Actually, the Oakland school board didn’t invent the idea. It was based on the writings of some linguists. I don’t think the school board actually believed that ebonics was a separate language. Instead, they were (justifiably, IMO) trying to get additional funding set aside for school districts with a large number of bilingual children. They were pointing out that children whose parents had little education also needed remedial education in English.
What you are observing is common among people who speak more than one language or dialect with a reasonable degree of fluency. They speak with whichever one is best suited to the situation.
Your confusion probably stems from a misconception about the nature of language. The dialect most widely spoken and understood in the US is Standard English Vernacular (SEV). Another common dialect is African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), called Black English Vernacular (BEV) in older linguistics texts and Ebonics by much of the general public. AAVE is not a corruption of “correct” English, and people who speak it do not do so simply because they do not know “correct” English. It is a distinct and grammatically consistent dialect with many native speakers.
From a linguistic standpoint there is no “correct” dialect, there is only the dialect best suited to the situation. In the US that dialect is often, but not always, SEV. Anyone who speaks both can AAVE and SEV can switch between them at will, just as like someone who is fluent in two different languages. If someone who usually speaks SEV at work begins speaking AAVE to a relative on the phone it isn’t because they have suddenly forgotten “correct” English but because they have switched to speaking the dialect that they and their listener are most comfortable with.
My first year in college I had a Jamaican roommate who spoke at least three distinct dialects. When speaking in class, to me, or to any non-Jamaicans she spoke standard British English. On the phone to her mother she spoke another dialect that used different grammar and pronounciation (“No mummy, him not go dere!”) but that I could still understand perfectly well. With her Jamaican friends she spoke “Patwa” (Jamaican Patois). Despite some apparent English roots Patwa was completely incomprehensible to me, had a distinct syntax and vocabulary, and probably deserves recognition as a seperate Creole language and not an English dialect at all.
No, it is not purely a black thing. You would be able to understand it perfectly well if you were more familiar with the dialect. Native speakers of this dialect are mostly African-Americans, but anyone can learn to speak and understand it.
(I tried to post this last night just before I went to bed, but I guess the hamsters stomped it into the dust. Here is a reconstruction from memory.)
The first proposal that Black English is a distinct idiom with its own systematic grammatical structure was put forward by a linguist named J. L. Dillard in his book Black English (New York: Random House, 1972). It was for this same concept that, years later, someone came up with the catchy brand-name “Ebonics.” But the credit for developing the linguistic theory of it goes to Dillard (unless anyone knows of an earlier work).
I think the improper pronunciation goes back to the slave days. Many slaves weren’t taught English they just picked it up. So its something thats been passed down from generation to generation and adoted as a “cultrual” thing.
** elmwood**, that piece on kielbonics is one of the funniest things I’ve read on the SDMB in quite a while (all four of my grandparents came from Poland).
In a side note, we do not speak kielbonics at home (Pepper Mill has no Polish blodd), and no one we know speaks that way, but our daughter MilliCal uses “dat”, “dere”, and “dose” for “That”, “there”, and “those” all the time. We can’t figure it out.
If Ebonic speakers could, in fact, switch easily back and forth between dialects, I could more easily accept that it was simply a matter of choice. Most people, black or white, who speak one of these demotic forms can NOT switch back and forth easily or, in many cases, at all. That’s the problem, IMO: many people talking “street” can’t just turn on formal English in formal settings.
I’m very impressed when anyone has complete bilingual ability, in ANY two languages, and I point out to defenders of Ebonics that as a second language (or even as a first), it’s only positive. As an only language, though, it leaves its speakers disadvantaged, and many defenders are comfortable with its status as a sole language.
The issue here is not “allowing” Ebonics to exist (it does and will) but allowing its grammar, syntax and diction to substitute freely for those of standard English.
What do you mean by “allowing”? Do you mean allowing non-standard English to infiltrate standard English? Although I cringe when I hear “African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)” (thanks Lamia) in an out of context situation, there’s no such thing as allowing/disallowing anything in a language. Languages are dynamic and they are defined by their usage. We could try to be like the French and fruitlessly force “impurities” from the language, but I see a lot of conflicts with the first amendment in that route.
If we ever can force the language to change, I would instantly delete the words “gonna” and “wanna” and all other silly concoctions. Sure, keep saying them, but there’s no excuse for actually writing them (well, other than by way of example :)). And “could of” and “would of” – I’m curious about whether people who write those really think they’re literally saying “could of”/“would of” or just don’t know how to write “could’ve” or “would’ve.”
So, Max; when I say “y’all” are you going to say “Well, you redneck (or Southerner for you PC folks)?” What about when I pronounce “have to” as “hafta?” When I’m speaking in a formal setting, I use the so-called Prestige Dialect of Standard American English. Otherwise, I use the dialect I’m comfortable with.
Get off it. It’s just one of many dialects of the English language.
Cockney English uses “f” for a trailing -th
eg “Kaff” (=Kath) in soap opera Eastenders, who also owned a “caff” (=cafe)
I don’t know if this is also in Ebonics but the replacement of “l” for “w” is also common in Cockney:
“not giw’ty” (=not guilty)
“Michewwe” (=Michelle)
I undertand that the black people who live on the sea islands of the Georgia/S. Carolina coast speak a very interesting dialect called"gullah". What does it sound like-does gullah use “axe” for ask?
Well, that would tend to be true of every speaker of the language, wouldn’t it? Certainly, your “improper pronunciation” or my “improper pronunciation” (when viewed from the perspective of a proper Oxonian) is the result of the regions where we grew up with the cultural aspects of those places.
The cultural aspects of AAVE would have more to do with the segregation of blacks into their own communities during and long after slavery with “education” having little or nothing to do with it. I was familiar with several immigrant Polish and Italian enclaves as a kid (and briefly encountered a similar German group) and I can assure you that their “English” had a great many differences from SVE both in pronunciation and in syntax. The only differences that I can think of between the grandchildren of those enclaves and those of black groups is that the immigrant groups began intermarrying into the general population and the enclaves dissipated–something that has not occurred among a large number of blacks.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Balthisar *
**
What do you mean by “allowing”?
How about “generally accepting”? That any better? I think you understand my shorthand, but if not, what words would you use to describe giving negative feedback to non-standard dialect? I’m not even talking about direct feedback, but the sort of judgments we all pass on speakers of language that we (privately) consider to be limited?
Or is it that all dialects are equally privileged in your view?
AAVE is not a mangling of “correct” English, it is a genuine English dialect that is no less valid than, say, the Scouse dialect.
The switching of “th” for “d” is not unique to AAVE. The “th” sound is unusually difficult for the human mouth to form. Every child in my family needed a couple of years of early speech therapy in order to master it. This sort of difficulty is why the “th” sound does not appear in most human languages, including many English dialects.
**
It is a matter of choice for people who speak multiple dialects. For people who speak only one it obviously is not.
The entire “Ebonics” issue arose because educators were looking for a better way to teach students to speak SEV. Treating AAVE as merely an uneducated attempt to speak SEV rather than a seperate dialect was not helping students to learn SEV. There was hope that by granting AAVE recognition as a foreign language (although it is really an English dialect) then educators would be able to teach SEV as a second langauge (dialect) to native AAVE speakers rather than wasting everyone’s time attempting to force children to always speak SEV instead of AAVE.
Just to emphasize what Lamia said, they are not mispronouncing words, but speaking them correctly in their dialect. There are lots of dialects of English, and we all speak our own which would be laughed at in other settings.
In the book The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker quotes the language of a young black man in an emergency room, which most people reading the book would find almost incomprehensible, but then goes on to show how he is actually following the complex rules of his dialect correctly. Not inferior, just different.
BTW, in Pittsburgh, people also say “axe” instead of “ask”. And “Pixburgh”.
hazel-rah writes:
> 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.
chula writes:
> Actually, the Oakland school board didn’t invent the idea. It
> was based on the writings of some linguists. I don’t think the
> school board actually believed that ebonics was a separate
> language. Instead, they were (justifiably, IMO) trying to get
> additional funding set aside for school districts with a large
> number of bilingual children. They were pointing out that
> children whose parents had little education also needed
> remedial education in English.
Let me discuss these two comments, since they get the facts fairly close but still don’t get them quite right. Actually, the general belief of linguists nowdays is that the features of AAVE are caused both by the elements that they derived from other American dialects (and the elements were themselves derived from British dialects) and from creolization with African languages. There is a presently-existing creole of English with many elements borrowed by African languages. It’s called Gullah, and it’s spoken by some blacks on the coastal islands of South Carolina. Like creoles in general, it’s hard but not impossible to understand for a speaker of Standard American English to understand it. It’s clear that some words from African languages, and possibly a few grammatical patterns, have been borrowed into AAVE. It’s probably true though that most of the elements special to AAVE are derived from other American dialects. (More specifically, they are derived from Southern American dialects. Remember, until about 1930, the overwhelming majority of American blacks lived in the South. Even now, about 55% of American blacks live in the South.)
The Oakland school board statement about “Ebonics” was a horrible distortion of the beliefs of linguists about AAVE. I was at a meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January 2001 (about four years after the Oakland statement), and the linguists there were still incredibly angry about the worthless of it. Studying African-American Vernacular English (or Black English, but certainly no linguist calls it “Ebonics”) has been one of the interests of linguists for the past 30 years. That’s not surprising, since studying regional, social-classed-based, gender-based, occupational, etc. dialects is a part of what linguists do. The Oakland statement was a hopeless misunderstanding of what linguists had told the teachers about AAVE. First, the statement was full of gooey, meaningless educational jargon. Second, the teachers (or maybe administrators) who wrote the statement didn’t understand anything the linguists had told them about the status of dialects, the origins of AAVE, or the recommendations that linguists made for teaching.
Although I’m not from “Pixburgh”, I do hail from Western PA, and often exhibit a similar accent to those in the Burgh.
I’ve noticed, especially when I visit my family and lapse back into the accent, that we tend to drop “th” entirely off of the beginning of words and replace “th” with “D” in other situations.
Example:
Q: Where you goin’?
A: Dahn air. (Down there)
A: Up air. (Up there)
Q: Where you from?
A: Da Sas ide. (The South Side)
I find myself concetrating quite a bit in professional settings to pronounce the “th”, but when I’m at my folks, the “th” 's disappear entirely.
No, I got you now… I really thought you meant something along the lines of “purifying the language.” And like I said, I’d be for it. But, I also understand it doesn’t work that way.
I get a bad impression of a speaker when I hear anyone speaking non-standard English in an environment that demands it – and it happens frequently. I no longer try to correct anyone for fear of being branded a racist (yes, it happened, at work, when I was trying to be helpful).
Yes, I think all dialects are equally privileged in my view – but only in their place. That’s why standard English is standard English. That’s why the Germans-Austrians-Swiss have Hochdeutsch. And so on.
Where one can make a difference is if you’re given the chance to teach a business communications course at work (you guys do training, right?) – stress the differences, and stress that “black English” isn’t wrong – just that it’s not standard English.
In Great Debates, yes.
Not here.
Please, everyone, stick to the facts.
As someone who volunteers in an innercity hospital, I can tell you some horror stories of bad language skills. A lot of black people seem to have trouble saying Pediatric. Instead, they say ‘pee-tree-attic’. Also, instead of saying Connect, a lot of them say ‘menneck’. I think it’s pure laziness, with a dash of stupidity thrown in.
Also, I don’t understand why black people have to name their chirren (I mean children) names like Q’sharneesha, Quad’asia, Shardaysia, etc.