# Ebonics? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 5, 2013, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ebonics/649365 "2013-02-05T04:47:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 22
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2013, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ebonics/649365/22 "2013-02-05T13:39:20Z")
As I said in another recent thread: > [@Do you think Obama counts as a black president?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-think-obama-counts-as-a-black-president/644289/74): > > AAVE is a linguistics label, and in fact refers to a sociolect. Sociolects are different from dialects in that which sociolect you’re using depends on context. Most people have different sociolects, for instance, I talk much differently with my friends than I do with my professors than I do with my family. Those are all examples of different sociolects. So when I “cut back on the informal speech in a formal setting” it is, in fact, doing the EXACT same thing AAVE speakers do in a formal setting. We both switch from our respective colloquial sociolects to Standard American Academic English. AAVE just happens to be a sociolect that has a more well known label (I think it has rather unique properties and is considered more noticeable than most sociolects as well, but I’m not 100% sure on that). Though I won’t deny that most people who know the term probably don’t know that they do the same thing and think it’s just a way to denote “black people speak”. You might ask, “if it’s a sociolect, then why aren’t other sociolects like, say, ‘geek talk’ also documented and talked about so thoroughly?” The fact is that it’s a **very interesting** regional, ethnic sociolect. It shares things like grammar rules very similar to African creoles, without actually being a creole, and is spoken by a very large amount of people. It’s not just a way to separate black people into the “other” (though non-linguists may attempt to wrongly use the term to do so), and it’s not to imply all black people talk like that, or only talk like that, or have difficulty talking in any other way, or anything else unsavory. It’s just that it is a very interesting, very unique subclass of English that has interesting rules that linguists can use to get more complete and better data about how language works. Though, and I admit this openly, people who talk about AAVE and aren’t using it in a linguistic sense (or perhaps a sociological one) are probably using it either mistakenly or maliciously. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ebonics/649365)._