s nothing else in the song (or on the album) to indicate this is a consciously “black” stylization. He does, however, use the very-east-coast expression “a buck three-eighty” in a different song on the same album.
Here in da city of brotherly love, dey published a book Phillyphonics-Now Youse Can Talk Like Us.
Examples-
Philadelphia= Fluffya
Italian= Eyetalian
Eagles= Iggles
Water= Wooder
For more examples, watch the first Rocky film. Plenty of obviously inteligent and respected Philadelphians speak in Philly dialect.
Yinglish
This is a dialect used by many Jews of European descent. Fyvish Finkel speaks in Yinglish offfscreen as well as on. Yoda’s syntax is based largely on Yinglish. Zev, Izzy, and many of the other Jewish Dopers probably speak Yinglish as well.
English is a dynamic and fluid language. Why all these dialects? I should know such things?
Is the ability to understand ebonics purely a black thing? I’ve experienced the phenomena of black folk speaking with perfect diction but once they’re around their black friends (and in my earshot) I can’t make heads or tails of what they’re saying. Most times when I am dealing with black people I feel like someone’s going to brand me as racist because I can’t follow half of what the people say and I am sincerely giving them my undivided attention.
This may be off topic but I figure most blacks are speaking with a variation on southern English which is supposed to sound quite a lot like the English spoken in England around the time America was just an unruly colony.
First off, the term “Ebonics” is a fiction the Oakland school board thought up; they (erroneously) thought Black English was a creole of English and African languages. It isn’t. It’s just one of many dialects of American English. It’s not even an American English dialect influenced by African languages… all the things Standard English speakers find odd about Black English can be traced back to features of British English dialects. If it were really a creole, you would not be able to understand it at all.
This knowledge illustrates an irony that would be hilarious if it wasn’t so racist… many Standard American English speakers equate Black English with stupidity, while the same dialect features used by a British English speaker are equated with intelligence.
Ax for ask is not (only) a black thing. It originated in England, in fact look in the Oxford English Dictionary word history sometime: aks is a dialectal variant form in England that has been traced back to Anglo-Saxon, some 1300 years ago. Before that, it was probably found in Common Germanic on the European mainland before the Angles and Saxons migrated to Britain. It may go back all the way to Proto-Indo-European.
English has a history of switching around the order of s and the stop consonants next to it. This is called “transposition.” For example, English wasp goes back to Proto-Indo-European *waps-. Italian vespa shows the same transposition; this phenomenon has always been around in Indo-European dialects and has no special association with Black English.
AFAIK, Yoda’s SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) syntax is based on Japanese rather than Yiddish. Yiddish, a form of German, most often uses SVO the same as English; it puts the object before the verb only for emphasis: “A shmendrik, he says!” This to Yiddish its reputation for colorful and expressive speech helps give. Because it more flexibility with emphasis has. Hungarian and Latin, too, consistently this variability allow, either SOV or SVO using depending on where you the emphasis put. Japanese always the verb last in a sentence puts. So Amharic, Hindi, Hopi, Korean, Lakota, Navajo, Persian, Quechua, Tamil, Turkish, and many, many other languages around the world do.
